Ground2k shore modification

[Guest JohnC]

Here is a shoreline I am trying to modify with GR2k3.0 in WinMe. The dotted line shows the old shore and the lighter colored image is the desired shore I want to produce. The dark bar at the bottom represents the approximate length of the beach I will reproduce. I will succeed, but cannot get the program to draw land on one side and water on the other.In Ex 1 The grid shows the 4 Areas, ((F1) icon is active)I am trying to produce (Areas ID

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi John.I tried your scenery in Ground2K ( downloaded a map from Mappoint.com ), and found I also had no success with a Coastline creation... I'm using the updated version 3.04.But you can get a correction with the "old" method.For a start, forget landclass ( and waterclass ). You can do that last in the project. Forget areafills ( for now ) as they can be added on an 'as needed' basis later.Forget line exclusions ( for now ).Some background:All the earth is covered by both landclass and waterclass. LWM polygons determine which is shown... with the default as landclass. The same waterclass is shown when you make CUSTOM slices and use an alpha channel to reveal the waterclass.To complicate things further, FS2002 has some landclasses named as water types... but there is almost no reason we would ever use a water-named landclass, as we should reveal the waterclass with LWM polygons. And that's what you need to do.Carve your shoreline area with an LWM ( land/water mask ) poly with connected ends and the elevation you want ( or -9999 for no elevation ). This is "Poly without shore", and essentially, you are drawing a "lake" right over part of the default lake and land :http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/9447.gifThen, make your beach with a VTP2 line, layer 8 and ends not connected. This is "Line/LakeShore"...be sure to select an appropriate type of line, and width. Draw it right over the edge of your "lake" poly :http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/9451.gifCheck the scenery in the sim ( then deactivate it in the Scenery Library before returning to Ground2K ). Now you'll see which LOD13 Areas need areafilling with land, exclusion of VTP lines and polys, and, finally, landclass adjustments.I hope this helps you get a start. I don't know why the coastline function doesn't work in this case... you could send the .LWM file to Christian Fumey, to see what he thinks of it. It could be that you and I both misunderstand something that Ground2K is actually doing here with coastlines ( I never use that option, because I'm old and set in my ways :) ).Here's an older post about how I usually develop a project:http://forums.avsim.com/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchI'm fairly methodical in my process. I usually make sure all LOD13 Areas that will have land are areafilled to land first. ( You could do that as well. ) I then make watermask polys to create the water. With a lake, you can connect the ends and make it "Poly with shore"... but with a coast, or part of a lake, I make the water poly w/o shorelines, then add the shorelines later, as a separate line. That process makes no difference in the ASM code or BGL produced. The "ringing" of LWM polys with shoreline is a feature Christian added to his Ground2K program.DickP.S.The land on the right assumes you are facing the direction of point-progression of the line. You can unclick the box, to switch to land on the left, if you like to go the other way. Also, Don't be too "picky" with the shapes. By that, I mean you don't need a lot of points to make a lake, or shoreline. The very image of the beach is thick and wavy, and covers a lot of small mistakes. Too many points can just complicate the scenery and add to the polygon burden. Your water and land LWM polys are split up into fan shapes by Christian's program, so they will compile correctly into BGLs. More points mean more polys. More polys ( at least with elevation ) will eventually mean lower FPS in the sim.

[Guest JohnC]

OK..I'll go back to work on your "older" method.......I saw one of your works made some time ago showing how things could be improved w/o photorealism, but I must tell you...I am "sorely" tempted to return to pure photrealism:-outta

[Guest]

