Sorry for my bad english aswell (malagasy <-> french <-> english... what a mess !)
First of all, I didn't watched youtube and I didn't read that much tutorials. But...
1) Doesn't the tiles should be aligned vertically ? I mean, the sides should be aligned north/south and west/east, to match FlightSim longitude and latitude system (source textures geographic north oriented) That's how I've done ground polygons so far, and thought that was the way to do it.
But if it works well when tilted like you did, then don't mind.
2) The black spots on the edges can be made transparent using an alpha channel on each texture.
3) To get rid of the "seams/holes" you have between each tile, weld the vertices :
- select the plane
- then on the object properties tab (secund one on the right) right click on its hierarchy and convert to poly (or mesh)
- select edit vertices mode
- select all vertices
- click the "Selected" button under the "Weld" tool group.
This will collapse each vertices that are close together, and the "holes" should disappear. The threshold in meters defines the maximum distance for the collapsing. You may change that value to a higher one, like 1.0m instead of the default 0.1m to weld the vertices close by one meter. By the way, your unit setup should have been set to "meters" to start with.
To get each square independant from others again (if you need to) you'll have to select each polygon quad one by one, in polygon mode, then detach...
4) In Photoshop, I make the tiles 1000x1000px, not 1024 to begin with. The remaining 24 pixels wide space (12 pixels on each side, to have the final 1024px) is for camera distorsion overflow. ie, sometimes, when you look at certain angles, the texture get blurred/shifted, you get blurred edges, and the tiles doesn't blend well next to each other. This help
reduce that issue that occurs on
some user's computers. That means thin edges from nearby tiles are included on the edges of each texture, but Unwrap Mapping is applied in GMax to only display the 1000x1000px area of each texture.
Yes, it takes
forever to make each tile. Don't worry, you're not the first nor the last to experience that. Like you, I don't know of any efficient shortcut to speed up the work. It even takes longer, both in Photoshop and GMax with the technique I've just explained.
5) To reset the XForm to make your plane bounding box align again with X/Y/Z axes, go in the last (6th) tab on the properties on the right, the "Utilities" one, then select your plane, and click the "Reset XForm" button. Then go back on the object properties (2nd tab) and right click on the XForm modyfier and click "collapse all". This will apply the XForm reset to the object stack.
By doing so, you'll loose the initial pivot orientation. Unless you really need to reset the XForm,
don't !
6) By the way, make regular saves to your GMax source file (don't want to have nightmares when GMax suddenly stops working)
I use this system :
- Save the file, like "GroundPoly.gmax"
- Go in windows explorer, locate the saved file, make a copy and rename the copied file to "GroundPoly_
YYYYMMDD_HHmm.gmax", where YYYYMMDD is the year/month/day (20150629) and HHmm the hour/minute (in latin format, like "1428")
That way you always have a saved copy of each stage of the modeling. Whether you need to pick one object from a former version, you can import that object in the File>Import menu of GMax.
You can leave those in the same folder because that naming will keep them in the progression order, and give you information about when you started the project and how many days have gone so far.
Once you have a bunch of saved copies, create a "Saves" folder under you project folder, and move some, if not all copies there.
You can compress them aswell in a date stamped named zip (like "GroundPoly_YYYYMMDD.zip, YYYYMMDD being the date stamp of the latest gmax version of the group of copies you want to compress) GMax files compress very well, by a factor of 1:10 usually.
And those copies can help you produce screenshots of the development process, just in case you need to at a later time...
