How to create photoreal scenery for FSX

[Tiberius K.]

Thanks a million for the Photoshop link Jim, I like Photoshop:).

 

I just got started with it and doing the watermask & blendmask. I followed the same instructions as with GIMP, but when I got to Exporting the blendmask, the options given on Photoshop were confusing to me and I am hesitant to continue for fear I screw something up and have to start all over again. Thanks for your help!!

 

 

In Photoshop you have to choose "Save As", not "Export"! And then you can choose BMP if your file is less than 2GB (or doesn't exceed 30,000 pixel in any dimension) or TIFF if it is bigger.

[Jim Robinson]

If I were you annber I would go to using .tifs now that you're using PhotoShop. With a .tif you can embed the water & blend masks right into the main imagery source as alpha channels and forget about the multi-source BS. Here's a quote from another thread:

 

In Photoshop you can add alpha channels for your blend and water masks. Open your L17X81280X81305Y94878Y94903.bmp (your filename will be different obviously) in PhotoShop and find the channels palette. "Window > Channels" if all else fails.

 

You should already have an "Alpha1" channel, all white. This is your watermask. On the imagery use the lasso tool with "feather: 0" and "anti-alias off" to select your water areas. Switch to the Alpha1 channel and fill the selected area with pure black (#000000 or RGB: 0,0,0).

 

In the channels palette create another new channel, it should automatically be named "Alpha2" and by default it will be all black. Fill it with pure white. This is your blend mask. On the imagery, use the lasso tool to select the part of your imagery that you want to be visible in the sim, for the blendmask it's OK to use feathering and anti-alias in your selection to give you a soft edge. Invert the selection (Ctrl+Shift+I) and fill the area on Alpha2 with black.

 

Add any color adjustment layers or whatever editing you need to do and save it as a .psd. When you're ready to compile the imagery, flatten everything and "save as" .tif. The blend and watermask channels will remain in the .tif. (Bitmap doesn't support multiple alpha channels) Edit your .inf to reflect the change from .bmp to .tif as shown in the example above. Compile by dropping your .inf onto resample.exe. Resample will detect the channels and you should end up with water and blend in the sim.

 

Doing it this way saves a lot of fuss trying to get the blend and water sources set up in the .inf. The only caution is that your exported .tif can't exceed 2Gb so keep your sources small, 20,000 x 20,000px for example will usually go less than 2 Gb, much larger than that and you'll probably have to strip one or both of the alpha channels out and save them off separately, adding them as extra sources in the .inf.

 

Jim

 

Then you need to edit the .inf something like this, note the lines in red:

 

[source]
  [color="#FF0000"]Type = TIFF[/color]
  Layer = Imagery
  SourceDir = "."
  SourceFile = "L17X81280X81305Y94878Y94903.[color="#FF0000"]tif[/color]"
  Variation = All
  [color="#FF0000"]NullValue = 0,0,0[/color]
  SamplingMethod = Gaussian
  ulyMap =  44.4357410376762
  ulxMap = -68.37890625
  xDim =  5.36441802978516E-06
  yDim =  3.83122366525947E-06

[Destination]
  DestDir = "D:\MSFS\Addon Scenery\KBHB Bar Harbor\Scenery"
  DestBaseFileName = "KBHB_Bar_Harbor_Photo"
  DestFileType = BGL
  LOD = Auto
  UseSourceDimensions = 1
  CompressionQuality = 95

 

I usually loosely mimic the blend mask area with a pure black layer overtop of the main imagery, that, with NullValue = 0,0,0 renders the blended out part of the imagery as "missing data" and therefore reduces the size of the compiled .bgl somewhat. The only caveat is that you need to "replace color" on the remaining part of the imagery, replacing any black with 1,1,1 or else you'll have transparent specks all throughout your PR where a black tree shadow for example was rendered transparent. The landclass textures underneath will show through in all of these specks and it looks awful

.

To export a .tif:

First save what you have as a .psd so you can open and edit it again if desired. Then ctrl+click the black "null zone" layer's icon in the "layers pallette" (F7) to select it, invert the selection with CTRL+Shift+I. Do "layers > flatten image".

