Hi All,

 

I'm using MegaScenery South Carolina and when I fly over a body of water like Lake Wateree I am noticing a layering effect on the water. It's like there are concentric rings layered on the water in varying colors and they follow the shoreline. I am using a couple of GTX 580's and I have their settings on "default" in the Nvidia Control panel. Take a look. Any ideas? Thanks!

I'm seeing the same effect, I'll be following along.

See it too, but water-masking is pain in the butt to do, and that can always be improved with updates anyways. Run water mid settings at 2x do not as notice it much.

Here's what I'm getting. Will check my water settings later.

 

Try adjusting water settings to the various levels and re-checking. Please advise of any difference. Are you running 32-bit color in FSX?

Try adjusting water settings to the various levels and re-checking. Please advise of any difference. Are you running 32-bit color in FSX?

 

How would I know?? FWIW, I'm running a 64 bit W-7 OS. My water is already set to 2X.

Try adjusting water settings to the various levels and re-checking. Please advise of any difference. Are you running 32-bit color in FSX?

 

Yes, I am using 32-bit color (5760X1080-32 bit). If I turn off the water settings altogether, the water appears almost black with minor stratifications. Every other water setting causes the stratifications as shown above. Filtering also does not appear to make much of a difference although Bilinear filtering causes the stratifications to appear more pronounced and they do appear to lessen in intensity as I progress from Bilinear all the way to ansiotropic. The example shown above reflects the use of ansiotropic filtering.

 

If you have any other suggestions, I will be happy to try them. My system is modestly robust and so I really do not believe it has much to do with my ability to process the scenery.

 

I appreciate your assistance.

Take a look. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

The semi-technical term is that you are seeing a watermask for the photo water that is using a stepped gaussian blur for blending purposes. It is part of the scenery and not an effect of your computer system.

Thank you, meshman. I imagine that, if this effect is part of the scenery package itself then I must live with it. I do not know of any process available by which I can improve the view using the tools available (filters, etc.) to me in FSX.

I need to correct myself and say that what you are seeing is a blendmask, not a watermask, of the photo into the default. And no, there is not an adjustment or tweak to alter what you are seeing.

Found out Ultimate Terrain and MSE_v2 can cause problems with texture bleeding. Still, playing around with me and find out what causes the biggest problem with water.

Ahh haa!! I've got MSEv2 and UTX both installed (see my screenie above). Thanks for the notice. I'll be watching.

Gonna play with UTX some more and find out which water class are the bad ones and good ones to keep.

I spoke to the developer about this issue last month when I noticed the same problem for the NJ scenery, especially around the Hudson River area:

 

 

You can see the mask actually blends back to the underlying landclass before reaching the water. Apparently this is due to coastline changes with the new scenery versus the water masks that FSX had when it was released over 6 years ago. It's something the developer hopes to take the extra time to fix in the future. I'm not sure why they can't use whatever they used for V1 of the scenery, as that looked just fine:

 

 

I have UTX and GEX installed and no amount of layering changes has affected anything.

Thanks for posting those last two shots Drew.

 

Your MSEv1 shot shows that the developer of that series used only a water mask which leaves pure FSX default water with no transition right to the shoreline. In some places, as in your example, this can look decent. Imagine if Florida's coast was done like that though... all that clear shallow water with the sand, seagrass, and coral reefs should be shown off in a photoscenery product!

 

As meshman pointed out earlier the visible banding as seen in your MSEv2 shot is caused by the blend mask which the developer is using to transition between FSX default water and the photoreal water. Maybe the banding could be minimized by choosing the color of FSX water that comes closest to matching the photoreal water?