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FSXA Landclass blending...

Shaun

Shaun

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unitedkingdom
I've been reading the SDK on terrain, but I can't make head or tales of it.

I want to put a landclass into an area, but don't want to use a polygon because it doesn't blend it in.

I see where there's spatters of say, small urban grid wet, it's blended into the surrounding lanclasses, how does one achieve this?
 
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Shaun said:
...how does one achieve this?
Click to expand...

You don't, it's done by the game/sim. Go into \Scenery\World\texture and find the 900xxxx.bmp files. Those are the splatter makers. They can be localized and made to override the main files, same as land class textures.
 
Shaun said:
but don't want to use a polygon because it doesn't blend it in.

I see where there's spatters of say, small urban grid wet, it's blended into the surrounding lanclasses
Click to expand...

Not sure if this is what you are looking for but.

EZ Landclass put town and landclass in specific areas.

http://www.dirks-software.ca/ but you need MS excel

or sBuilder

or Landclass Assistant
 
Ah I see.

That EZ landclass wont run at all, and it's for freeware projects only.

I understand that the 900xxxx.bmp have the landclass information coding in them. Is it possible to use the TMFviewer to discern which one and where is the area of interest I'm after. And how does it code the landclass into the splatter?

"Olson Land Classification Table
For any square on the land classification grid, a single value from the following table applies."

and it gives values 1-100+.
 
Oh I see! You use a geotiff with the value as greyscale, and run it through resample as a landclass layer.
 
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EZ landclass is what I use and it works for me in Office home excel 2010. You are telling me something new with the 900xxxx.bmp is a landclass file. I did not know that.

What I did was use EZ landclass - and take a VNC (VFR Nav chart) and made my own landclass for small towns and villages in Ontario.

So somehow you have to get existing landclass data in a tif format so you can "colour" it yourself.

I really only have worked with elevation dem data for ontario canada.

Next is roads coast lines etc. shapvec
 
It's got examples in the terrain SDK. It's just a greyscale geotiff with the greyscale values indicating a specific landclass. Easy to paint over a large area in the shades one needs.

The values correspond to RBG. So Broadleaf forest is 30, (30,30,30).

The values are listed here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707102.aspx

But you can use the Tmf viewer to open WorldLC in FSX/scenery/base/scenery (change the LOD to 5) and then, set a coordinate, zoom in (+/-), and hold your mouse over a pixel, it gives the value and description along the bottom.

Amazingly powerful!
 
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Wow - lots more information in the ESP SDK. Here I am looking at just the FSX SDK files. Thanks very much for the tip.
 
First, what I know about the 900xxx tiles come from Holger S. Seeing as a lot of his work is focused on his products, I'm not sure how much he has or would be willing to share.

From what I recall, 900 tiles are randomly called by the rendering engine and Holger and associates did a lot of work to set up the 900 tiles in a manner that suits their work efforts.

Land classification tiles can be what ever you want them to be, especially if they are localized. And the 900 tiles and their "splatter" can also have a local folder priority within the game / sim. <--- nod to P3D, because there is no entertainment value in that program... :D
 
Oh right. Perhaps they are used in determining the weighting (blending) of landclasses relative to one another.

Using a greyscale geotiff as a "ModifiedGlccSubset.tif", results in the a blending occurring between the surrounding landclasses and those defined in the geotiff, with with a discrete hard edge. Perhaps this pattern is determined by these 900 tiles.
 
Hi there,

the FSX landclass spreadsheet I uploaded several years ago contains some information about how these blend files work; we call them "M-tiles" due to the letter m in their names (and not only the 900 series are involved). I believe the spreadsheet was available here in the Downloads section somewhere but, if not, here's the direct link to it: http://fullterrain.com/orbxstaff/HOLGER/misc/HS_FSX_Land_Class_Table_v3.zip . It all seems quite complex but they are actually quite easy to make once you get the hang of it. Unfortunately, the biggest issue is that most of the agricultural and urban M-tiles are blocked in the default lclookup.bgl file (the sim will use the first variant of that set instead of the proper variant), which is one of the reasons why we (=Orbx) use a modified version; doesn't really make sense to spend lots of time making realistic new landclass texture sets but then they don't blend properly...

Cheers, Holger
 
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