How to create photoreal scenery for FSX

Yep, thanks a lot Jim.

I have a project with a small island and lots of other islands nearby, so the approach with removing the cvx file and editing a whole grid wiped out all the islands :)

Now I will try the technique used in the thread that you referred to.

Zoandar, it would be great to hear from your result with this.

Michael

Replacing the CVX2517 and 2617 files I had pulled out of folder 0302, and then using SBuilderX313 to draw Exclude_All_Shorelines polygons covering both those QMD7 sized areas did indeed remove the lines I had seen in the water along various shoreline areas.

BUT...... (As I say.............)

Now it seems to be causing some other problems that I am not having much success in correcting.

This area is at the root of the Marblehead Peninsula in Ohio, and is referred to as the Muddy Creek area. This is before any editing at all, directly from Virtual Earth servers.

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Here is what I now see in FSX, with the underlying CVX2517.BGL file restored. This "snake" in the water only appeared AFTER restoring the CVX file. It was not there before.

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I can make it disappear by using an Exclude_All_Terrain polygon in that area. But when I do so, I get s piece of default terrain suddenly appearing in the water just north of this area :

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If I try to use the same kind of exclusion poly to make that go away, it has no effect whatsoever. I do not know what to do here. This is at the 3 corners of meeting segments of my scenery, so it may prove to be an "overlap issue" I have seen before with coloration, where making a change doesn't work unless you make exactly the same color change on the edges of BOTH meeting segments. I am still experimenting to try to fix this. Any suggestions are welcome!! :)

Aside from this problem, everywhere else along the Lake Erie Shoreline in Ohio, Michigan, PA, and part of Canada across the water all look OK having restored those CVX files.

This is crazy!

I start with this:

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I add an Exclude_All_Terrain poly to this area to see if it will help:

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And it actually causes MORE default terrain to show!!??

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This makes no sense to me at all! I'm completely baffled here. (But persistence will prevail. Read on.) ;)

Thinking this over, I decided to "divide and conquer". :)

I have removed all three of the Muddy Creek 2 (which I named MCK2 for simplicity), Muddy Creek, and Marblehead segments from their list in the Scenery Library at locations, 90, 91, and 94 respectively. I will add them back in one by one, to try to see which one causes the rectangle of unwanted land to appear.

This is just Marblehead, with the other 2 still not loaded. It is not causing the rectangle. So likely explains why using an SBX exclusion poly in the Marblehead segment did not work right. But it also shows something else interesting.

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That 'snake' of unwanted scenery I had to exclude, mentioned above, is actually a fictitious river created in this area by FSX in its default scenery. There is an Exclude_All_Streams type in the SBX polygon list. Now's the time to see if that's meant for this kind of issue. I opened the MCK2 SBX Project file and redefined the exclusion poly as _Streams instead of All_Terrain. If it works when I load MCK2 next, I'll have learned something. :) Most of the time when I am stumped it is simply because I don't have a key piece of information. :)

Next I loaded the MCK2 segment in the Scenery Library.

Ah! The 'snake' (stream) is now gone! :) And still no rectangle.

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Now to load Muddy Creek.

And, just as I had hoped, by moving these 3 segments up to the top of the Scenery pecking order, the 'mystery land' is now abolished! :))

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Now I get to make another flight around the area to look for any other problems, but it appears that this area, at least, is now OK. :)

One thing you can always do is load the default CVX in TMFViewer and see what's there causing the problem. In TMFViewer you can "jump to lat/lon" and zoom in close, You also have options in the "View > Vector Data > Layers" menu of hiding or displaying different types of vectors. Lastly you can right click a vector feature and choose "Identify vector features" and read the GUID associated with it. In SBuilderX's "tools" folder are some txt files, lines.txt, polys.txt, etc. Depending on the type of vector, open the appropriate .txt file and search for the GUID, it'll tell you exactly what you have to exclude when you run into something like this.

Great job troubleshooting BTW :) .

EDIT: It is also possible to load your photoreal .bgl and the default CVX into TMFViewer at the same time. Load the photoreal first which will jump you to the immediate area, then load the CVX which will overlay the photoreal (or vice versa, can't remember). You can adjust the opacity of the overlay in the "View" menu.

