FSX Advise on custom water/landclasses

[lordofwings]

I am working on several SBX projects and I have come to a necessity I have been unable to satisfy so far.

For example, parts of my scenery contain water ponds that need their own waterclass. These are small ponds but water that looks real (brownish, greenish, etc.). If I mark them as "Perennial Lake" they look AWEFUL, a lake with blue water that looks more like a pond for chemical waste.

Likewise I need to make certain textures for some land features. I find little in the default FSX that closely resembles the tropics (or at least my country).

I know how to make a texture, usually an image that I can make seamless with GIMP so that it tiles properly and then left as BMP or converted to DDS.

I don't know how to make a poly in SBX that I can mark with my own custom "water pond class".

These are small areas but I figure there must be a way that if you have a seamless texture, that you can make a polygon of any shape and "fill" it with this texture. I tried using SBX "TexturedPoly" but apparently it only accepts a SINGLE polygon for each texture.

 

[lordofwings]

Just learned a waterclass and landclass has to be 1km square and that a landclass can be "polygoned" to any shape whereas a waterclass cannot.

In the picture I need a pond, so I think it would be a good compromise to make it a "land" area even though it has water since no flying object will be operating there.

I use a custom landclass (Land Class South America) which is payware, it is much much better than the default landclass in FSX for this area but still leaves a lot to be desired. I would like to see if I can improve on that but for the moment my "pond" has more importance.

 

[GaryGB]

Hi Emilio:

One can indeed create polygons or vector content which are textured with any land class type made available in the pick-lists of ex: SBuilderX by virtue of it first being defined via Terrain.Cfg with all required information (see the existing definitions for various land classes in [FSX install path]\Terrain.Cfg), and then by adding the custom land class to the separate SbuilderX definition files.


BTW: It is unclear how much custom land class and/or vector definitions can be added to FSX, and how many layers of blended land class can be rendered in a scenery with custom render priorities before FSX begins to suffer performance problems; IMHO this is already becoming an issue for FSX users with anything other than well-optimized, high performance computers when using current OrbX FTX products, with or without also having installed Ultimate Terrain and other sceneries which load up custom definitions into Terrain.Cfg.

This is of course besides the inconvenience of longer FS start-up times due to more scenery content being added to the FS scenery library, since EVERY file called / mapped by a BGL set active in scenery.Cfg is inventoried by FS when it is loaded into RAM, and the same is true of every file called / mapped by a definition in Terrain.Cfg.


But I do understand the need to address the land class customization for areas of the world outside of North America, as this has been an issue throughout the history of FS.

I believe a solution to the above issues in the future, will probably be FSX end users deciding where they are going to fly for a particular FSX session, then running a batch file or configuring a GUI utility to swap groups of files for FSX.CFG, Scenery.Cfg, Default.xml and other autogen-related *.spb files, Terrain.Cfg, and various other land class-related files before starting FS.


Regarding your inland water bodies, if none of the available inland water class textures look acceptable to you, remember that one can use a gray-scale blend mask with photoreal textures using a water mask (or having a defined water attribute 'color' set into the texture image), and if the gray-scale blend mask is set up correctly, FS applies no more than a default FSX "wet water / waves / reflections" attribute to an otherwise photoreal image... to provide the color etc. to your inland water body areas.

FYI: Custom photoreal land class (used with or without an accompanying land / water mask and/or blend mask) goes into its own BGL in a active \Scenery sub-folder.

At this point it effectively becomes its own "local land class" which over-rides any other default globally defined land class texture display priority in FS, and does not have to be separately defined in Terrain.Cfg, thereby helping to avoid over-burdening the Terrain.Cfg, Default.xml files etc. with extra listings.

Thus, one can make most of a LOD-13 tile completely transparent in order to overlay a 'custom water body image' with FS "wet water / waves / reflections" attributes onto the ground with less than the entire LOD-13 photoreal texture having any visible image showing as an 'opaque' texture.

[EDITED]

PS: LOD-13 quad cell tiles for ex: land class are approximately1223 Meter x 1223 Meter spans at the Equator.

EPSG:4326 GIS projection Source data for the FSX 3D world is mapped to an Oblate spheroid, so Quad size on-ground varies by Lat / Lon.

Default FSX land class textures mapped onto Terran Quad tiles are 1024 x 1024 pixels in size, BTW.

[END_EDIT]


Hope these ideas might help !

GaryGB

 

[lordofwings]

So if I just take that pond area as photoreal (rather than the whole area) I shouldn't have problems with the image ownership, right? that's why I just wanted to draw my poly and give it a proper water image. I love photoreal but with all the (C) issues I am staying away from it.

 

[GaryGB]

I'm doubtful that anyone would be able to identify- much less take 'formal' legal exception to- use of a tiny fragment of a downloaded image tile for a small water body if the shoreline or perimeter of that water body was not also used... because it is not any longer showing up as a completely recognize-able original image due to it likely being "blurred" by the end user, "filtered" through FS' pixel rendering engine and a superimposed terrain detail bitmap, "semi-transparent" via a blend mask, and having FS "wet water / waves / reflections" attributes on top of it etc..


But of course, alternatively, one can use a custom photo-real image from 'free texture' web sites, or a texture image from FS default ex: water classes as an underlying 'quasi-photoreal imagery' source file to make a "pseudo-photoreal" tile in conjunction with a land/water blend mask via FSX SDK Resample, with a terrain detail bitmap, and FS "wet water / waves / reflections" attributes on top of it etc..

GaryGB

 

[lordofwings]

Will try to assimilate the landclass tile thing, I need to create one that shows green fields delimited by trees but without roads because I want to recreate the actual roads of the location.

Thanks for the input.