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Tangier Island

Can anyone tell me how detailed I need to be when making the land mask? These Islands have many intricate inland waterways. . .do I need to draw around those when doing the white mask for the land area or just a solid white around the landmass and then come back with details when I do the black mask for the water?
 
What I've been doing in PSP is selecting the water area with the freehand selection tool on a separate layer, then filling that with black. The original photo is on the background layer. Once I have all of my water placed I fill the background layer with white and merge the layers.
 
What I've been doing in PSP is selecting the water area with the freehand selection tool on a separate layer, then filling that with black. The original photo is on the background layer. Once I have all of my water placed I fill the background layer with white and merge the layers.
Ahh ok, well, That would have been my first option because it would keep me from doing what I'm having to do which is to hand draw the water areas. The water in my image isn't defined enough for the selection tool to pick it up. Not a problem, I'll be finished with the hand drawing before long anyway. Thanks.
 
Well, it took the better part of the day to get to this point, but I've learned a lot too, so it's all good.
 
Thanks Jim. The one thing I need to work on now is the shoreline. The image looks fine and with vegetation, boats, aircraft, houses, etc, it should make it a pretty nice airport to fly out to, but the landmass looks disconnected from the water and I assume that laying in a shoreline will cause that to look a lot better. Right now, if you watch the wave motion it's moving "under" the island, rather than moving up to the beach area. I lined in a small section of shoreline, but I put it in clockwise and it needs to be reversed so that the water edge is to the water, lol right now it's reversed. Another day though, I'm goin ta bed.

We've got some weather moving in from the west and just over the Red River. Doesn't look like any of it goes near your area, but who knows.

Take care.
 
Yes it does. That requires a multipart .inf file for resample. Quite simply, instead of having only a single bit water mask mask (black or white), you also generate a blend mask. It's example 5 in the Terrain and scenery SDK
 
Yes it does. That requires a multipart .inf file for resample. Quite simply, instead of having only a single bit water mask mask (black or white), you also generate a blend mask. It's example 5 in the Terrain and scenery SDK
Actually SBuilderX already does that in combination with the photoimage. I build one mask in PSP with a white knockout for the landmass, blur the edges (gaussian blur) and name that with a _B extension on the end of the file name. Then I do another layer with the detailed water areas and name it with a _W on the end. When I go back into SBX and compile the photoimage, it combines all three. The blur mask is what I've been using to make the photoreal images blend better into the default. With these island though I wanted some wave action around the edges and the shoreline is giving me that. I just had it turned around so that the wave action was moving out rather than in.

Also I looked at other Island areas in FSX, and they look no different than mine in that the water motion appears to move under rather than stopping at the edge. I think you just don't notice it unless you sit and watch it for a period of time, which you wouldn't do in normal flying. No one pays attention to it really, they just know that, there's the Island, set up for a landing, lol.
 
This is about the largest thing I've attempted so far and depending on how this turns out, I may look at others in the area. I won't get into anything larger than local airports and the area immediately around them though, I know that. This is a bit different because it's a relatively small chain of Islands and I was able to pull it off in one shot.

I'm populating the main Island with houses and buildings right now, anything that isn't seasonal is going in, including boats, docks, etc. I'll have to figure out the Autogen Annotator at some point because I want the vegetation I put in here to be seasonal.
 
Ok, got the Annotator working. Gonna take some times as it's slow going even though I can create whole areas of autogen, it doesn't seem to placing vegetation in all the areas I designate, so I'll have to keep working on it. Getting there though.
 
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