 

I usually do some sharpening at this point so with the selection still intact do "filters > sharpen > unsharp mask" and set "amount: 50", "radius: 1.0", and "threshold: 0".

 

With the selection still intact do "Image > Adjustments > Replace color". Click on the black outer blend area to set the color to be replaced to black, "fuzziness "0", and set the "lightness" slider to +1. Click OK and there's no more pure black in the imagery.

 

Do CTRL+D to deselect and then "Save as" > "Format: TIFF" and then "Image compression: None" on the export dialog.

 

Here's a quick imagery source that you can open in PS to help understand what I mean:

 

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/KEYW_key_west_sources.zip

 

I make no claim that this is an example of quality work, lol. It's a chunk of LOD15 to keep the file size down, and I spent a total of about 5 minutes on the blend & water masks. The adjustment layers are just there to show you what's possible, double click any adjustment layer's icon in the layers pallette to make adjustments to them.

 

Check the channels pallette to see the blend & water masks. I always keep these selection areas as a hidden color fill area in the .psd, that way if you ever need to load a selection you can do it with ctrl+click on the layer's icon in the layers pallette. (the water for example, say a week from now you decided to adjust the water color without adjusting the land too)

 

Note that you can vary the opacity of any adjustment layer to decrease/increase it's effect, you can also "erase" parts of them with the eraser tool if you find they're too strong on one part of the imagery and not strong enough on another.

 

Random hint: use the "magnetic lasso tool" ("width: 10", "edge contrast: 100%", "frequency: 100") to do your water masks, you'll be amazed how well it works :)

 

 

Jim

[annber]

Thanks Jim & Tiberius for taking the time to help me figure this out. Yesterday I literally spent the whole day trying to get the masks to work, I even went back and decided to follow the instructions step by step using Nauru instead of doing Olbia, but at the end when I dragged the INF file to the resample, the result was the same: Failure.

 

There is something that I am doing wrong that is highly frustrating me, and generally speaking I am able to figure things out and make things work, but after spending literally almost three full days of trying, I am nowhere near success.

 

Bernardo.

[Jim Robinson]

Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat...

 

In the screenshot you posted above your .inf is looking for "OLBIA.BMP" but from what little I can see of your explorer window there is no "OLBIA.BMP" that I can see assuming the files are sorted by name.

 

Let's repeat:

 

One unrelated thing I would suggest is to go into "Control Panel > Folder options", click on the "View" tab and tick "Show hidden files, folders" and also untick "Hide extensions for known file types". That'll let the file extensions show in the explorer window which should eliminate some confusion. I'm wondering if "OLBIA.bmp" doesn't actually exist, i.e. did you save it as "OLBIA.xcf" instead (which appears to be Gimp's native format)?

 

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/olbia.jpg

 

Turn on the file extensions like I told you to. Have a look at my last post above re: using .tifs and incorporating the alpha & blend masks as channels in the .tif. It'll make your life a lot easier and also make me feel a little better about the hour or so I spent putting that together for you.

 

Jim

[annber]

Jim, I do value your help, always have, so my apologies if I have not paid close attention. What I will do is print out the instructions and have them next to me, it gets confusing to have to switch from one screen to the other while trying to follow. I will post later tonight about how it goes.

[annber]

Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat...

 

In the screenshot you posted above your .inf is looking for "OLBIA.BMP" but from what little I can see of your explorer window there is no "OLBIA.BMP" that I can see assuming the files are sorted by name.

 

Let's repeat:

 

 

 

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/olbia.jpg

 

Turn on the file extensions like I told you to. Have a look at my last post above re: using .tifs and incorporating the alpha & blend masks as channels in the .tif. It'll make your life a lot easier and also make me feel a little better about the hour or so I spent putting that together for you.

 

Jim

 

To answer some of your points.

 

1) I do have show hidden files or folder enabled. have had it before starting with sbuilderX

 

2) This are the files I had in the OLBIA folder, which I have now moved since it was not working, isn't that a BMP file?