Hello to alli have a similar problem:the default coast is north-south oriented, just something east from its real location. I add now the shoreline as a land polygon with shore (without closing polygon) and all works well - a good method as writen in the tutorial.But my new shore is something west to the default shore and just crosses SOME METERS against another LOD13 Cell. It seems, that this small Cell (1.4 x 1.4km) was default defined as water area, because it was just near at west of the default coast, which crosses the neighbour cell. Now, i tried to:define this cell as land-> nothing, i only see the shore, but behind it again water which reaches until the east border of this cell!i tried to add a VTP Poly...--> Nothingi tried to define the whole LOD13 as Land--> FS2002 shut downi tried to overwrite the water information with the LOD13 definition but now as Water, and then again the cell as land...--> again seeing water behind the shorei tried exclude LOD cell--> nothingi tried to make a coastline--> nothingno method works! ah, and this Cell has LC Texture!May i define this Cell with WC with a special class?or simply:how can i delete this default water definition?rarely on the whole other part of coast, the method "Land"-Cell at water-LWM polygons and "Water"-Cells at land-LWM polygons works ok!Thank you for some assistance... it is realy a great program and you are great people for assistance!thanks to you, God bless youFrancis

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi John.There's definitely a steep learning curve... and not just for Ground2K, but for understanding LWMs, VTPs, Landclass and Waterclass.Photoreal is rather simple by comparison. Part of the difficulty of Ground2K is in it's GUI interface. Christian has his own way of doing this, and it's not a traditional "Windows" GUI, and uses an older version of Visual Basic. But once you become familiar with it, it's quite easy to use, and quite ingenious.There are "exercises" that could be done to help understand the process. Make a lake without shoreline at -9999 ( current elevation ). Then add elevation. Then add a shoreline, first with the land on right checked, then without it checked. Try different lines. What happens when the ends aren't joined for lakes? Lakes can be drawn w/o shorelines, and shorelines drawn w/o lakes.Make an island in the lake, and the shoreline for the island. A road in the island, and a streams going into the lake from the island. Play with the layers to make the road cross over the stream, or under the stream. Have the stream layered under the shoreline or over the shoreline.It's like learning a musical instrument ( but much quicker ). Eventually, if you have a good map with the right georeference, it's mostly just tracing. Then you can get into more exotic things like a VTP mask of city streets at the layer of your choosing, or cutting a VTP poly out of a transparent CUSTOM-named texture to use just it's autogen, or re-meshing the area the old lake used to occupy... things the MS design team never envisioned we'd be doing.Dick

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Francis.Just a guess, but your poly may have crossed into an LOD13 Area that has it's landclass defined as a water-type. This is not the same as waterclass. Every LOD13 Area vertex in the world has an assignment as both landclass and waterclass... but some landclasses are of the water type, and so they look ( and act ) like water.You need to make sure this LOD13 Area is areafilled as land, and also create a landclass that will display that LOD13 Area as a land-type value. ( Sometimes more than just that one vertex will need a new landclass, as land blends, and water does not blend. )As I've said before, I usually start my project by areafilling with land, all the LOD13 Areas that I will be altering. I will later mask them with water polys.If you compile and check your scenery at that point in the sim, some LOD13 Areas may show blocks of water, even though you've filled them with land. That would mean they have a water-type landclass assigned, and need to have a new landclass value assignment. This is not a "fault" of Ground2K, or of LWM/BGLC coding, but simply Ground2K's code correctly displaying the current landclass ( which happens to look like water ).Most coastline corrections near the ocean or large lakes will have LOD13 Areas landclass-assigned as a water-type. So you can count on making a landclass BGL to add the land back into the sim, so the masking ( LWM ) properly shows. If you look at the worldlc.bgl with TMFViewer, you'll see most of the earth is assigned a landclass type of water. So, this is something to expect near coastlines.In the past, we mistakenly believed there was no landclass under such Areas... but now, we know the landclass is of a water-type. Either way of thinking of it, a new landclass needs to be created, or it will still look like water, even though it was masked as land.That's one reason why Christian added the landclass function to Ground2K.If you were to replace the default groundtexture bitmaps :000b2su1.bmp, 123b2su1.bmp, 124b2su1.bmp, 127b2su1.bmp, and 256b2su1.bmp, with a bright red DXT1 256x256 bitmap, then you should be able to see the landclass values that look like water.Dick

