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Photoscenery Borders

Gianni

Gianni

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453
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austria
Hi all together,

For the first time I am trying to implement areal photos into my FS9-scenery. A very good friend of mine has placed the georeferenced pictures and (aside from the known 4.7m/pixel resolution, which has to be accepted) it looks good. The textures are following the mesh exactly.

The only problem I have is that the entire picture has a white canvas in FS9. I thought that using an alpha mask in the texture would be a way to blend this texture over the landclasses outside the picture. My friend has told me that as far as he knows there is no possibility to do this because these parts then would be interpreted to be water. So now I am in deep trouble.

My question: can you confirm that there is no way to eliminate the mentioned white canvas - and if there was such a way, where can I find an understandable tutorial?

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Servus Gianni. There are actually 2 alpha masks available for photo scenery files.
I guess you work with TIFF format?

Alpha 1 is indeed the water mask. (better leave that plain white if you do not have any rivers run through the airport :D )
Simply add another mask ("Kanal" in Photoshop) and call it "Alpha 3". I guess other names would also work, but never mind.

That Alpha mask defines what will be visible and where the underlying landclasses (with autogen) should be visible. (white=photo image, black=blending)
You can even use smooth borders ("weiche Auswahlkante" in Photoshop) to blend the environment more smoothly. ;)
 
Hi ! Servus back to you! And thanks!

hm. that seems to be the way. I will give it a try this evening. We may discuss this topic via Skype if you do not mind.

the only water area in my scenery is the Inn-river. in my aeral photo it has a dirty brown colour (which comes reality very near). so I will leave it as it is (I will not be able to solve the problem that at the very edges the transition to the used river colours of the users will be visible anyway).

cu!
 
Hi Gianni,

What Thorsten mentions is for FSX, not for FS2004, sorry :D.

In FS2004 you are right, alpha channel of photos placed with resample will become water. If you place them as VTP polygons you can use it for transparency, but then you get visible seams between the tiles, so that is not perfect either.

It is best to make sure that the photo you use fills the LOD square completely.
 
Oops, very sorry for that! FS9 seems so far away, I tend to forget these things... :D
 
Gianni, I don't understand:


<<The only problem I have is that the entire picture has a white canvas in FS9>>

You would be wise to create the image to show what you wish to see in fs9. Thus, if you mean white is showing on the image, you would want to crop or cover that.

Remember in fs9, the lod13 grids define where the image is displayed. I always created a grid to overlay over my image so I could plan the transisiton to default.

Choose which lod13 grids will contain the transition. First I do a test compile of my photoscenery, which would contain a hard unrealistic transistion to the default, I'd take a top down screen shot, and without changing the camera position, then I'd take another screen shot without my scenery...just default.

Now, in photoshop, I'd put the two images into seperate layers and craft a new image by feathering in default right onto my photoimage to "craft" the transition.

It takes practice, but doing it this way, you can hide the transition pretty darn well.

Good luck!

Bob
 
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