Painting an existing ground texture ?

Hi Guys,

 

I've just finished installing the small and very nice looking Greek island airfield Kastelorizo (LGKJ), made by Emmanuel Mwandosya and have added many other not true to real life objects via my Abacus EZ program, just to improve further on it's looks, e.g. many new trees and a small harbor with some buildings/houses, etc.

 

The airfield itself is situated at an elevation of 474 feet but my harbor is at sea level and I would like to draw/paint some kind of road leading from the harbor to the airfield but this is not possible via Afcad or ADE because of the elevation difference.

 

I assume that the only way of doing this is to paint the road onto one or more of the existing ground textures for the area, most probably included somewhere in the main World/texture folder.

 

My question is therfore, how can I find and select the (nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnsu.bmp) texture(s) concerned ?

 

Is there some kind of geographical positioning code in these World texture names ?

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

Regards

 

Hans

SBuilderFS9 will paint a road for you, or make a forest, or a farm field, or a city. Or all of them. It is not perfect but it (mostly) works, and for the simple process of making a road it is ok. If you need some help getting started you can ask me for a nudge in the right direction.

Thanks Roger for your reaction but my primary problem at this moment is somehow first locating the texture(s) concerned and after that I will only be too pleased to accept your SBuilder "nudge".

 

By the way: have you ever used a program called GIMP for this kind of thing instead of SBuilder ? It seems to be able to do the same and even more than SBuilder.

 

Hans

Gimp is merely a raster painting program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. SBuilder is much more than that as it can create scenery and the components and code necessary to make it work. You can also use it to place objects and probably much more.

 

I suggest you take Roger's offer as he is an authority on this type of thing. He has created many quality scenery addons.

Hans,

You can do whatever you want, it's up to you, but you don't need to locate textures before you use SBuilder. SBuilder comes with it's own textures for concrete roads, or dirt tracks, or whatever, and it "paints" the road over the existing texture in your version of FS9, whatever that texture is. It doesn't care if the texture is a forest or a farm field, it will "paint" the road wherever you direct it to. So as SBuilder doesn't care what the texture is then you don't have to care either. You just decide where you want the road to be. If you want help email me rogwen at rogers dot com.

Roger

Edited November 2, 2020 by Roger Wensley

Just to elaborate, SBuilder places what are usually called "default roads" that you see all over FS9. These are known as vector or VTP objects, and as Roger says will be placed over any texture where you specify it to be.

 

What's more, if you *did* find the texture used at that location (and assuming it is not in a photoreal scenery area, which I believe it is not) and painted a road on it, that road would appear everywhere in the world that texture is used (which will be a lot!). So just go ahead and use SBuilder, and don't worry about the texture located there.

O.K. Guys, I get it.

 

As I've never done anything like this before, I was initially under the impression that I needed to paint a specific (default) ground scenery tile, which covered the related area and that locating/selecting that specific tile was the first hurdle to cross. Sorry about this mis-understanding.

 

I will dive further into SBuilder tomorrow, in which I've already discovered that co-ordinates are used in geographical positions, independant of underlying ground scenery tiles and/or mesh.

 

Thanks Roger for your help offer but please let me do some SBuilder sweating first, so that when possibly contacting you for a "nudge", I will at least be able to know what I'm talking about.

 

Yes Tom, I now also understand that even although it would somehow be possible to paint a road onto one of the default ground scenery tiles, this tile, together with it's new road, would then be repeated all over the FS9 world.

 

Thanks for the lesson guys.

 

Hans

Hi Guys,

 

After trying to find my way around in this rather difficult to use SBuilder program, I was, after much sweat, finally able to create a grainy and scraggy edged sandy beach-like VTP polygon for my coastal harbor area. Not really a problem because such areas are not meant to be viewed from close up anyway.

 

However, the road from this new harbor area upto the airfield was a different matter altogether but I was finally able, after a lot more sweat, to construct it via a very narrow and winding separate VTP polygon. But even although the road had now actually become visible, my sandy harbor area had disappeared. Further testing revealed that it was either the now active harbor- OR the road VTP.bgl file, which showed up correctly in the scenery, but not both together.

 

Roger, I think I now need an SBuilder "nudge" from you because in my mind there just must be a better way of creating the road and in such a way that both these separate polygons can become visible at the same time. Thanks in advance.

 

Regards

 

Hans

Hans,

 

Two polygons in the same area can complicate things, in many different ways that I won't go into now, and sometimes a choice has to be made. But, when you say you made a road "polygon", do you mean that you did not select "line" to make the road? With Sbuilder open and the plane position showing, and the zoom increased to 512, you select "line" and NOT "polygon" and then draw the road route. When it is complete you point to the line and select "properties", then "VTP2", then the point next to "assembled", and then put the cursor in that blank space and another window will open with a series of selections for lines. Select the road you want and then click on "points" and probably reduce it to 20 and click on "change" and then save and make the bgl. Maybe you already did it that way?

