Hello:
There are indeed generalizations made with regard to FSX / P3D and FS2Kx legacy versions of FS terrain that state the base global texture class to be either "all water"
or "all land".
Paul Wheeler said:
"Water, water everywhere...
The first common misconception simmers have is that the FSX world is all water and the land is drawn on top. This is not true. The FSX world is in fact all land. The water is then drawn on top of this land. It is created by drawing polygons of water which are then assigned textures. There are many different textures available and how they are assigned is determined by what is called 'waterclass'."
http://www.strikingsoftware.com/forum/index.php?topic=677.0;wap2
Rhumbaflappy said:
"Landclass and waterclass are two entirely different things. All areas of the planet do have both LC and WC. The problem is that for much of the world, the ACES team used value 100 for much of the world's landclass value... which happens to be an ocean water landclass. They should have made it rock or beach, then you wouldn't be confused that there is a
landclass that is water. You can look at the world's landclass with TMFViewer and see that 6/10ths + is configured as water. You can also view the world's waterclass. ( worldlc.bgl and worldwc.bgl )Whether we see the landclass or waterclass depends on the LWM bgl ( land/water mask ). But if value 100 is the underlying landclass, it will look and behave as water."
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/...s-to-landclass/?do=findComment&comment=554595
ACES FSX Global Terrain expert Adam Szofran said:
"With the FS9 Resample tool, the water mask punched a hole in your image to reveal default water beneath.
With the FSX Resample tool, we wanted to allow more flexibility, so we changed how the water mask works and we also added a blend mask. Now the water mask triggers reflective and specular water effects, but it doesn't punch a hole in your image. The benefit of this is that you can now paint the water any color you want. For example, if your source imagery contains murky brown swamp water, you can now get the muck to show up in FSX with reflections and specular effects. If you'd rather just see the default water colors, you have to use a blend mask to punch a hole in your image to reveal the default textures below. Note, however, that
the default textures revealed by the blend mask might not be water; they could very well be land textures! Therefore, if you want to guarantee that the blend mask will expose default water textures, you need to create a water polygon (a big square one will do) that covers the area where you want water to appear. For information about creating water polygons, look for the documentation of the shp2vec tool in the FSX SDK.
Good luck,
Adam"
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/...-default-water/?do=findComment&comment=558800
Luis Feliz-Tirado said:
"It is important to remember that the Flight Simulator world is entirely made of land. Any water that displays is a Hydro Polygon, so if it is excluded, then the underlying land will show instead. Therefore, when excluding a Hydro Polygon, the designer must replace it by another that covers the same extent, the entire area that was covered by the default water, or land will display in the uncovered parts, (unless, of course, you are replacing a lake or river, in which case, just remove the old and draw the new.)"
IMHO, important factors to be considered when working with land or water class terrain scenery is 'layers' and 'priority' ...when attempting to implement excludes, holes, blend masks, and land / water masks.
The importance of these factors increases when one has
any number of add-on 3rd party terrain scenery installed and set active in ones FS configuration, as one will be dealing with
more than just the FS "
default" scenery layers ...and these may be interposed between ones project added to the FS Scenery Library GUI as a 'top' priority Area layer.
As Ian alludes to above, in FSX / P3D it is possible to:
* "
Exclude specific" CVX vector objects within a LOD-9 / QMID-11 quad
...by intersecting the poly-line or polygon object with a small pair of vector objects, each having the proper GUID
...or to:
* "
Exclude All" types of CVX vector objects within a LOD-9 / QMID-11 quad
...by covering all poly-line or polygon objects with a single QMID-11 sized vector object, having a proper GUID
FYI: By
first viewing
all active CVX vector terrain BGLs locally-mapped to cover a project area in FSX / P3D SDK SH2VEC, and identifying the GUIDs for vector objects in those BGLs that one wishes to exclude, one can then implement a successful "exclude and replace" procedure and/or determine what additional land / water class polygons may be required to change the terrain attributes displayed when "masks" and/or "holes" are implemented in higher priority terrain texture layers.
NOTE: To perform the above cited inspection of CVX vector and/or certain other terrain BGLs, use "
TMFViewer"
FSX SDK:
[FSX SDK install path]\Environment Kit\Terrain SDK\
TmfViewer.exe
P3Dv2/v3 SDK:
[P3D SDK install path]\Environment SDK\
TmfViewer.exe
P3Dv4 SDK:
[P3Dv4 SDK install path]\World\Terrain\
tmfviewer.exe
BTW: Many- (but
not all !) terrain scenery CVX vector object "exclude and replace" as well as other functions may be implemented via ADE as an alternative to SBuilderX.
PS: An excellent tutorial on how to utilize "excludes" and other aspects of the terrain scenery SDK is here:
https://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxsd&DLID=141643
Terrain Design for Flight Simulator X
This simple illustrated document explains the basic concepts in Flight Simulator X terrain, and how to change them using SBuilder for FS X. Make new water bodies, roads, vehicle traffic, airport flattens, remove autogen, add more detail - anybody can do it easily and quickly.
My most sincere apologies - I am unable, for lack of free time, to offer support of any kind. For questions or problems, please post in the Avsim scenery design forum.
Filename: terrain_design_for_flight_simulator_x.zip
License: Freeware
Added: 14th December 2009, 13:29:15
Downloads: 16639
Author: Luis Feliz-Tirado
Size: 3991kb
NOTE: ADE users may be particularly interested in a class mapping reference for Airport Boundary / Background polygons which is included with the above tutorial package in:
[Terrain_Design for Flight Simulator X install path]\Additional_documents\
Airport_ground_mask.xls
Hope this helps !
GaryGB