Jim

One thing you can always do is load the default CVX in TMFViewer and see what's there causing the problem. In TMFViewer you can "jump to lat/lon" and zoom in close, You also have options in the "View > Vector Data > Layers" menu of hiding or displaying different types of vectors. Lastly you can right click a vector feature and choose "Identify vector features" and read the GUID associated with it. In SBuilderX's "tools" folder are some txt files, lines.txt, polys.txt, etc. Depending on the type of vector, open the appropriate .txt file and search for the GUID, it'll tell you exactly what you have to exclude when you run into something like this.

 

Great job troubleshooting BTW :) .

 

EDIT: It is also possible to load your photoreal .bgl and the default CVX into TMFViewer at the same time. Load the photoreal first which will jump you to the immediate area, then load the CVX which will overlay the photoreal (or vice versa, can't remember). You can adjust the opacity of the overlay in the "View" menu.

 

Jim

Thank you!

Ανυπομονώ για μια αγγλική μετάφραση κάποια μέρα. :)

For the part I understood (in the edit at the end ;) ), each bgl file I open with TMFViewer opens a new window. How do I tell the utility I want it to add them in layered fashion? This will take some study, but it sounds like a valuable way to find a problem. Do you happen to know of a good tutorial on using TMFViewer?

Thanks for the kind words. I have spent a lifetime troubleshooting and usually fixing a great many things about which I actually know very little. Many of them would require years of college degrees to be considered "proficient" or "an expert" enough that someone would expect such repair capabilities from a person. I didn't have that kind of time to devote to most of them, because they were time critical to get them working again. FSX is an exception, I admit. And good product design results in an intuitive function, making troubleshooting easier. Sadly, a very nearly deceased art among design engineers. And an extreme rarity in software design. I got lucky, in short. I pride myself on the ability to distill a problem to its essential cause, and then deal with that. Saves on the reading. :) And flying is more fun than reading. ;)

What's a Vector in FSX scenery? lol

Ok, this is the island I am working on. I have now put the cvx file back where it belongs and deleted the hydro file.

Is my next task to create a shoreline and then start planting my excludes to get rid of the default terrain sticking out of my island?

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Michael

If we are going to not remove the terrain CVX files, then I am not sure if it will have much impact on how default terrain will peek through compared to the segment in this tutorial on using SBX, creating the hydro-poly, drawing the poly to create the "hole", etc. I would not know how that will pan out until I would try re-doing an island like Nauru and NOT remove the CVX file at the beginning of the process, and then work through it to see what problems popped up.

I can say that, aside from the mystery terrain that showed up in the Muddy Creek area in my recent posts, I am going around looking at things elsewhere and not finding any problems so far. I'm also researching where to find a good tutorial on TMFViewer, as Jim's information makes it seem to be a very valuable troubleshooting tool, but at this point I don't have a clue how all that works. :)

In your case of this island, yes, I think I would probably proceed with using Exclusion polys in SBX to handle unwanted terrain showing up. But maybe someone else will chime in with other suggestions. In the step where Tiberius has you "Press H" to get the typical water type for the polygon, there is a very long list in there of many kinds of things, including several types of exclusion types. Hopefully that will get you where you need to go. Never hurts to experiment. :) just keep backup copies of any files you spent a lot of time to create. You can always go back to them if needed.

...each bgl file I open with TMFViewer opens a new window. How do I tell the utility I want it to add them in layered fashion? This will take some study, but it sounds like a valuable way to find a problem. Do you happen to know of a good tutorial on using TMFViewer?

Are you using the FSX version of TMFViewer? I usually just start TMFViewer and drag the .bgls into the TMFViewer window. I'm using the TMFViewer that comes with the acceleration SDK, but I've used the one that comes with the SP2 SDK in the past, they both work the same way. Not sure about other versions. It should be in your "Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK\SDK\Environment Kit\Terrain SDK" folder. BTW I was wrong about the opacity thing, apparently vector data is always 100% opaque. Save that trick for later when you're working with landclass or seasons. Still, if you drag your photo.bgl into TMFViewer first it will jump to the area you're working with. Then drag your CVX in next and you'll be roughly zoomed in on the problem area. Otherwise trying to find a single stream line or something in the vast coverage area of the CVX can be a little like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. BTW, in TMFViewer you can click the map to center, then use the + - keys to zoom in and out.

