• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • 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

Complete_Spangdahlem AB

Ed,

Thank you so much for the lessons on photo-real scenery. Your work is inspiring me to get in a bit over my head. I just finished my first paint job of an aircraft (Conrad's T-33), and now I'm slowly moving forward on the F-100 repaint.

However, this scenery stuff has really got my attention. I've been able to use SBuilder to create large areas of photo-real scenery no problem, but blending the photo-real with the default textures is giving me a real headache. I've read a very good tutorial on making photo-real scenery with Sbuilder, but I'm still not getting it.

Here is what I've produced so far:

4636956905_6a19ccb88f.jpg


That was a layered image that I made in photoshop assuming that black was transparent in flight sim. I loaded up that image into Sbuilder and the compiled it as a BGL. Perhaps white is transparent? Perhaps a flattened image will not work?

Scenery noob,

Chris
 
Hard to see what is going on in that pic really. If that's the result of the blend, the steps should be:
Import the bmp image into Photoshop
set a middle layer for "solid" black (0,0,0)
set a top layer for "solid" white (255,255,255)
On the top layer, using the lasso tool (freehand is easiest) draw around the area you want to preserve for the scenery and fill it with solid white. Do that for the other areas I see in that pic. When you have all the areas filled with white, apply a gaussian blur which will blur the edges of each area. You might have to play with the strength of the blur to get it right, you don't want a huge blur, just one that lightly smooths out the edges.

Now, make sure that all layers are solid color again so that what you have is an image that has a solid black background and white areas marking the ground cover you want.

Convert this image to a grayscale. Whatever you've named the image, now give it this extension (this is just a "what if") "groundphoto_B.tif". It must be saved as a grayscale with that "B" extension done just as I did it there and it must be saved as a "tif". It will probably ask you if you want to save as a single layer or whatever photoshop refers to a flattened image as. . .click yes and it will save it back to the "Work" file folder as a single layer tif image.

Now, when you load your project again and click the compile button, it will recompile the original photoimage with the "blend" you just did and the results will be a nicely meshed photoimage in FSX.


UPDATE:
I just noticed what you said on the last line. You don't load that image into SBuilderX, you load the original photoimage. Once it's loaded, click on the edge to hi-lite it and then compile. The compiler already knows to look for the various components, it will find the "_B.tif" image you just did and compile it along with the original image.
 
I can't believe it! It WORKS! THANK YOU - THANK YOU - THANK YOU. It works wonderfully!

I did not follow your procedure exactly (as for the ordering of the layers), but I did end up with a black image with white spots for transparency. I placed the photo as the background layer, then a white layer, then a black layer on top. I then drew black onto the black layer which revealed the white underneath. Applied the blur, converted to gray scale and saved as TIF. Thank you so much Ed -- I can tell that this is going to be fun.

Many thanks after a day of head-aches,

Chris
 
lol, "IT'S ALIIIIIVE", lol, good for you Chris. Once you do a few of those, it'll become second nature, then the biggest problem is finding tiles suitable to use that are sharp enough to look good as ground textures.

Post some screens too when you have time in a new thread so it doesn't get lost in here.:salute:
 
Falcon,

Can you list all of the bases you've ported over or fixed for FSX? As a former Air Force brat, I like flying out of bases my Dad was stationed at or had visited during his twenty year career. Also like flying out of bases I have visited during my stint in the Army. I think the work you do is phenominal and wanted to say thank you.

Matt
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top