I've made a lot of simmers happy by providing photoreal scenery of the entire continental US. All of my customers wanted me to continue to improve the product with water masking and night scenery. However, my sales were not sufficient to justify my continuation of the project. But that has changed.

 

I have been asked to continue for another company that makes photoreal scenery like mine. This time to include water masking and night scenery. I am ready and willing to begin except for one thing. I don't know how to make the night scenery and my water masking is not as good as the product I'm trying to replicate it for.

 

That's why I'm seeking help. So please help me help you by leading me to the information I seek.

Thanks Larry

That's good news Larry. I've wanted to buy some of your work, but to be frank the only reason I never did was just due to the lack of night textures which are essential for me. Once you start work with the new company I will most likely be a customer of yours and pick up the new stuff.

 

As far as night textures and water masks its not as hard as you might think. You will be able to gather some info on this in the scenery design form or on FSDeveloper website. There is also a good tutorial from Luis Feliz-Tirado that can be downloaded here http://library.avsim.net/download.php?DLID=140539 . Although the tutorial is mainly for using SBuilderX, the nature of the masking and night textures will most likely remain the same.

 

From making my own photo real stuff using SBuilderX, I can say that making good looking night textures is the hardest part. I will say that as good or bad as MegaScenery Earth can be, they do a really good job on the photoreal night textures and I would love to be able to talk to one of the fellows who has done their processing to see exactly how they do it.

 

Anyway, good luck with the new projects and I hope you keep us informed. Are you at liberty to say what company you will be working with so that I can try to follow the progress?

Larry, that is great news. I really liked where you were going with the 50cm p/pixel stuff and was actually looking at purchasing. Since I do lots of photoreal myself the biggest obsticle I can see is creating masks with the large tiles. the basic principle is easy, I can walk you thru any night textures, seasonal or water masks, just shoot me a PM. The hardest part will be creating the .ini file, but once you do it a couple of times, it's easy.

 

I would also like to know the company you arew working for and hopefully we'll see some new high res photo scenery in the future.

That would be a very time consuming task, at least the way I do it. It takes me a long time to do both water and night for comparatively small areas.

Thank you guys already for the help and encouragement. You both asked who the company is and it is their wish to make sure I can actually produce before announcement. I can tell you they were left high & dry and I aim to help them make a comeback.

 

Masking means anything with a certain color (white for me) will show through to the default scenery.

I currently create the Geotiff to resample in a GIS mapping program (Globalmapper).

The first picture below is the scenery I'm trying to match.

The next pictures are my attempts at creating a coastal polygon to match the aerials.

I have a GIS shapefile of the ocean coastline that does not quite match the aerials.

And the shapefile and aerials do not match the data used by Microsoft long ago.

 

Having seen a blend between aerial & default water that is what I seek.

Anyone seen that and possibly know how it's done :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is indeed excellent news!

 

Thanks Larry!

 

Gene

Hi Larry,

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what photoscenery did you develop? I dont hang out on sim forus much. I literally bought and enjoy every square mile of Mega Scenery Earth, and use the freeware Bluesky to fill in here and there. Never bought SimSaavy becase of lack of night scenery. You have a gauranteed customer here with what you are planning.

 

Chris Strobel

To do what I think you're looking for, I created a water mask (manually). That's normally sufficient, but the one I'm doing now is just a few square miles so the photo scenery below the FSX water was causing the water to look very different from the default water beyond the photo scenery. I tweaked the water in the photo and got it to match. Then I loaded the scenery in P3D and it looked awful. Their water base color is different. To solve that, I used a blend mask to take out most of the photo scenery water, leaving it to the default. But, around the shoreline, I left the photo scenery with its water mask and blended it into the default with the blend mask. The advantage to that is that the water keeps the nice variations near the shore, then fades into default water.

 

I'll post a screen shot a little later. I'm downloading the 1.4 update to P3D now.

Here are a couple of screen shots.

 

The first one shows the photo with water where a river enters the lake.

 

 

The second shot shows the photo scenery blending into the default scenery.

 

Best news I have heard in awhile Larry!! Keep me in the loop

Hi Larry

 

I have developed a technique for producing water mask files that can be dropped on top of the existing 50cm scenery to give sea all the way up to shorelines, add water to Lake Mead etc. However they have no shoreline merging etc., but are something that I use for large areas for my own personal consumption, and probably not of a quality comparable to commercial products. But if you're interested in how I do it I could send you details.

Petraeus -

I don't know if Larry's interested, but I sure as heck am!

 

If you're working up a writeup, please do consider PM'ing it over to me as well, as I would love to introduce some watermasking on top of the SimSavvy 50cm scenery. It might not be commercially perfect, but it might just do the trick!

 

Cheers,

-Greg

We do want and need that process very much Petraeus. I can post it on my website if you like.

I am after high quality and the blend mask is what I was looking for and will be using most likely.

But I will test all methods I can find to use the quickest one that has reasonable quality

.

If we can make this a freeware project that many can contribute to, it would be best.

 

Because.

 

I will be signing a software publishing agreement and the scenery will be produced for that venue, not Sim Savvy.

And the company I'll be producing for is monitoring this forum so please be kind :)

 

Larry

Hello Larry,

 

This is very good news indeed. I am glad you landed on both feet. I enjoy your Sim-Savvy photoreal scenery every single day. And every single day I wish someone would address the water masking problems. I would be happy for a while with just having a smooth, consistent body of water around Louisiana and the Mississippi Sound. Having it look realistic where the rivers flow into the sound would just be gravy.

 

If you want to use my home area as your test bed, you will be able to show folks some tremendous improvements in what they see while flying over the beach or water in this area.

 

 

Ray

Outstanding Larry. Best wishes for your success and the company you are in partner with. I love your massive scenery product. I have used it in practicing for cross country vfr flights in sport aircraft and was impressed by the value of simulating a flight first using real scenery. I was much more confident on longer flights of 3 or 4 hours that I would recognise all my landmarks.

 

More than that I have gone places using your scenery product that I might not ever get to go in the real world. It's so massive you always discover someplace new and awe inspiring. For instance the past week I was using your scenery to fly in the mountains of Washington state around Seattle and was blown away by the detail.

 

When you get this new product out you can bet I will purcahse it. The last one was worth every dime and I bet since it covers the US I'll be enjoying it for years to come.

 

Wish you all the best,

Greg Dillahunty

texasaviationonline.com