"Vector data" is/are things made by defining points BTW, lines, polygons, etc. as opposed to something defined by raster data (pixels) such as photoscenery, mesh, landclass, etc.

When you guys get around to making shorelines in SBX make your hydro polys first. You can right click the finished hydro poly and choose "Make line" which will clone the outline of the poly into a line. If you've sliced or filled your hydro poly to QMIDxx you'll find the line goes all the way around the perimiter of the QMID cell. At that point hide polygons ("View > All polygons), right click the line, and use "manual check" to move through the points of the line, deleting those at the corners of the QMID cell until your line only encompases the actual shoreline area needed. Tag the line with "Shoreline generic bay harbor" or whatever, then when you get ready to compile just select all polygons and then select all lines - it will compile all the excludes, hydro polys, and shorelines into a single .bgl. Probably all sounds like martian but try it, it's pretty self-explanitory once you see it in SBX.

That said, you may not really need shorelines if you're using a photoscenery. The photo will cover them up anyway. You may need to rebuild some shorelines that have been excluded beyond the coverage area of the photo though, and also you can take advantage of the wave effects on top of your photo if you use "shoreline generic ocean".

Oh yeah, the strange land anomalies that show up when you make these excludes are because you've eliminated the default hydro poly, whenever you do that you'll see land. Check out Tiberius' screenshot at step #28 on page 2 of this thread.

Jim

Ok, this is the island I am working on. I have now put the cvx file back where it belongs and deleted the hydro file.

 

Is my next task to create a shoreline and then start planting my excludes to get rid of the default terrain sticking out of my island?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140720[/ATTACH]

 

 

Michael

I would say your next step would be to make polygons in SBX on top of your photo. Make a polygon for each island by selecting around the edges of each. No need to define a polygon type for these, "Polygon of type none" will be fine for what you need to do. When you have all the islands done, make a larger polygon that encompasses all of the island polygons and tag it as "Hydro_Generic_Bay_Harbor_Perennial" or whatever. Then select one of the island polygons, right click, and "set as hole". It wants you to define the "parent poly" at that point so just click the edge of the larger Hydro_Generic_Bay_Harbor_Perennial poly and you'll see that the island shape has been cut out of the hydro poly. Repeat for the remaining islands.

"View > QMID grid > level 11", drag the corners of the hydro poly out past the edges of the QMID 11 cell and then right click > Slice to QMID11. Delete the excess poly fragments around the edges and you should have a perfectly filled QMID 11 cell with the islands cut out of it. Make another random poly somewhere in the QMID 11 cell and tag it "Exclude_All_Water_Polygons". Right click it and "Fill to QMID11".

That should be about it, select all polygons, compile, and try it out in the sim.

Jim

Hi Jim,

Yes, I'm using the version of TMFViewer that came in the FSXA SDK, but I think after reading your clarification I know why my experiences are different. I never actually "open" or run TMFViewer as an application. At least not since the very first time it was mentioned in this tutorial. I set Windows 7 file association for bgl files to open with TMFViewer so it was quick and easy to look at a BGL file by just clicking on it. My primary reason for ever doing so up to this point has been more a matter of making sure I know where I am in reference to the overlapping boundaries of adjacent scenery files, of which I have a bunch. I learned the hard way that editing a feature right on the very edge of a segment usually means also having to edit it the same way in the adjoining segment, such as coloring a river or harbor that spans the 2 segments. Otherwise they won't match up right in appearance. Also to see the shape of a segment's hydro-poly without having to fire up SBX. All these other nifty things you've pointed out TMFViewer can do are new to me. I'll try opening it and dragging the files onto it instead, to see how that works.

Thanks for the clarification. I agree a lot of these procedures sound like greek the first time I read them. :) I felt the same way when I was told on the GIMP forum how to constrain the fuzzy select tool using a Channel. Sounded really complex to me until I actually did it a few times. It is actually child's play and works really well! I am using the technique to revisit marinas around the lake shore and some of the rivers, to add them into the watermask of their segment, so that instead of being a static colored area they actually have FSX water effect in between the boats and piers. It sure looks much nicer, and would take forever to trace by hand.

