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FSX Airport Background

Andrew

Andrew

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norway
OK, I finally exported a custom-made photo from SbuilderX to my airport. I use a straight bmp picture.

Two questions: In FSX the photo is way off regarding colours. Is there any settings you use in order to blend with the default textures? I tried to do this in Photoshop, but in FSX the photo is always far off compared to corrections in Photoshop.

PS: Found out why...FSX is thinking my texture is water. How do I avoid this? I can`t find any settings in SBuilder.

Another question: In order to make a blend mask later on, must the photo be 32bit? I already successfully made a mask which is working well, just wonder if the "master pic must be 32bit as well as the mask.

Cheers,
:stirthepo
 
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With your edited comments on issue one a picture would really help ti see what you're describing.

The source photo can be 24 bit and the Blendmask an 8 bit grayscale file.
 
Hi Lance,

I don`t have a pic by hand right now, but it is simple to describe: My parking lots (took the rest away with my blend mask) are very "bluish" with waves! And I can see my plane reflected from the bitmaps when slewing low in FSX. The complete texture had waves before I started with the blend mask. The source pic is shot from an aerial pic on the net with FSscreen :D

Thx for the tip regarding blend mask, 8bit is definately more effective...only the alpha channel.

Cheers,
:stirthepo
 
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Hello,

There are some tutorials on AVSIM on how to use SBuilderX to make photo scenery.

Your questions: I had a programme (do not remember the name now but I can ckeck later if you want) which took 2 pictures: picA was my photo bitmap; picB was a top down screenshot taken in FS in the region where my scenery was going. Then the programme transformmed picA so that its colors match those of picB.

In addition to this I can create a blend mask. It should be a picture of the same size as the photo bitmap and should be placed in the /tools/work/ folder. Note that the name of the map should start by "photo" or the map is ignored by SBuilderX when it checks if any photo scenery needs to be generated. Therefore if your Summer map is called, say:

photo_my_citymap.bmp

a blend mask must be created with the same size of the above file and named as:

photo_my_citymap_B.TIF

and it should have the tif file format. If yoy need to use a water mask you should have in /tools/work/ a tif file named as:

photo_my_citymap_W.TIF

As I am writing this, I am noting that Lance is also trying to help you. So please refer to his post for further information.

Kind Regards

Luis
 
Without some type of visual reference, it's all guesswork. It almost sounds like your blendmask in the area is set to bring in some of the default FSX effects. But without seeing what it looks like...?

The blending I've done in very narrowly defined. It will mostly go from pure white to pure black in a couple, three pixels. But there may well be times when a wider effect is called for.

When you get the chance a couple, three pictures will help a lot.
 
Guys, I am just fine. The reason for the water effects was the main bmp was 32bit. I made it 24bit and that solved it. Don`t have a clue why. Alpha stuff?

Luis, thanks for the tips regarding SBuilder. Among other things, I forgot to use the word "photo", a little fact easy to overlook. So now I got a nice summer texture cut perfectly to the airport border, blend mask (8-bit grayscale made today) working perfectly. I am running SBuilder hot :D

I got a quite good result having Photoshop in a window, and comparing to a background FSX shot. I used Hue/Saturation and adjusted greens, and with Color Adjustment I did the rest, then finally decreasing ligtness approx. 30%. Anyway, it would be great to try the program you mention if you stumble upon it.

Lance, thx for the mask tips. I am more or less at the pixel values you mention, most of it cut sharp.

I got a last question: I use compression value of 85% when resampling. The bmp is 45MB, the final BGL is 8.5MB. Is this a "huge" value for a large airport? I cannot see any loss of frame rates yet.

Cheers,
:stirthepo
 
Thx for the link, Luis.

That program looks interesting indeed, and I will give it a try. Too much work (and guesswork) tuning manually...too many factors I don`have a clue about (and I don´t want to become an "expert" on that too)...overloaded already.

Regarding 85% compression, to me it looks quite good in FSX. I found that value based on tips from this forum. My original picture is 4000 x 5000 pixels. After setting only summer texture plus the 18MB grayscale mask, I end up with a 8,5MB BGL, and I see sharpness all the way from high up to being good enough at ground level...not bad :)

Cheers,
:stirthepo
 
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