 

A second thought; you did realise that you use the position of a plane in FS9 to show the points that you want the road to go to? In the form of a red cross on the Sbuilder screen.

Edited November 4, 2020 by Roger Wensley

Thanks Roger for your answer.

 

Yes, I had seen the "line" option in SBuilder but in trying it I had gotten myself all tangled up in what to do next in relation to what I had already done. Making my thin (road-like) polygon was then my next best option, not knowing that this could "bite" my already existing harbor area polygon. However, I'll now have another go at it and will report back.

 

Yes, I already found out yesterday that the plane's position is or should be, the starting point from which to begin drawing my road and that following points should then lead the road up the valley all the way up to the airfield. All this while dodging autogen and my own added trees/buildings as well.

 

By the way Roger, I purposely did not send you an e-mail because otherwise this thread could run the risk of ending in the status "open ended".

 

Regards.

 

Hans

After another few hours of messing around with this SBuilder program in trying to get my road to become visible via the "line" drawing procedure, I kept running up against a new problem, in that my road only became partially visible. It only became fully visible along it's whole length after I had (temporarily) dis-abled the scenery's existing VTPP file, the file which creates the airfield's grass surface polygon.

 

Clearly another conflict situation between SBuilder files and which now causes me to opt out of this program all together. It can most probably do a lot for many of you scenery experts out there but it's conflicts and further unpredictabilities are just too much, at least for a beginner like me.

 

Thanks anyway for all your help guys.

 

Hans

Hans, I wrote those instructions from memory, so apology in advance if........ Let us know if it works for you.

Roger,

 

No apologies necessary Roger because your instructions successfully got me going on my illusive road, which for me was now no longer a scenery issue but far more an SBuilder "find out how to" issue. Moreover, after your "nudge" and help I now at least know some basics around how this SBuilder program works, what it's limitations are and last but not least, what the differences are between "paintable" addon scenery ground tiles and the default autogen ones.

 

Out of pure inquisitiveness, combined with covid19 boredom, I've now dived back into SBuilder again and have successfully used my new polygon "know how" for creating missing grassy terrains on two of my addon airports.

 

Roads ? Huh. Who needs roads !!

 

Regards and thanks again for your help.

 

Hans

Netherlands

Hi It is possible to draw a road onto a ground texture I have edited them for years and still at it for P3Dv5, the problem is there are only 7 textures in a set which are repeated so you would see the bit of road again and again and in other parts of the world. Not really possible to if it covers over a more than one texture I seem to remember seeing a long time ago a program to place all the road from a map but never really looked at it so cant help, airport builder If you can see a small access road.

 

Web : http://biggles11.wix.com/the-natural-world

biggles-tnw@outlook.com

Hans, One of the problems with SBuilder is the conflict between roads and existing grass airfield backgrounds. But, note that I wrote "existing" etc. Making a road often deletes part of the existing grass, but then you just remake the missing bit of grass and it all works.

Hi there Roger,

 

Yes, SBuilder does have quite some strange "ifs and buts", not only in it's relations between default roads and polygons but also with LC scenery, most probably because LC scenery normally exists as a scenery layer "on top of" any SBuilder polygon(s) and which then need non_SBuilder solutions.

 

A fine example of conflicts between polygons and default roads is on one of my addon Greek airports, which has a default looking (maintenance) road running all around it's perimiter.

A (grass) SBuilder polygon background was also necessary here, so I made a nice big (test) one covering the whole airport and with a wide margin all along the outside of this road. The result was a correct polygon background but also a non-polygon covered margin on both sides of the road all around the airport !!

I then made a new polygon with the road itself as it's borders but even then the polygon edges kept their distance from the road all around.

 

My end solution in this specific case was to draw an Afcad (or ADE) road on top of the default one and to then mask the void between that and the polygon edges with shrubs, fences, etc. Problem solved.

And then, on to my next problem airport.

 

My initial "road problem" with which I began this thread is now also solved by covering the area concerned with forests and other objects.

 

However, thanks again for another of your "nudges" in the correct direction and I will certainly try this one during my now ongoing general check of all my 600+ addon airport backgrounds and especially on the older ones, where the background problems are most prevelent. The covid19 scare is keeping me inside and off the streets anyway.

 

Thanks again.

 

Hans

I have also run into that "road removes the airport polygon along its edges" problem and am glad to hear it's not just me.

Hey there Tom,

 

Join the SBuilder frustration club !! You can count on my vote for you to become it's first chairman !! LOL.

 

However, it must also be said that Roger's latest suggestion does seem to work but not in all cases and especially not where coastlines are in close proximity. These seem to have the same adverse effects on polygon edges as roads.

 

But anyhow, I've now created correct grassy backgrounds for six of my older addon airports/airfields but these have then created even more "problems", in that they were then just asking to be enhanced and improved even more !! Yep, SBuilder is indirectly addictive as well !! LOL.

 

Regards and stay healthy.

 

Hans