Although I did the entire tutorial at Nauru, including the shoreline wave effects to learn how that works, I don't generally apply them to the scenery I am doing along Lake Erie's shores. The waves look nice against the large beaches of a tropical island, but the beaches up this way are for the most part pretty narrow, and often non-existent. And since I've had no luck in trying to exceed LOD15 when capturing scenery here, I generally fly at least 2500 ft. AGL to get a decent appearance, so I wouldn't be noticing beach wave action much anyway. If leaving them out contributes to a few more FPS I'll take that instead. :)

Hi Zoander

I have been following the discussion between Jim and yourself with great interest and have tried using TMFviewer in the way he suggests. If you open your photoreal scenery .bgl file and then click the Open option in the File menu of TMFviewer and select the cvx????.bgl file. You will then find that the last one opened is overlaying the first and you can alter its transparency from the Overlay transparency... option in the View menu. Under Vector Data, Layers you can remove the water poly's, exclusion poly's, etc to give you a clear picture of what's going on. I hope that will help a bit.

In doing that I have found that there are roads and railway lines criss-crossing my scenery, which is great. The roads are fine but the railway lines don't match my scenery. Do you or Jim know if is there any way to move them so that they line up properly or do I have to exclude them and redraw them in my scenery?

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In the screenshot the road is on the right in red and the railway is on the left in a shade of green that causes it to blend into the background. However you can see that it crosses an area of water on a causeway and a couple of bridges and in FSX the line is just hanging in the air above the water to the side of where it should be.

Regards

Archie

...the railway lines don't match my scenery. Do you or Jim know if is there any way to move them so that they line up properly or do I have to exclude them and redraw them in my scenery?

Nope sorry, exclude and redraw :) What sucks is that roads are clipped at QMID 11 too so that means a potentially large reconstruction project unless you luck out and find the default road is just a short piece. Usually they're not too bad from my limited experience. You can make a tiny "exclude_all_roads" polygon just touching the default road and see how much it wipes out.

If you're making a photoreal the roads will be covered up anyway though, right? They do have a flattening effect that might show up if your terrain is uneven, but if it's relatively flat ground I wouldn't worry about them.

You could try extrusion bridges where the railway crosses the water BTW, I believe they do show up over the photoreal. If that works you can add a shadow to the PR under the bridge for a nice effect.

Jim

Tiberius K, if you're watching, it is definitely NOT my intent to hijack your fine tutorial. I'd just like to share some added information about which I was asked here.

No worries. You are doing a great job. Thanks. Both thumbs up!

The idea was to just teach the basics, the bare minimum so that anyone can at least bring a satellite picture into FSX and knows how to use the tools. To teach all the fine details will take hundreds of pages and pictures for a tutorial. Everyone has his own style and ideas of how photoreal scenery should look like, too. I'm also experimenting a lot with my own sceneries I'm working on at the moment. So if you have specific questions then post them. I'll be reading.

Thanks again Zoandar that you were hanging in there. Learning by doing can be fun. :p

Dealing with off-color imagery captured from the satellite servers can be an annoyance or a downright frustration. When I was working my way around Lake Erie along the north shore of Ohio, USA I found that of the 3 servers available in SBuilderX313 at this time, (Google, Virtual Earth, and Yahoo) Virtual Earth yields the best looking scenery and most natural coloration. But for some odd reason, when I crossed the international border into the Canadian side of the lake, its islands, and shorelines, I found getting decent scenery is next to impossible.

Color is not a problem. The real problem is clouds.

I should mention that, from the very start, I could NOT achieve capturing ANY scenery at the LOD 16 Tiberius K. describes in this very nice tutorial. I just won't happen. The very best I can get is LOD 15, which I used for most of my project dealing with US scenery. Ontario, Canada shoreline and its islands, such as Pelee Island, I had to settle for LOD 14 or 13, simply because there IS NO scenery above that level. The screen just blanks out in SBX when trying to capture that part of the world in the higher resolutions using either Virtual Earth or Yahoo, so I was forced to use Google. But I had to go with terribly low resolution to not have part of the image simply missing. In fact, one of the Canadian Lake Erie islands yielded such terribly poor imagery that I had to "paint it" with forest imagery garnered from one of the LOD 15 Bass Islands as a GIMP pattern, just to have it look any better than butt ugly. :)

Yeah, I often have to do a little patch work, too. Since I'm mostly doing tropical islands only, they all look much alike, so it's easy to copy and paste few parts here and there. If it's done well, no one will ever notice. It's done easily with rather flat terrain where you don't have much shadows created by the landscape itself.