 

I do need to work with photoshop, and will carefully try to follow the steps outlined, but thought I would include this in case it helps you show what I was doing wrong, thanks!!

[Jim Robinson]

You've got hidden files showing but you don't have file extensions turned on. I see you have two files in that folder named "OLBIA", one appears to be OLBIA.inf and the other appears to be OLBIA.txt judging by the file icon & "type". There's no "OLBIA.BMP" which is what your .inf is looking for according to the DOS resample window, see the screenshot I edited in the quote, it's circled in red.

 

Is "OLBIA original" your main imagery source? If so change "SourceFile = OLBIA.BMP" to SourceFile = "OLBIA original.BMP" in the [source1] section of your .inf. Also get in the habit of using an "_" (underscore) instead of spaces in your filenames. Otherwise make sure the filename is enclosed in quotes in the .inf or you'll get an error.

 

Jim

[annber]

Hey Jim, I now have file extensions showing as well, and I have made some progress using Photoshop. I am playing around with watermask & blendmask borders. For example, in the picture attachments you see, I extended the watermask to about 50 feet from shore with the idea of showing the coral around the island, that being St.Thomas, US V.I.

I just inverted the watermask image and filled it with white, turned it into a blendmask with blur at around 50 thinking it would blend more with the ocean textures. My issue is that it does not blend well at all with the ocean textures, (I am using REX), one part is too light blue and the other part too dark. Is there a way to better blend that, or approach it better?

 

I also show FSX stock ground textures in same parts, and even the airport is off, I suppose the airport could be fixed with a different afcad, but have not found one yet.

Thanks for the advice!!

Bernardo

[Jim Robinson]

You probably need to use the lasso tool with a feather of around 200-300px to make your blend mask for the water. Just make a big roundish selection area that loosley folows the shoreline but several hundred yards out onto the water. That'll make the transition more gradual although you may find you need a larger piece of imagery to spread that transition out on. The feather edge needs to be completely confined within the imagery coverage area or else you'll still have a hard line showing at the edge of the imagery.

 

Also you could select your water mask area and put a selective color adjustment layer over it (which limits the adjustment to the water only), figure out which waterclass texture FSX is using in that area (345b2su1.bmp?), get that into PS and match your PR water to it.

 

Another option would be to make a small waterclass .bgl with SBuilder that changes the color of the default FSX water in that area to something that better matches your PR water.

 

Jim

[annber]

Hi Jim, before I read your latest advice I was experimenting, trial & error, although lots of the latter, so this was a picture I took of the new coast. I will now take a close look at your entry. One thing I want is to somehow show the photoscenery of the coral coastlines as much and as clear as possible while doing a blend with the default ocean textures.

thanks!!

[annber]

Jim, you are a genius. Your advice on how to blend is perfect, it is so much better than what I was trying. The only thing is that somehow I am getting a faint border edge. How would I get rid of that?

[Jim Robinson]

Your feather edge is extending out to the edges of the imagery, make your blend a little smaller or use a larger chunk of imagery. One thing you can do is check the color of the blend mask at the very outer edges of the imagery with the eyedropper thingy. It should be pure black (0,0,0 ~ #000000) all the way around. If there's even the slightest bit of white (i.e 1,1,1 or #010101) you'll see the hard line at the edge of the imagery.

 

That looks kicka$$ BTW :)

 

Jim

[annber]

Jim, sometimes the textures are not available at the resolution I want, which creates a very narrow coastline. The problem with that is that my blendmask is too close to shore, which in turn reveals the default terrain around the coast as shown in image. Couldn't I create waterclass tiles for the sections not available or is that not the way to solve this issue?

Thanks!!

[Zoandar]

Thanks Jim & Tiberius for taking the time to help me figure this out. Yesterday I literally spent the whole day trying to get the masks to work, I even went back and decided to follow the instructions step by step using Nauru instead of doing Olbia, but at the end when I dragged the INF file to the resample, the result was the same: Failure.

 

There is something that I am doing wrong that is highly frustrating me, and generally speaking I am able to figure things out and make things work, but after spending literally almost three full days of trying, I am nowhere near success.

