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FSX Help with photo shoreline

ALain152

ALain152

Messages
607
Country
france
Hi,
I'm used to developping for fs2004 and recently tried to update a little photoscenery for fsx.
It seems not to work exactly like fs2004...
The issue is on the screen below

issue006.jpg


Photoscenery is cut well but here and there I get some landclass appearing instead of water.
What am I doing wrong ? Is there a (simple;)) way to avoid that stuff ?
I don't understand. It' was so easy with 2004...

Thank you guys
Regards
 
Thank you.
Well is seems the watermask (in blue) has no more effect. It's the lwm_poly (dotted line) that defines water.

issue007.jpg


So the question becomes: how can I turn my watermask into a lwm_poly ?
Got a bad feeling...

Regards
 
It's been a long time since I did some testing, but I found my best looking results are creating hydro polys where water should be and then using a blendmask to let some of the photo to show through. I've never found a good program for extracting a shoreline vector from a raster.

scott s.
.
 
Thank you Scott.
That's exactly what I was afraid of :o

Does it really mean that:
1/ I have to cut off (cut out ?) the shoreline with alpha mask for fs9,
2/ double cut off with hydropoly vectors for fsx.
No way to avoid doing twice the same boring time consumer job ?

I apologize for my bad english
Regards
 
Last edited:
Hi Alain,

I think you can do it with an alpha channel for both. In the FSX INF file for resample you specify that it becomes a watermask and then it should work.

The biggest task is then to put the alpha channel in your source image.
 
Hi Arno
Will try that but :
If type is alpha imagery which layer do I assosiate ?

Thanks
 
Last edited:
At the risk of mixing two different approaches, the problem I see in general is dealing with the water flattening as one issue, and the appearance of water texture, wave effect/reflections and float plane capability as the second. If the land slope gradient isn't too bad, you can probably leave in the existing flattens and no one will notice. But if the gradient is important visually, then you might consider fixing the flattens. At least with a photoscene, you don't have to worry about the texture changing to the steep slope variation.

For flattening, getting rid of fs9 flattens is one problem that isn't easy to overcome, but at least any polygons you create in sbuilder can be exported in bln format and appended into sbuilderx . Going the other way works except sbuilderx can create islands as holes in polygons but fs9 (and sbuilder) can't.

scott s.
.
 
with fs9, LWM waterpolys generates water, but you can create water everywhere with just a texture alpha chanel.

with fsx, alpha chanel does not really create water, you need to place a waterpoly just under if you want to add blend and effects. the problem comes from your waterpoly that does not perfectly fit with the texture edges : between waterpoly and texture there's nothing except the fs default ground.

the only way to fix it is to create a waterpoly that goes inside the texture edges (but you'll "cut" the mesh), and/or create a blend area starting just on the shoreline with opacity 100% for the first 5 or 10 meters then blending to the deep water. this should overhide the ground texture stripes...

it's amazing fsx developers did not provide anything to fix this problem !?
 
jetrc said:
with fsx, alpha chanel does not really create water, you need to place a waterpoly just under if you want to add blend and effects. the problem comes from your waterpoly that does not perfectly fit with the texture edges : between waterpoly and texture there's nothing except the fs default ground.
Click to expand...

I am not sure if that is completely true. If you use the alpha channel as the blendmask that is what will happen. But if you use it as a watermask you should get water just like in FS2004.

When setting it as watermask by accident, instead of a blendmask, I once flooded quite a bit of desert :).
 
Shorelines

I have the same problem, the mesh does not match the photoscenery shoreline perfectly. Creating a hydropoly underneith in SBuilder is not an option, as it cuts into the mesh, creating ugly artifacts in the landscape.

One solution could be to draw the ocean for the shorelines from the photo texture, but I would rather find another solution.

Any thoughts?
 
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