I usually choose one island that looks naturally very nice as a standard model and recolor the other images until they match this one. When I did Western Fiji I took Naviti from bing maps as the standard and recolored all other islands in the area according to that one.

Tiberius K. in the flesh! At last we meet. I thought you had moved on to that great flight sim in the sky. Um....wait....that's what we're doing here, isn't it?? lol

I want to thank you profusely!! It was literally decades I used most of the evolving versions of MSFS and dreamed of having scenery actually look even vauguely like my part of the world, and found it very disappointing it did not. When at long last I found an online vendor willing to make and sell Ohio scenery I was ecstatic! Finally!!

Imagine my disappointment then, when what I bought had a large percentage of the lakeshore waters completely NOT water but a very ugly photo imagery. And the vendor gave up when trying to implement some sort of fix for it, and later went out of business. Every time I flew I was staring at that ugly lakeshore, dreaming of SOME way to come along to fix it. When I could stand no more I started researching how this might be addressed by any means possible. I bought addons that were supposed to make water more realistic. But since it isn't water, they did not work (not knowing anything at all about FSX scenery at the time I had hoped FSX could use the utility addon to "fix it". That did nothing).

Eventually I started looking for some way to "work with FSX water scenery", and after some Googling I was led to this nifty tutorial. You've opened a barrel of dreams for me here, and I really do thank you for it!

You've also kind of created a monster. lol Well, you and GIMP, which had also been unfamiliar to me. The further I go the more I learn, and I find myself literally circle touring Lake Erie around and around again applying newly learned fixes to improve the appearance of my scenery more and more. But I enjoy doing this so at least I'm a happy monster. :) I'm currently adding all the little marinas along the lake shore to the watermask, rather than having static water coloring in them.

On the subject of clouds and satellite image coloration, I've only very rarely seen a single cloud in the imagery for my entire project, which is mind boggling because we get a lot of overcast weather here in Ohio. I was led to believe these satellites must deliberately only photograph areas with no clouds on any given day. Of course the clouds were in Canada, where all my lousy scenery coloration has seemed to be. I don't understand why.

Anyway, glad to meet you! And did I say THANKS? :)

Hi Zoandar,

you've got the right attitude. Never give up. There's always a way to work around a problem. I'm still working on a solution for that moving out cvx files nonsense. I'll try experimenting a bit more with exclusion polygons. So far moving out the entire cvx file was the best solution since I'm usually planning to cover the entire area so I'll have to do the entire grid anyway. However, if you want to use your scenery on another computer then there might be some problems. That's why I usually move out the entire cvx and apx files.

Creating a blendmask can be an art. I've experimented a lot lately. I had to do thousands of square miles of reefs. You can also consider changing the water tile category for your scenery area. The default water tile color isn't always the best.

Hi Zoander

 

I have been following the discussion between Jim and yourself with great interest and have tried using TMFviewer in the way he suggests. If you open your photoreal scenery .bgl file and then click the Open option in the File menu of TMFviewer and select the cvx????.bgl file. You will then find that the last one opened is overlaying the first and you can alter its transparency from the Overlay transparency... option in the View menu. Under Vector Data, Layers you can remove the water poly's, exclusion poly's, etc to give you a clear picture of what's going on. I hope that will help a bit.

 

In doing that I have found that there are roads and railway lines criss-crossing my scenery, which is great. The roads are fine but the railway lines don't match my scenery. Do you or Jim know if is there any way to move them so that they line up properly or do I have to exclude them and redraw them in my scenery?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140747[/ATTACH]

 

In the screenshot the road is on the right in red and the railway is on the left in a shade of green that causes it to blend into the background. However you can see that it crosses an area of water on a causeway and a couple of bridges and in FSX the line is just hanging in the air above the water to the side of where it should be.

 

Regards

 

Archie

@Jim - is this what you had in mind when saying overlaying layers in TMFV could be transparent?ld

Archfer, this brings a question to mind. I don't think in all my years of FS I've ever seen an AI train moving on a railroad. Is FSX capable of doing that?