[Guest hefy_jefy]

Hi all,I just wanted to say that I have had similar problems, but that with a little deductive thinking you can get around them. In Dick's case by knowning a great deal about the subject in my case by simply thinking around the problem and trying a few things. I just completed the Moss Landing area in Monterey Bay with many winding small rivers and swamp areas - it took awhile and I came across many of the problems described earlier!!!I solved the different shoreline type by making a water polygon height 0 as Dick decribed then overlaying the different shoreline types as lines.Thanks again to Christian who has fixed the >260 mesh points problem (already!!!)Whats really cool is when you assign a Water Class to the rivers and the muddy water "bleeds" into the water of Monterey Bay - made it all worth the effort.Geoff

[Guest]

Hi Geoff,I've been editing the shorelines of East Vancouver Island with Iain Murray's Shoreline Maker. There is no provision in that program for modifying the water textures...it appears that rivers or lakes assigned water texture take on the texture of the default underlying water. Can you tell me how to modify water textures using the .clm output of Coastline Maker? There are lots of estuaries and shoreline flats in my area that would benifit from shallow water textures.Harvey

[Guest JohnC]

Your advice worked very well (no, perfectly) , Dick, and I am taking your advice about little projects to get used to the interface.Too bad someone hasn't come up with code that would exclude the whole world EXCEPT a fixed area(s). One could then stack Terrabuilder or other photoreal generated built up areas bgl on top of standard Ground2k type scenery bgl's for corrected further out areas on top of the Microsoft default(no sense in changing Easter Island for now).Looking down at an actual photoreal image of my old property and house is hard to give up.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi John.You'll see more possibilities with Ground2K and VTP polys as you experiment. Also, remember that your source images used from Terrabuilder ( or Terrascene, if you like ) can be used as "maps" for Ground2K, as well. Generally, you'd already have georeferenced them, so placement isn't a problem.You'll eventually find that instead of tinting a photo, you can use Ground2K to "cut" a poly of forest texture, or grass, or swamp, and the autogen that comes with them. And you can always use the 'slices' from resample as textures ( they need to be vertically flipped for VTP2 polys )... and you may not need the whole slice, but can cut part of it to use. Slices placed as VTP polys are a layer, and can be overwritten with other VTP polys and lines.Dick

[Guest JohnC]

Is it possible to effectively rotate some of the road directions in some of the city and suburban LandClasses?......having all roads vertically and horizontally lined up doesn't look real...in Burlington for example there is an entire district where roads run orthogonally off a northwest main road...:-beerchug

[Guest hefy_jefy]

Hello Harvey,I am not sure how to go about that in Coastline Maker, I did a little work with it a while back but I found that Ground2K is much more flexible. GR2K is more difficult to get into, but once you get the hang of it much better. There is a tutorial on the Avsim site called "Ground2K for beginners" I worked my way through that first, and then with help from this forum I was able to make further progress. I am NOT a code writer and everything done so far has been done from the "dummies" side of the GUI!I was going to also suggest the excellent program from Doug Cox, USA Photomaps (jdmcox@jdmcox.com http://jdmcox.com/) but of course it won't help you with Vancouver Island:-(One of the restrictions with Coastline Maker is the available area in your base map/image/photo, GR2K seems only to be limited by the memory you have, (and you can "zoom" in and out).Good luck, sorry not to be more help,Geoff

