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Something Handy for Scenery folks

falcon409

falcon409

SOH-CM-2025
I would imagine that like most everything I've found that seems new and amazing, the people who do this all the time will probably say. . ."oh yea, I've been using that for years", lol.

Making seasonal scenery tiles is not a simple task necessarily, it takes time and a good eye to change color channels around and tweak the bmp so that the coloration matches the area you want the new photoreal ground texture to reside. Well, I found this over on the FSDevelopers site. . .a plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro mainly, called Metrix. Basically what you do is bring up the raw photoreal scenery, then load a template of the area that the scenery has to match (I used a top down image from FSX).

Now you highlite a good area of the template with a marquis outline, then do the same with the raw image. Now go back to the overhead shot, make sure it's active, open the Metrix plugin, have it analyze the image, when finished, move over to the raw image, make sure it's active, load the plugin again, tell it to apply and in seconds it will apply the color changes it analyzed from the template and convert the raw image to the same coloration.

This image may be hard to see, but the pic on the right is the template and the rectangular area to the left in the raw image is the area I had it revise. It was exact. Now it will still take a bit of tweaking, but this plugin eliminates the time it would normally take me to go back and forth from one image to another trying to get the color balance just right.
 
Almost forgot, if you don't have Metrix. . .here's a link:
http://www.jnrubin.net/psi/index.html

Also, I tried a winter texture and the results were better than what I could do, but not enough to say I could just run Metrix, convert the raw image and then upload, lol. It will get me closer to what I want, but I'll still have some work to do to make it mesh with the surrounding areas in winter.
 
shame no-ones made an .ini creation utility for scenery design, imagine how much work that could save and how much faster it would be :jump:
 
And people say developing scenery is hard, LOL.

Thanks Ed, been using it for awhile, problem is, I usually like the photoreal texture rather than the default I have to match it with, to much yellow.

Before I used this, I would take an image of the border that showed the default and the photoreal, load it in Gimp, save the changes as a preset and then load up the photoreal tile, pretty easy for those that don't have PSD or PSP.
 
yeah i take a swatch of the FSX colours paste it onto the background image then go about matching it until that swatch blends in... kinda daft way to do it but it used to work.... with fine tweaking, just wish FSX did hedges better :icon_lol:

heres what i mean about the swatch theory...
Before:
L16X64947X64950Y42955Y42957_bef.jpg

After:
L16X64947X64950Y42955Y42957.jpg
 
Thanks Ed for the heads up on that.

I wonder if it would be good for upholstery in FS planes? That is very hard to match colors that have 'Noise' effect added. This would mean colors could be exactly tuned to each other.



Bill
 
Smoothie said:
yup, don't forget to get a normalmap plugin for gimp, then you can create bump maps for repaints too :kilroy:
Click to expand...

(I think) I already have one as well as that .dds plug-in, although I prefer letting Imagetool do the conversion (batch-file hooray!).
 
yeah i love my batch converter, yours do it BMP>DDS? if so i have a PSD>DDS you can have as well, actually that offer stands to anyone who wants it :kilroy::kilroy:
 
Smoothie said:
yeah i love my batch converter, yours do it BMP>DDS? if so i have a PSD>DDS you can have as well, actually that offer stands to anyone who wants it :kilroy::kilroy:
Click to expand...

Yep, BMP -> DDS or the other way 'round.

Just post the code here, it's not that a batch file is the biggest computer mystery ever.
 
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