Repainting existing scenery textures

[hjwalter]

Hi all,

 

I have some older airport scenery satellite textures which have (probably hand painted) water polygons near or around them but their colors deviate strongly from other immediately adjacent default water colors. E.g. Very unrealistic light blue colored water, instead of the darker (inland) default water, often separated only by a sluise gate or dike, sometimes even just by a straight line.

 

I've already created a correct water polygon beneath the scenery concerned via the SBuilder program but I now (probably) need to somehow change the light blue color into black, so that an alpha channel can then render it as being transparent.

 

I've already but not very successfully, tried the FSPaint program but that, at least to me, seems to be a very long way round.

 

Are there any other more simple programs/procedures in existence via which I can somehow get rid of these extremely unrealistic light blue colors ? Even being able to just re-paint them with darker colors, would be very welcome.

 

I realize fully that with the above I will be messing around with other developer's fantastic addon work but I have absolutely no intention whatsoever to post any of my results and especially not, if they ever become successful.

 

Regards and anxiously awaiting any comments.

 

Hans

[tgibson_new]

Hi Hans,

 

Yes you usually can repaint it, unless the author used the default AFCAD/ADE water, which is the same around the world (and thus probably best not to change that). But we will need more detail on exactly which scenery and exactly which water you want to change before we can give you much help.

[hjwalter]

Thanks Tom for your reaction.

 

In the meantime I've dived a lot deeper into the MS Paint program than I've ever been before and was finally, after pulling all my hair out, able to select a (test) rectangular area within the bright blue water texture area and have at last managed to fill it with the black color necessary for later alpha channel transparency ..... and ..... it actually works !! I now have a test rectangle of my underlying default LWM water within the light blue area.

 

I've now also realized that because the shores along the to be edited land/water edges are rather jagged, it will need a lot of extra work to get all these visibly and correctly joined up. Well, at least it's a good activity for the coming winter months.

However, I do keep wondering how the original author has done this because my feeling tells me that there just must be a simpler way.

 

The airport scenery concerned is a very well made version of EGLC (London City) but I've already also seen more or less the same problems in the locks of Tony Agramont's Panama Canal.

 

Best regards

 

Hans

[Jim Robinson]

There's a tool in Gimp called the "fuzzy select tool" that might make selecting and filling those water areas a lot easier. (Comparable to the magic wand tool in PhotoShop). It selects by color, and there's an adjustable range/tolerance. If you could get that setting right you could probably select all the water areas with just one click, then fill, etc.

[hjwalter]

Jim,

 

This GIMP program, of which I had never even heard before, is a very impressive program indeed but quite obviously meant for far higher level graphics experts than I am. It's even free and open sourced as well !! WOW !!

 

However and after some initial stumbling, I did finally manage to find my way into the program for editing the FS9 BMP texture files but only after first converting them to 24 bit versions and re-naming them via the MS Paint program.

 

After that I found the polygon creating process and was then able to trace the exact outlines of the first area to be filled with the black pre-alpha channel color. What then remained was creating the alpha channel itself and saving the file in the standard FS9 DXT1 format, like all the rest of them are.

 

And, do you know what. It actually works great and as far as I'm concerned ..... problem solved !! Now to repeat the process for the remaining 16 BMP files, which (partially) contain the "bad" water textures.

 

I will certainly try to find your "fuzzy select tool" process but for the moment I'm very happy with the polygon draw process.

 

Thanks a million for the tip.

 

Regards

 

Hans

[Jim Robinson]

Hans, press "U" for the fuzzy select tool. On the left there's a box for "threshold", set that to about 30, click the water area and see if it does what you want it to do.

 

I'm not a Gimp expert by any stretch of the imagination. I've been using my old CS2 version of PhotoShop since 2005 and TBH it drives me nuts to try to do anything with Gimp because I try to use PhotoShop keyboard shortcuts and Gimp gives me a completely unexpected result every time! :) I know it's a good program though, I've been amazed at some things my friends have done with Gimp. I don't want to spend much time with it myself because I'm afraid if I get familiar with Gimp it'll confuse me when I return to PhotoShop, lol.

 

I'm glad you found the program useful. :)