I would agree with Jim that I would think default roads and RR would be overlaid with our own custom scenery. And after restoring those FSX terrain CVX files, I now have highway traffic moving along my scenery interstates. I am not sure if they actually follow the same paths as the default scenery interstates, but I haven't yet seen a vehicle off-roading it. ;)

How much effort is involved in making traffic move on secondary roads? Based on what you folks have said here, is it just a matter of tracing the desired path on our scenery and then compiling some kind of additional BGL file?

I did have an odd thing happen for awhile last night, but before I could finish creating a post here, with screen shots, of what I was seeing it suddenly vanished and I still have no idea what was going on. I was fixing a coloration issue at Long Point, Ontario (fascinating geology there) and suddenly a "dashed line" appeared parallel to the shoreline in my scenery. I actually looked like thick versions of "~ ~ ~ ~ ~" in a black color. At first I thought it was somehow the edge of the area's hydro-poly (remember, most of my scenery was not created with full QMID7 sized hydro-polys because it is not islands, except those in the west end of Lake Erie, which is far smaller than a QMID7 grid area). So I used SBX to move that hydro-poly boundary, but the line remained. Oddly, it was not apparent on the Long Point.bmp base image. I tried a few different things in GIMP and after each re-compile it wad still there. I unloaded my Long Point scenery and found the line to be following a winding line of trees along the shore in the default terrain. Somehow, it was trying to show THROUGH my imagery. I checked in GIMP to assure my bmp image was 100% opaque, and it is.

So I set the issue aside to think about it and started gathering the screen shots to post it here. Along the way I found a coloration mismatch I wanted to fix, using tools in GIMP where the three segments of scenery match up to comprise the whole of Long Point (its about 40 km square). As I was fiddling with the opacity of a green overlay on the adjoining segments to get the best match, recompiling each of the 3 segments each time to see them in FSX, suddenly that line disappeared. I still have no idea why it ever showed through in the first place. So I did not bother posting about it. But your comment on the railroad reminded me of that event. What could cause something like that to "bleed through" opaque custom scenery to the surface and be visible?

Thanks, Jim, that was what I was afraid of.

The roads are pretty close to perfect it's the railway line (railroad) that I thought was showing up in my scenery but I have had another look and here are a couple of screenshots:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140760[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]140761[/ATTACH]

It looks like a bridge of sorts almost following the line of the causeway and running from one side of the lake to the other. As this is an object would I be able to edit it?

You were correct, the roads and railroads don't show up in my scenery but if there are no AI trains as Zoandar says then maybe I should just forget them.

In the first screenshot you can see an AI boat on my scenery lake so I suppose the AI road traffic will just follow the lines that are hidden by my scenery. If that is the case all I have to do is exclude the railroad lines and redraw them (there are only a couple) for AI trains to follow the rails in my scenery.

I will give it a go and see what happens.

I had another question. Can I use water class tiles to show varying depth in my harbour and can I change the colour according to the seasons? Once again, maybe I should just give it a go and see what happens.

Regards

Archie

I have to credit my son, who was home on a Christmas visit, for a lot of the work going into my gradient Blendmask procedure. I was showing him what I had done with the custom scenery, and he asked why there wasn't some way to make the defined edges of the shallow water look less defined. He has some Photoshop experience, so he asked me what went into making the Blendmask and Watermask. Once I showed him how that is done, we tried several methods of getting a gradient, but it was a lot of manual blurring and such. What I wanted was something I could essentially "spray on", with no more than a pass or two, instead of all the recursive brushing we were doing. After some time I arrived at my technique described above.

Now and then I do have to give in to hiring someone to do a project here that is beyond our means and skill set. But not often. Never giving up is baked into my constitution. ;) One of the up sides to a lack of patience I have cultivated all my life. There is a difference to me between "patience" and "putting a lot of detail work for hours into a project". For me, patience means waiting for something or someone else to act. I'm not into that. :)

One very major aspect in dealing with water masking in FSX, which I learned the hard way, is the importance of an underlying color being right, and being uniform if you want the water to look the same all over the place. All it takes as a terribly off color area like Long Point, Ontario to bring this to light, which was where I made the decision I needed a way out. Here is what it looked like before I started to work on it:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140762[/ATTACH]

And here is what it looks like after I worked on it (MANY times over): (zoomed in somewhat)

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140763[/ATTACH]

This image is one of those I was preparing to post regarding the aforementioned "mystery line" that eventually disappeared on its own. The red arrows are pointing to it. But for this post I am just referring to what some attention to coloration can do. :) It puzzles me that these images come from the satellite servers looking so ugly. Their websites using these images never look this bad. I can't imagine they spend the hours we do putting refinements into each image before they are displayed, especially given they are doing the whole Earth!

