jyd

Jim- good points here. choose your airport, do your photoreal, then you see the difference around the airport which is FSX default. You can change this witha LC or land-class in SBX or ADE. Make a polygon around the airport. You can take in a lot of area past airport edges. How much? Your choice. then choose in properties in SBX or ADE the LC. This gives you many choices..... city, urban growth, cool crops, tropical, desert, mangrove, on and on. colmpile and take the resulting cvx file and put it in your scenery. This will cover the area you designated and will go right under your photoreal. i.e. say.... left to right. - here's your LC right up to the photoreal, then it disappears and reappears on the other side of the photoreal!! Then yu can put in autogen annotator tress whre the photoreal is if you wish. Really wish we had Skype to show ya. rwy is off. Usualy the rwys are fairly ok but taxiways etc are terrible! hahaha. You have to change things with ADE or AFX or Airport studio to match the photoreal. This is SOP with all of us. this is what we do when we make photoreal. If you have ADE when you compile it will generate a cvx file for you. You can see it better if in options you check the box that says make separate bgls. go get Skyipe now. Install and request contact with me asap. I am here. I gave my info. Bob

Locating aircraft? Actually you just go to FSX... to your scenery you are working on. Go to the middle is what I usually do.... say right around the middle of the main rwy. With SBX open you click '''' show aircraft.... then zoom in so your bottome right number shows about 1 or 2km. all this does is connect you with FSX instead of opening SBX, show background then type in lat and lon and/or try to drag over to your scenery.

cont'd from last post Ready? click ok or save - whatever it says. Wait a bit. Notice the numbers running. One of two things will happen. a. message cannot continue (or something of the like) place hide and redo the background. OK back back to other screen, hide the background by view clcik o background the again show back ground and try again. Now and then this happens. b. message- wait while x number of tiles completes. (message is kind of like that). NOTICE the screen behind this one is compiling the numbers downwards. Let it do its thing. When it is done your screen you see right now will disappear. The above is the toughest to explain. 12. at this point I would probably want to go to file then saveas. Why this has to be done twice I don't know, but I do it and I don't lose my project... ever. 13. Now- I would just minimize SBX screen. Navigate to SBX's work folder (this is a pain to do so I have a shortcut to it. 14. Here you find a bmp and a txt file both with ugly long numbers as filenames. Fine Some will say.. well you do this or that to rename... yes but we are concerned right now with the main stuff. 15. Take this bmp (it may look somethng like.... LX2834753738950378j4348596.bmp ) to your paint program. 16. In your paint program color everything you want to be seen - white. Color everything you want to show through as default FSX - black. so you see this is kind of like an alpha channel. Around the edges you can make your brush large and choose 'smudge'. Soe paint programs call this 'smear'... same thing. go around the edges back and forth perpendicular to the edge. Then do it again, this time WITH the edge. NOTICE - how the edge becomes nice and blury. THIS BLENDS THE EDGE FROM YOUR PHOTOREAL TO DEFAULT.... ERGO called BLEND MASK. 17. IMPORTANT- choose saveas!!!!! save this as a TIF file!!! ANG the same filename BUT ADD THIS TO IT AT THE END.... __B. so- your your old name was LX1234567.bmp. You new filename is LX1234567_B.tif 18. close out your paint program. 19. bring up SBX 20. top menu go to 'select' then choose all maps 21. See the green compile arrow? click it. You should see a check next to photoreal. hit OK 22. Wait- this might take a while. Go out and smoke a rope and kick back a bit. 23. when done go to work folder again and find a file called phot01. 24. rename this file to anything you like. and drag this puppy to your active scenery folder. fire up FSX and go see!!! STICK A FORK IN YA - YOU'RE DONE! I know this looks like a lot but it really is rather simple. It just takes a lot to type it out. We still need to do Skype. BTW- our 'family' is just a bunch of us idiots who have connected on Skype and help each other out. Hope you both can meet up. You both probably have stuff you cna helpl US with! Bob

Jim- bob Familton is in our "family' as of a couple of months ago. Nice guy. Autogen annotator is used to create trees, housing, etc once your photoreal is in. You have to have photoreal file to use annotator. I just recently discovered that if you need to or want to delete your photoreal .... once you have put in your trees with annotator you can take out the photoreal and the tree files will remain. Anyway- as soon as you or both are free to 'come out and play' I'll be here. In the meantime. Basics- 1, Open FSX 2. Open SBX 3. create new project 'type in a name' your choice. 4. click on 'show aircraft' (this connects you to FSX) 5. click on edit and check preferences. (here you can choose VE or Google- I usually try this one then that one to see which one looks better "today") 6. choose one then ok or svae whatever it says. 7. Now- click on 'show background' 8. now- important!!! go to 'file' then add map then choose 'from background' (NOT from disk) 9. New screen appears draw red box around your airport. (sometimes hard to see... cannot zoom in... don't try) 10. See the little circles on the right side? Choose the highest or second highest. (This will make a biiiig file but yo will get better resolution. Too low and your photo will not show up. - I usually choose the second highest from the top. 11. Notice this screen is on top of the previous one. CONTINUED NEXT POST.

I guess no one's interested. ;)

I hear ya howlin' I can eat a mess o tater salad! bob

Jim Robinson and Jim F. - On Skype I am jyarddog or look me up --- Robert Lacy. Yep Ione, WA. home of the 5 second rush hour traffic, and the great S23 Ione international airport. ( bwahahahaa) contact me via Skype and I will accept and send my e-mail addy. both of ya. Jim F. Let's do Skype- it is most advantageous for you to have 1. SbuilderX, 2. a good paint program such as Corel's PSP - I have X4 Corel is up to X6. Earlier versions are good. , or Photoshop, or gimp, or Paint.net it is easier to do Skype rather than try to type things out here. Later we can get into doing seasons and night textures. Send contact request, I will accept, just remind me of who you guys are so I don't think you're someone from Nigeria, wanting to give me a milliion bucks if I'd only send my bank account number. :p I wonder if there is any band in bonner's Ferry who needs a good bass player. Bob

Jim you are from where? I see by your profile you knew Opa!

Everyone had great posts on this. Wonderful!!! SbuilderX now has a 64 bit version that works fine. the google dll seems to be doing well also. I've taught over 9 people how to do photoreal each in about 20 minutes. pm if help is needed. Free of charge but trip to Hawaii would be nice. Bob

Jim- I might have missed this butg when doing bridges in SBX a friend of mine went to the sbx ini (config) file and change the extraextrusionaltitude=-20m to -1m.Maybe this helps? dunno. seems to work well. Bob