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FSX Wet surface effect

  • Thread starter Thread starter Aviasim
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Aviasim

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Hello!

Since I have not been developing anymore, I did say I will still make things and test things out, just not release airports etc or make you all believe I am releasing an airport.

Well, I have been experimenting, this time with the wet surface effect of FSX that I have never used in my scenery of Leicester.

Well I removed my Leicester scenery and now the airport in FSX is just my testing ground and experimental scenery.

So, what I have is almost the same as before, except this time I used SBuilderX to make photoscenery from the imagery I had purchased for EGBG X, this is nice as it will follow terrain, again which I have not ever done!

I knew that using AFX or ADE and placing aprons, taxiways and runways etc will give the rain effect hard coded in the sim, which does not flicker or make it look like the wheels are sinking. So I had "drawn" the runways, aprons and taxiways in AFX looking directly at FSX to line things up perfectly, I changed the weather to rainy and could then see nice wet effect from certain angles and altitudes.

But, to me this looked very basic, the ground was just one color, but in real life it isn't, therefore didn't look so realistic or special.

I then done my normal method of creating ground polys, except this time the alpha channels made everything invisible apart from the runways, taxiways, aprons etc, which in photoshop I added "cloud" effect and noise and played with the brightness and dark/bright random patches to give it variety. I exported this and used the MCX wizard to place this poly at layer 4, which ofcourse goes over everything.

Instead of the runways, aprons and taxiways being pure white on alpha, they are greyish with bright and dark patches with a noise effect, as said earlier, to make it half visible and a variety throughout the ground, ofcourse this resulted in me seeing what is underneath, and sure enough I could still see the wet effect that looks like it is on the aerial imagery.

I have provided a screenshot, if you have a strong eye you can see where the alpha channels are more intense in some areas than others, but, I am very happy with the result.

Also visible in the screenshot are just 3 of the hangars which share one 4096x4096 texture with a bump map that has "Volume Shadows" ticked on meaning these hangars will cast shadows on themselves etc, again, this looks very nice with the bump map applied and gives a very realistic touch to the scene, however, the textures are not showing in full quality as I am yet to set my texture max resolution to 4096!

Untitled-2_zpsb3beb019.png


:)
 
PS, this was just a test, no real or super duper accurate layout on the AFD, emphasis on the word "EXPERIMENTAL".

Also, if you are anything like AirDailyX, FlightSimulator News Brief etc or any website that posts news about ongoing projects or anything that is in development....DO NOT post this on your website! this is for FSDeveloper only! If I see it on any other website other than this I will remove the screenshot and the included text for gibberish!
 
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That's really a great idea, I will check that with my next project.
Thanks for sharing.
Jörg

Gesendet von meinem GT-P7501 mit Tapatalk 2
 
That's look very good.
The rain effect is from the underneath AFCAD taxiway, isn't it?
except this time the alpha channels made everything invisible apart from the runways, taxiways, aprons etc
Click to expand...
Do I understand it right? Make the alpha for ground poly to see the rain effect?
"Invisible" makes me confused a bit.
 
Yes, the rain effect is on the AFCAD which is above photoscenery, then an extra polygon on top with alpha channel to make everything grass/sand/mud etc invisible...giving just surfaces such as concrete, brick, asphalt etc a slight transparency so you can see both the rain effect and the photoreal so it gives a mix of colour and of course realism.

Here is an alpha channel for the area you see,

ol_27_zps1277fe8b.png
 
OK, I got it.
1.You make ground poly of satellite photo and make it semitransparent with noise on the taxiway, runway, apron.
2.Then take full opaque on other things on grass, etc. That makes ground poly doesn't have repeated photo with underlying photoscenery.
3.So you get some degree of real satellite photo on the afcad surface make it uneven, non-repeated texture.
Am I correct?
That's nice!
 
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