Hi,

I am new to the community and I am currently working on a photo scenery for Wick Airport - EGPC.

I followed this brief tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M41bBEw7_OM

And I have managed to get a brief photo scenery going. I know nothing about watermasks and/or blendmasks however, following a different tutorial, I used GIMP to create a watermask and blendmask. My blendmask doesn't seem to work - according to what I think it does, however, the water mask partially does I think. Basically, if anyone could help me solve this issue, I would be very appreciative.

My next steps - after this is sorted - are to use ADE9X to re-align the AFCAD to the scenery and after that, use whisplacer to add houses/buildings etc. into the scenery. I would also like to create some winter, night, autumn and spring textures but, again, I have no idea how to do so.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
TheFSFreak

 

 

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Channel_LandWaterMask = 3.0
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yDim = 5.61322716547824E-06

[source3]
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Did you fill the water with white or is that the way the imagery was downloaded? Really to blend the water properly you need a larger piece of imagery and your water needs to extend farther from the shore.

 

I use PhotoShop and I'm Gimp illiterate but usually I select the land that I want to be visible first with the lasso tool and a feather of 1-3 px, I make a color fill layer, bright green say, it's only purpose is to maintain that selection outline until I'm ready to use it again. Then I do the water, this time with a feather of 100 px or so, and make a layer for that too. Then I load the selections for both of those layers at once, invert it, and make a pure black layer from that. The first two can be discarded now. Next put a white layer underneath the black layer that encompases the entire image, flatten, and save as an 8-bit grayscale .bmp (usually .tif actually but it looks like you're using .bmps which is fine).

 

It should look something like this when you're done:

 

 

The green line is your approximate imagery, notice the blend feather for the water extends beyond the edges of the green line, that's why I say you need a bigger chunk of imagery. Your blendmask should be pure black at least one pixel in from all the edges in order to not show a hard line in the finished photoreal, you need more imagery so that wide feather on the water ends before it gets to the edge of the imagery. I'd download a larger piece, then if you need to extend the water out from the shoreline you can clone stamp some water from another piece of imagery over the white area if need be.

 

Jim

The  size of your image is fine, as pointed out, you need to work on your blend/mask better as it doesn't blend from white to black, only a band of gray around the image. The one image with the land and the white around it can go away, that is why you are seeing the white around the water edges. Just use the original image. You will also need to make a night image (add a pure black layer over your image and reduce opacity to 97%, then use the eraser tool with different settings/opacity for any light sources you want)  and add it to the .inf file. Seasons, you will have to play with different color settings for the main files for each season and add that to the .inf file also.

 

It's hard to tell in the image if either your blend or water mask are working. The parts of the scenery inland don't seem to blend at all, but they do at the water areas, could be the way you did the blend. Do you have FSX water where the water is in the image, if so, your water mask is working.

A good blend mask takes some work, make sure you have complete black on edges you want to blend, water and land. You can always trace an area and then blur it with Gimp.

 

I would also take your main image into Gimp and tweak the contrast and colors to better match the default you are using. Use your image posted above for this and save the preset/settings for your main image

 

To realign the AFCAD parts, what works best is to use SBuilder and create a simpler photoscenery of just the airport with it and then load that lower res image into ADE and use it as a background, works great.

The  size of your image is fine

 

The size of the image is not fine, unless he's planning to blend the water out completely at the shoreline. If he wants some photoreal water he'll be needing more area to spread the water blend out - unless he prefers a hard line where photoreal water meets landclass water.

Based on what i see of his original image he has plenty of room for a nice blurred blend from the land to water. If he does indeed want more of the photoreal water showing under the FSX water, then yes, he should make the area bigger.

Hi All,

 

Thank you for the responses!

 

I have managed to work around what some of you have said and I have managed to improve the scenery! However, I still have problems with a sharp water line. Is this because of the blendmask or watermask and how can I resolve it??

 

Many Thanks,
George

 

NB: I discovered/remembered I have photoshop elements 9 on my PC which I can try and use but I have only ever used it once!