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi John.VTP1 polys allow rotation of a texture, but I'm not sure offhand if Ground2K implements that.I use a different approach. It's hard to draw city streets with our current knowledge if VTP2 lines... we're plagued by tapered ends.Christian may implement VTP1 lines, that should not suffer from this problem.Until something of that nature occurs, very detailed city streets are possible by using the ability of VTP polys to display transparency in the Alpha channel.http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/9752.jpgThis is a snip of a large image made from MapMaker. It actually is TIGER data of the city streets of Delavan Wisconsin. I can make a georeferenced "mask" with gray streets and a black background. This can be sliced by resample ( I'll throw away the BGL and keep the slices ). The slices then need to be vertically flipped, and an alpha channel keyed to the black color. These slices can then be placed as VTP2 or VTP1 polys. The polys can even cut part of the individual bitmaps. They can be placed as a layer 4-100... they are best shown as a low layer ( layer 4,5,6, ? )... to lay under mostly everthing else ( except water ).At their chosen layer, they will display as a gray street map, and can show an underlying landclass... the red circle shows where my house should sit:http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/9753.jpgIt's not complete at all, but illustrates a way to get accurate city streets. The above example could use a lower layer poly as a grass texture. Then I could place buildings on it.Alternately, I could try to color an image to blend with the default textures somewhat, but cut the polys ( from slices ) at the edges of the city. They don't need to blend perfectly into the countryside, as that's differently textured anyways. If the polys are VTP2, and autogen made before flipping the textures, we can display autogen by accessing the texture as #252 or #253 landclass value, and placing the autogen and properly-named bitmaps into the "...scenedbworldtexture" folder ( with the other default landclass ground textures and autogen ). That's how to display CUSTOM textures as VTP.In effect, you can irregularly trim the CUSTOM slices to the edges where the city blocks meet the countryside, so blending becomes less of an issue.================One thing you could try, is to split your project into different LWM modules with Ground2K... each sharing the same background map.A Ground2K project can quickly become cluttered with all the polys and lines. If you make different projects, the BGLS can have different names, but all dumped into the same 'scenery' folder for testing and distribution. You could have a MyCity.LWM file that just treats cities. A MyRoads.LWM for the roads. A MyWater.LWM for lakes and ocean water. A MyStreams.LWM for the streams. And so on...This adds a modular ability to your overall project, even beyond what Christian has added. As long as they share the same backgound map, they should fit together pretty well as BGLs. It really helps to keep the current working .LWM image clean, and the overall project organised.Dick

[Guest]

Great!it works!!!!thanks to all!don't forget: WaterClass to use if water appears in a cell of LOD13, instead of land... logical or not????kind regard and God bless you!Francis

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Francis.All LOD 13 Areas of the world are covered with both landclass and waterclass. The LWM poly ( or areafill ) masking controls which shows.Much of the earth is covered with a landclass value of #100... and this landclass looks and behaves as water. This landclass value is changed by making a new landclass BGL, with a different value assigned for the needed verticies.If you make land areafills over all portions of your project that will require changes, and some square LOD13 Areas refuse to show a land texture, then most likely that LOD13 Area ( or one adjacent Area ) is influenced by a landclass assignment of value #100 ( and looks and acts like water )... you'll need to change that value for one or more verticies to something else with the LC function of Ground2K. Waterclass has nothing to do with it. Waterclass just changes the looks and depth of the water.=============================================You should learn to use TMFViewer, to both view the worldlc.bgl ( the default fs2002 landclass BGL ), and to view your landclass changes, and to view your LWM water/land masking.Do a multiple load...First load worldlc.bgl ( found in the FS2002 'Scenery' folder ), then your landclass.bgl, then your project_3.bgl Keyboard arrows scroll, F1 and F2 zoom. The left mouse click will center. You can enter a latitude/longitude in the Jump menu. Under the View menu, you can uncheck different loaded BGLs, and they will disappear from the view.This way you can detect the landclass types easily, and what types your LWM polys cover. If they cover water, you'll need to change the landclass to a land texture value.http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/9998.jpgThis shows I need no landclass changes for my watermasks to show correctly. The upper left shows 3 value #100s, but they do not affect my scenery changes. If this were a coastal area, there would be many more value #100s, and some probably would need changing.Dick