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Feathering the edges of polygons?

falcon409

falcon409

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I use SBuilderX for quite a bit of my scenery work now and one thing I'd like to be able to do is feather the edges of texture polygons, so there isn't a hard edge. One airport in particular that I'm working on has an area in the hangar area that is dirt. I can draw polys and change the properties to reflect the general appearance of dirt, but those poly's produce hard edges. I want to feather them so they melt into the surrounding area.
 
What about using an alpha channel to feather the edges. You can fade it out with varying tones from white(transparent) to black(opaque). Or use a speckled(small dots around the edges) alpha that helps it merge into the surrounding scenery. 32 bit has the best looking alpha with smooth transitions and dxt1 has harder edges. Just a thought!
 
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TB111 said:
What about using an alpha channel to feather the edges. You can fade it out with varying tones from white(transparent) to black(opaque). Or use a speckled(small dots around the edges) alpha that helps it merge into the surrounding scenery. 32 bit has the best looking alpha with smooth transitions and dxt1 has harder edges. Just a thought!
Click to expand...
Hmmm, ok, I wasn't aware that you could work with alpha channels from within SBX. I will definitely look into that tho. Thanks!!
 
Well, I haven't figured out how I would incorporate an alpha channel with a poly inside SBX, so I am working on an alternative. I am using a shoreline around the outer edge of the poly to soften it and if I can get it to size correctly (width) I think it'll do what I want. It seems that no matter what I set the width to though it doesn't change. Currently the width is set to 1, but as you can see from the image, compared to the shoreline of the lake, it's not near as thin, unless the shoreline is set at .00001, lol.
 
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Ok, I discovered that no matter what I set the line width to, it won't change in FS. The lines widths are set in the scenery.cfg file and can't be changed. The only thing changing the width in SBX does is make them easier to see and work around. So this option may not work after all. I liked the look of the edging and had I been able to reduce the size, it would have been fine, but it really is too wide as it is now, so I'll have to find another solution.
 
Sorry, you would have to integrate an alpha within photoshop(or similiar) into your original image and it will only show when the sim is loaded.
 
Are you aware of any tutorials that show that technique?

UPDATE:
I just went back and noticed what you said. . . ."into your original image". . . . .
I'm not using an image, this is just an enhancement to the default area. I'm using a background image to lay out the AB, but that's all. I kept looking at your suggestion, thinking "how in the world would I incorporate an alpha channel from PSP to feather a poly used in SBX? lol, lol. I guess for this project I'll use what I have and be happy with that. It still looks far better than the default. Thanks TB
 
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I think in FS9 it was possible to create a poly with custom texture. I think it was possible to use a texture with alpha for that. I'm not sure in FSX. You might need to use the modified terrain.cfg file to make that work now.

Line feature widths are now set in terrain.cfg. It is possible to create new terrain entries, and then you could use different textures and widths, but getting the changes into a user's terrain.cfg is non-trivial. That's why UTX for example has a fairly sophisticated configuration tool, to check and make sure the terrain.cfg adds are there.

scott s.
.
 
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