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  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

Winter custom ground textures

falcon409

falcon409

SOH-CM-2025
I still enjoy doing small airports and where it's available, the addition of photoreal ground textures is a must-have. I probably have a few hundred airports that I've done in Maine, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Texas. . .many of those have photoreal ground but the one thing they all lack is a winter texture. I have studied the default winter textures and looked long and hard trying to figure out how they were done. I've tried overlaying a solid white layer and knocking out areas to expose the ground underneath, I've tried using the marquise tool to randomly select areas of the ground and remove those sections a little at a time to get the expected results, they all suck, lol.

Are there any true scenery "artists" out there who can point me in the right direction with this?
 
Not that difficult to get some good results with this simple method:

Using DxTBmp, send the texture to Photoshop (or other editor).

Change the file to black and white mode.

Increase contrast by about 70 %

Increase brightness by about 30 %

Change back to RGB mode.

That's it.

You might want to experiment with brightness and contrast levels.

Note that all roads will be unplowed ;)

If you want to have some colour, you need to overlay the original texture with this one and use a 5% eraser on the areas you want to have colour.

Hope this works for you!
Sascha
 
Sascha66 said:
Not that difficult to get some good results with this simple method:
Using DxTBmp, send the texture to Photoshop (or other editor).
Change the file to black and white mode.
Increase contrast by about 70 %
Increase brightness by about 30 %
Change back to RGB mode.
That's it.

You might want to experiment with brightness and contrast levels.
Note that all roads will be unplowed ;)
If you want to have some colour, you need to overlay the original texture with this one and use a 5% eraser on the areas you want to have colour.
Hope this works for you!
Sascha
Click to expand...
Well, you gave me a starting point, that's for sure and I can see the possibilities. The brightness/contrast levels you use don't look at all like snow when I use them however. What I had to use was basically the direct opposite, lol. I used 100% brightness and 50% contrast. . .I could back off the brightness a tad, maybe 10-15% depending on the base image, but that's what gave me the appearance of snow. . . .HOWEVER. . .when I brought that image into SBuilderX and compiled it what I got was this horrendous glob of red and white mess where the image was supposed to be. I know there have been images where there were solid white buildings and I had to gray them out a bit because in the compile process they would render anything white as solid red. . .so imagine what this looked like when I compiled it. Anyway, I will play with this and see if I can get a decent image. Thanks for the push in the right direction though.

Shane, here's how I do night maps:
load the image into Paint Shop Pro, make a new layer and fill with yellow.
make a second layer on top of that with solid black

Now, use the sliders to adjust the yellow back to about 15% and the black to about 90% ( the yellow background will give the "lights" a yellow tinge as much of the FSX/FS9 lighting appears to have.
Now, with your eraser tool adjusted to be very soft start looking at areas where you would see lights on at night (around hangars, houses, buildings, street lights, etc) and start removing a bit of the black as you go until you have the effect you want. Adjust the size of the eraser tip to get different "washed areas" of light. When you have what you want, save that image (flattened) with the "N" extension. (note: in SBuilderX the image would be something like "Sherman_Mun_N.bmp"). That's it, when you compile that with the original image, you get a nice night map. Obviously you have to know how to get the night map set up once in SBuilderX, but that's something I assume you already have knowledge of. Good luck.
 
falcon409 said:
HOWEVER. . .when I brought that image into SBuilderX and compiled it what I got was this horrendous glob of red and white mess where the image was supposed to be. I know there have been images where there were solid white buildings and I had to gray them out a bit because in the compile process they would render anything white as solid red. . .so imagine what this looked like when I compiled it. Anyway, I will play with this and see if I can get a decent image. Thanks for the push in the right direction though.
Click to expand...

Hi Falcon,

To eliminate the red blotches, try removing the NullValue = 255,255,255 line from the Source data in your .inf compiler file. Stumbled on this tip a long while back at the PTSim forum when I was having similar problems...

Re. making winter textures, I've had some success with a PSP / Photoshop addon called Metrix. It takes a sample image [in our case a default 'winter' ground texture] and applies the color scheme to another image. Check it out:

http://jnrubin.net/psi/

Scroll down for the download and instructions.

Dave. :salute:
 
Shane Strong CYHZ said:
hey very useful info by 5% eraser do you mean its density?
Click to expand...

My Photoshop is a German version so I'm just guessing how the controller translates. Best guess: opacity.

What it does is control the amount of the image on top that is erased to reveal the image below (or background colour). Same as for paintbrush, only there it controls the amount of paint applied to the image.

So 5% eraser means you set the "opacity" to 5% and will have a transparency of 5% whereever you use the eraser. This is cumulative, so each pass removes more of your top image.

Doing snow textures, I use low settings because it is easier to control the amount of colour you get in the black and white image that way.

Cheers,
Sascha
 
falcon409 said:
The brightness/contrast levels you use don't look at all like snow when I use them however. What I had to use was basically the direct opposite, lol. I used 100% brightness and 50% contrast. . .I could back off the brightness a tad, maybe 10-15% depending on the base image, but that's what gave me the appearance of snow. . . .
Click to expand...

Falcon, I'd be very interested to compare the end result. I suspect it has something to do with the Photoshop version used.

I use CS at home and CS3 in the office. The contrast and brightness slider results are much more exaggerated in CS with a 100% brightness always resulting in an all-white image. Needless to say I do all of my FS painting at home ;) so the values I refered to apply to CS.

I attach the result of both values (original and inverted) applied to a forest texture tile, it would be great if you could do the same for comparison!

Cheers,
Sascha
 
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