 

Bernardo.

 

It has been my experience that every single time resample.exe had a problem it was because of a syntax error in my file naming for the 3 required bitmap files, or else the GPS coordinates copied from the photo.inf file. Everything has to be exactly right or the compiler will choke. Hope that helps. :)

[Zoandar]

The section in Tiberius' tutorial on creating the SBuilderX hydro-poly prevents the default FSX scenery from peeking through at the shorelines. If an island is involved, use his technique with a secondary poly drawn around the beach of the island, and make it a "hole" in the overall hydro-poly. If just a coast line, draw the hydro-poly so it slightly encroaches the beach along the shore, then extends out into the water.

[Jim Robinson]

Couldn't I create waterclass tiles for the sections not available or is that not the way to solve this issue?

Thanks!!

 

No, a waterclass won't turn land into water, all it does is change the water textures used in a given area. You'll need to exclude some water polys and rebuild them so they match the photoreal coastlines. That's pretty well been covered in this thread ad naseaum although I am not in agreement with the tutorial that disabling default .cvx files is the proper way to go about this. If you're interested, I came into the thread here with my thoughts on reconstructing hydro polys:

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?250762-How-to-create-photoreal-scenery-for-FSX&p=1736660#post1736660

 

 

Also here's another thread where I explained the process:

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?256500-First-project-with-FSBuilder-X-and-first-problems

 

 

At this point I'm bailing out of this thread as there seems to be some perceived "ownership" issues, if you need help in the future start another thread or PM me.

 

Jim

[sidh_gamer]

PLEASE check this thread and help me out!

 

Thanks

[sidh_gamer]

PLEASE check this thread and help me out!

[jandjfrench]

Hi,

I'm following this photoreal scenery creation procedure and am at Step 19 of Part 3 involving Watermask and Blendmask creation. When I see "19) Now delete your background image layer and then your watermask layer (right click)" I'm hesitant.

I've saved and am assuming it just involves deleting extraneous information as far as creating the blendmask but I'm not sure. I don't want to loose my watermask layer. Any clarifications on this will be greatly appreciated.

Jim F.

[Zoandar]

Deleting the layers you don't want to export is not necessary. All you need do is "not show them" (un-check the eye icon). I switched to doing this months ago and found it still works just fine. However, if you have lots of memory in your PC (I use 16GB) you may want to increase the default severely restricted number of undo levels in GIMP. They default to four. I am currently using 20. The thing you have to remember is that showing or hiding a layer is considered an increment in the count of the undo levels. And when you start moving backwards trying to undo something, they must also be worked through in the count. So 4 really is far too few. I often hide and reveal a layer when doing the masks, just to inspect the detail of something, as in tracing intricate shorelines.

[jandjfrench]

Hi Zoandar,

 

After reviewing the posts following the tutorial I read the next steps in the tutorial and saw that the layers were restored. I should just have read ahead.

Your clarifications and augmentations to the tutorial have been a life saver to me thus far. I think that's why I chose the path that I did. I saw where you had saved the tutorial in PDF format and I saved it also, but in HTML. I've saved the information in your posts also and have created links to it. Some of the information you've provided goes beyond what has been necessary for this tutorial but appears to be valuable for future use.

I've never used GIMP prior to this so your advice is much appreciated. I found the undo levels at 5 and increased it to 8; seems that should be enough for this tutorial. I also changed the max undo memory to 128 MB. The GIMP Help seems to be a bit out of date as it says the default core setting is one and when I checked it showed four which is what I have.

I'm currently at the Shorelines section of the tutorial and all has worked well up to here. I'm confused somewhat as I see clouds from the original image over water areas. I thought that should not be visible but I see clouds displayed in the tutorial image which shows the entire island after creating the shorelines so I guess I'm okay.

Thanks for your help not only with this but all the information you've previously provided.

 

Jim F.

[Zoandar]

Hi Jim,

 

You're welcome!

