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Photo Real Scenery

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1,267
Hi Rick,

I hope I'm in the correct forum. I have my KBHM project completed and now I want to place some photo real scenery around my airport. The problem is that I'll need to re-work the photo real scenery so that it reflects what it was around 1973 through 1986. In the image below, you can see that in the current image, runway 36 is 7,100 feet. But in the 1970s and 1980s, it was 4,856 feet. Note the difference in ADE where the runway ends at 4,856 feet as apposed to the real photo image which shows the runway that has been extended to 7,100 feet:


Runway 36_Then and Now.jpg



There are 2 ways I thought about correcting this, and one is to clone out the areas that I don't won't by using the clone tool in Gimp. I would draw the grassy areas over the extended portion of the runway. The other is to create a blendmask and making the extended runway, and other areas transparent. How would you scenery designers do this?

Ken.
 
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HI it looks like you're in FSX, or maybe P3D. While I've done this for both, it is hard to remember exactly after having had to learn MSFS. In those sims, I used to use ground polygons that I made using Sketchup and the geo locate add imagery feature. I would cut out the runway and taxiways and that would be a model from Sketchup that I ran through the MCX ground polygon wizard. The advantage is that you get better detail than the standard photo bgl. So you just take the ground photo however you get it, I used to use SBuilderX and I would edit that in Photoshop to remove anything I didn't want, or that I was going to render using ground polygon. Then I do the same thing with the ground polygon texture, from Sketchup you can point to your external editor, mine is Photoshop, click edit external and then just change the details you want, save it and it reloads in Sketchup with the edits.

Using that technique I once recreated a 1930's airport for someone. The beauty of the technique is that you can add seasonal variations. Here it is in winter

KvcKDEo.jpg


and Summer.

JC6G0aZ.jpg
 
HI it looks like you're in FSX, or maybe P3D. While I've done this for both, it is hard to remember exactly after having had to learn MSFS. In those sims, I used to use ground polygons that I made using Sketchup and the geo locate add imagery feature. I would cut out the runway and taxiways and that would be a model from Sketchup that I ran through the MCX ground polygon wizard. The advantage is that you get better detail than the standard photo bgl. So you just take the ground photo however you get it, I used to use SBuilderX and I would edit that in Photoshop to remove anything I didn't want, or that I was going to render using ground polygon. Then I do the same thing with the ground polygon texture, from Sketchup you can point to your external editor, mine is Photoshop, click edit external and then just change the details you want, save it and it reloads in Sketchup with the edits.


I'm using FSX and I'm following the tutorial "How to Create Photoreal Scenery in FSX.," which is a great tutorial. When I created my airport map in SbuilderX, I could no locate my INF file that was supposed to have been create along with my bitmap, bgl, and text file. Then I realized that I had 2 old INF files that were still left in that Tool/Work folder, and apparently updated one of those older INF files. Now, I can't get that INF file that I need. I've already done all that work in Gimp, creating the watermask and the blendmask, and I didn't want to go through all that trouble again creating a new map in SbuilderX just to get my INF file. Is there a way I can import my first map that I've already worked on into SbuilderX so that I can compile it again to generate the INF file I need for that airport map?

Ken.
 
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You could project it onto a new project, get it close and use that .inf and you could do similar in QGIS.
 
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