What's sad is that by default, FSX pretty much treats this beautiful 'sand spit' rich in history and tourism as if it doesn't even exist. I am not doing the entire Ontario shoreline, because I don't fly up there. But when I saw how awful FSX rendered Long Point and Erieau, I just had to do those 2 areas. Long Point has a lot of naval history. There are over 200 shipwrecks there dating back centuries, and it is a very popular dive site. I found it interesting that Erie, PA, which has a very similar attractively colored sand spit with a large basin in the middle of it and lots of shoreline development, is pretty much straight across the lake from Long Point. I wonder if the 2 sites were joined at some point after the lakes were created, and then erosion carved out the middle?

Anyway, nice scenery from the air!

I just did some Googling for AI trains in FSX and read a bunch of discussion which, distilled, comes down to the reason the developers originally intended to have them, then scrapped the idea. They could not get the train to move correctly on a curve. Several forum threads mention people subsequently trying on their own to model one, but always running into this problem.

Also, there were rumors that FSX integration would be included in MS Train Simulator when version 2 released, but the killing off of the MS development team caused said version 2 never to be developed. So as nice as the idea seems, I guess it would be really hard to do.

Archie I think that's an extrusion bridge in your screenshots. You can exclude those too with SBX but you need to do that with the exclude tool (the "X" icon on the toolbar) rather than with an exclude polygon of any sort. Just draw a rectangle with the exclude tool, it'll pop open a dialog when you finish where you can tick the box "Extrusion bridges". That'll make a new "000_PROJECT.bgl" in your scenery folder containing only the exclude since this type of exclude can't co-exist in the same .bgl as the polygon excludes.

You can recreate the extrusion bridge in the correct location with the line tool, make a line, right click it, and choose "properties". On the properties dialog you'll see an extrusion bridges tab where you can define the bridge (railroad, freeway, etc). Compiling that will make yet another .bgl in your scenery folder, you'll recognize that by the "_EXT" suffix SBX appends to the filename.

Can I use water class tiles to show varying depth in my harbour and can I change the colour according to the seasons?

You can, but to do that you'd need to blend mask the water out of your PR so that default water poly shows through (or a modified water poly you've made yourself in SBX). Waterclass won't have any affect your photoreal water. Further, a waterclass tile is along the lines of 1 km square so I doubt your area is large enough to get any deep water/shallow water variation going. A better option in my opinion would be to keep the PR water and modify the source imagery (maybe paste some water into it from a more appropriate piece of donor imagery).

I found some kicka$$ water in Maine BTW :) , check out the VirtualEarth imagery at 44.2212651, -68.6206674. I made some PR water overlays for that area, blending the islands out so the landclass islands show through. That resulted in what I thought was a great water effect without need to spend a week in the annotator adding autogen trees. Check out this thread:

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?251888-Visiting-Maine

Jim

 

 

A better option in my opinion would be to keep the PR water and modify the source imagery (maybe paste some water into it from a more appropriate piece of donor imagery).

 

Jim

I agree. This relates to my mentioning the underlying color for FSX water makes a lot of difference. In that ugly stock Long Point image, FSX rendered the near shore water as "electric blue" due to the silver coloration in the bitmap image. I think you could probably experiment with different shades of color, (I've learned that dark greens seem to work the best to match up with FSX water in other areas - I prefer to paint the water in most of my scenery with 273d2d Hex notation in GIMP (its a dark green) and it gives the colors you see in my second Long Point shot. But you could paint areas of lighter and darker shades and get effect just like the real aerial imagery you can see online for the water in areas like Long Point, Ontario and Erie, Pennsylvania. I left some of the actual satellite image coloration in those areas under the water to help get that effect.