 

I'm glad you are able to make use of my information. :) This is a very fun project for me, and I have gone great distances along the shorelines of the Great Lakes so far. I am currently doing Upper Michigan. Some of the coastal areas are very beautiful once converted to true satellite imagery, with their sand spits and glacial sand deposits. Makes for challenging water mask creations! ;)

 

I had never used GIMP prior to reading this thread myself. If you get stuck on something, the actual GIMP forum has very helpful folks. They've come to my aid more than once to figure something out. Some have said they feel Photoshop, especially its reduced pricing on the lite versions, is a better choice, but I would not want to have to learn it all over again now that I have learned to use GIMP. It has some quirks, but I manage to put up with them. One thing I learned is to avoid using a map that is the size of the entire "add map" grid in SBX. That makes for some huge files in GIMP, and causes it to bog way down, even on a reasonably fast quad core 16GB rig running Win 7x64 and FSX on a pair of SSDs. Overall it is faster to go with smaller blocks, like 75% of the full SBX map size, or less.

 

I've been really lucky when it comes to clouds. For the most part I have not had to deal with them. I have some in the poorer imagery I captured for some of the north shore of Lake Erie, from Long Point Ontario and west. But wringing decent imagery out of SBX for any of Canada is a huge pain, so I probably won't do any more of Canada. My only suggestion to work around clouds would be to try all 3 of the sources allowed in SBX for the imagery, and maybe one will not have the clouds in the area you are working. But I prefer Virtual Earth over the other two. They consistently have much better imagery.

[Zoandar]

BTW, I found a neat way to make doing high detail areas of watermasks easier, such as a marina with all the boat docks. I use the Magic Wand selection tool, which admittedly can be a devil to work with. But the way to do it is to make a copy of your base image layer. Then on the copy layer, draw a white circle around just the area you are intending to select, such as the harbor. This keeps GIMP from wanting to also select all the water out in a lake or ocean, which seriously bogs down the operation. This way you can focus on just the area you want, and use the mouse wheel (dragging up or down while holding the mouse button) to increase or decrease the selection sensitivity. Using this technique I have done very nicely detailed selections of intricate marinas and the like. They look so much better with the "real" FSX water around them after the BGL is compiled.

[jandjfrench]

Hi,

In Part X Step 9 of the tutorial dealing with "Add Generic Building" - "Terminal Small Gray" the terminal does not show up in my list of Available Buildings. None of the objects listed in the tutorial agree with what I show as Available.

I was able to locate a suitable substitute after playing around with ADE and adding libraries but in the interest of addressing problems with this tutorial I'd like to know why my object list differs. if anyone knows or could hazard a guess I'd appreciate it.

Jim F.

[Jim Robinson]

Generic buildings aren't the same as library objects so it could be a difference in ADE versions but it has nothing to do with the sim itself. Generic buildings are just an arrangement of coordinates in the XML script the airport is ultimately compiled from. The xml code for a generic building basically defines the size of the object and which portions of some default texture sheets should be applied to the walls and roof of the building. Here's the XML for "Terminal Small Gray" for example:

 

      scale="1"
     bottomTexture="64"
     roofTexture="9"
     topTexture="51"
     windowTexture="57">
         roofType="FLAT"
        sizeX="79.86"
        sizeZ="49.99"
        sizeBottomY="10"
        textureIndexBottomX="1024"
        textureIndexBottomZ="512"
        sizeWindowY="0"
        textureIndexWindowX="0"
        textureIndexWindowY="0"
        textureIndexWindowZ="0"
        sizeTopY="5"
        textureIndexTopX="1024"
        textureIndexTopZ="640"
        textureIndexRoofX="256"
        textureIndexRoofZ="256"/>

 

That's all there is to it, there are no libraries that contain these objects. More info on the texture sheets and how they are applied in the FSX SDK.

 

ADE comes with a set of pre-defined generic buildings which are stored in the Airport Design Editor 9x\FSX\GenericBuildings folder so the discrepancy you're seeing is simply because you don't have the pre-defined .gnb file for "Terminal Small Gray" in that folder for whatever reason - could be a difference in ADE versions. There are generic building libraries available and ADE also has the capability of saving generic buildings found at other airports into the folder mentioned above for use at other airports made by ADE.

 

Jim