Just thought I'd throw in a few screenshots of what I've gotten done on the Phoenix area photoreal scenery I've been working on. Enjoy.Anyone have a GMAX football stadium object they want to share?Art Martin

The textures on the mountains look really cool!

Much closer to the real color of the mountains froma distance. Is it possible to add some brown and a little green in there as well? I don't know how to make scenery, so I'm just asking.

The photos I'm using are coming from Maricopa County's GIS website and they're actual aerial photos from 2004. Not sure I want to mess with the colors. I'm simply overlaying those pictures directly over the underlying mesh. I think what happens is that the default textures are so off in their light brown coloring that the contrast between the actual colors is striking. I'm tempted to see if there's a better default texturing to apply to the areas around my defined photo areas so they blend better. Eventually though, I want to get all the mountains around the valley defined. Art Martin

Hey Art!That's really starting to look like home there. Are we heading towards fountain hills over Scottsdale in that second pic?Quick question: are you going to be able to do Light Map textures for night time?

Yeah that's the general direction I was heading in that picture with Squaw Peak on the right. The first screenshot was of PIR out at the base of the Estrella Mountains with the Gila River below.The night texture light mapping is something I haven't tackled yet. All the mapping I've done so far has been with FS Terrain Tools which only really creates the summer daytime textures. Bit of a struggle learning how to use the tools that require you to know the exact corner extents of the image you're loading when there are few references on the ground with the default FS scenery. What I was tempted to do is modify the 256 X 256 slices that FS Terrain Tools creates to make the alternate textures. Either that or simply go around to various parts of the scenery with Rwy12 and add in streetlights. That sounds like a monumental task. Obviously I have a big learning curve before I feel like I have a finished product. It certainly is fun though, flying around my hometown and actually following the rivers and roads. Loaded your airport texture upgrades last night and they're wonderful. Glendale Airport never looked so good. Art Martin

Looks good, how bout a Las Vegas photoreal scenery next? Thanks,Jeff USAF

Man, I can't keep all the programs straight. My reference in the other reply to FS Terrain Tools is actually FS Resample Tools. When I'm at work replying like this I'm relying on my feeble memory to reference these things. Doh.Art Martin

Ha! One thing risking marriage and sleep for my own city but another huge area like Vegas? Only chance would be if we moved to Vegas cause I absolutely insist upon flying over my own home realistically. It's a monumental task to put down large areas of photoreal images. Here's what I face each time I do a section:1. At work (while trying to also get work done and not get caught) I go into the Maricopa Country GIS site and get to their interactive map. I've tried this at home but my internet connection there is a modem and a typical 2 X 3 mile screen of an aerial photo is 2+ megs in size so my wait time is considerable. You zoom into the area you want, screen capture each image you need and paste it into a graphics program for saving. Each section takes a couple of minutes to get done. When I'm done, I burn them to CD and take them home for processing.2. Using Photo Deluxe I import all the images in and save them in the Hold Photo area so that I can combine them as layers onto a blank image I create. If I do a batch all at once, the images seem to all line up easily. However, if I visit the GIS website on different days, subtle differences exist in the picture scale I download and that means the segments I try to assemble have to be resized to fit. I find often that during assembly, I've missed downloading some area and waste a lot of time trying to find those missing pieces. 3. Once the segments are assembled, they're saved as a massive .bmp file. I slew around FS looking for some lat/long reference points (preferably in the upper left and lower right corners of the image) that I can relate to pixel locations on my new image. This is extremely hard in the Phoenix area because so little of it is actual photoreal stuff. My saving grace is having a freeware version of USA roads that I truly hope lines up with the real world. I've discovered the few objects that FS provides for Phoenix such as the downtown buildings are misplaced from real life. 4. Using FS Resample Tools, I bring in bitmap file, entering in the two sample points and their corresponding lat/long alignments and the program resizes my .bmp file, generates the .bgl file, and the raw slices cut out on the LOD lines. This is actually one of the easiest steps - minimal entry and 2 button pushes. You then have to run FSTextureConvert to make the DXT1 conversions of all those slice images. The scenery is moved into my addon folder and I run FS to see how it looks. A few times I've found it obvious that I've missed my alignments. If so, the whole process begins again from step 3.5. The photoreal texture wipes out any autogen so, using the Annotator program from the MS Scenery SDK, you then go into every texture file (there can be hundreds for each section you add) and define where you want buildings and greenery to display. The aerial photos do a great job of giving depth when looking straight down at it because of the shadows and detail but when you look towards the horizon at the main valley areas it seems extremely flat. The autogen helps to maintain that look of depth. 6. Adding in addtional objects and moving the misplaced ones that FS includes will be another huge task. I'd really like to put in details such as freeway overpasses and stadiums but face a huge learning curve in GMAX. 7. None of the above steps deal at all in creating textures other than the basic daytime summer one. I'm beginning to learn now how time-consuming creating those other textures might be. 8. There are drastic changes between where my scenery, which has realistic grayish/brown coloring to most areas of the ground, and the FS default textures they've chosen for the desert and cities of the Southwest. They have this bright, light brown (almost orange), mottled texture for the desert and mountain areas and a very lush green (with lots of pine trees) texture for the rural city areas. I'd like to see if there are better default textures I can use that will blend more easily with the edges of my new scenery. I have no idea yet how to do that.So, as you can see, this Phoenix project seems to have no end in sight. After I'm done with this and get it distributed, I think relaxing in the jacuzzi with a margaritta and getting to know my family again will take a much higher priority than taking on Sin City.Art Martin

That's a very interesting process, and it definately sounds like a herculean task, I hope it goes well. The reason I asked about Las Vegas, is because that is my hometown and I too am sick of flying the default crappy orange desert color. Those default textures might work for other parts of Arizona and New Mexico, and maybe Utah, but for Phoenix and Las Vegas, our desert is a more dull color, like what you have in your screenshot.Keep us updated, I'm definately interested in seeing and using the finsished product.Thanks,Jeff USAF

This will be a welcome add-on for me as well, am a relatively new simmer in Tucson for winters and use the TUS to PHX route to practice various planes and ILS approches........sounds like a real time consuming venture but lots of us will be waiting....regards RRL