how do i place my own ground-textures on specific area in fs ?

[Guest PoRrEkE]

is there any freeware available to do this ?maybe i don't even need a util program to do this ?where then can i find a tutorial ?pls don't tell me 'bout payware stuff, cuz i will NOT pay anything for being able to do this.cheers,Philippe Vanagt

[Guest PoRrEkE]

haha, ok seems TerraBuilder light is freewarethanks for the replys here boyz :(anyway, i can't get it to work :(did & installed all as expaind in the help files etc, yet no restult in fs :(might this be cuz i use winXP ?any help here would be appreciated !

[arno 1]

Are you trying to place an areal photo or something like that, then TerraBuilder might be a nice choice.If you just want to place a polygon I think Ground2k or even Airport/FSSC/GroundMaker is better.

[Guest PoRrEkE]

I found a website with detailed satellite pictures for the whole of West-Flanders Belgium where I live and I'd like to put these on the ground. (or as many of them as possible).

[arno 1]

Then I would just use the Terrain SDK from MS. It contains all the tools you need to place such images on the mesh. And the SDK itself also provides information on how to use it.

[Guest PoRrEkE]

I tried that, but I don't understand most of the SDK :(What do they mean with RAW files ? Are these the BMP files ?The .inf files .. do I make those with notepad ??Anyway, for now I'm gathering all the images from the website and make sure I know in which order to use them in the grid.So after I'm done with that work, I'll have a look again.

[bob.bernstein 0]

Many folks have written extensively in this forum on this subject. search on "Bernstein", and you'll find gobs of stuff I've written...While it will take you plenty of time to work thru these posts, you'll learn a lot. The other source that comes to mind is Christian Stock. He wrote an excellant manual on tmf design, search the library on "tmf" and it comes right up.Bob Bernstein

[Guest PoRrEkE]

searching this forum was a neat plan, however didn't bring me much help cuz the search lead to all kinds of topics which did not say much on the subject.HOWEVERI had an other trail-error (?) session with the SDK info and in the end something came out.FS Texture Converter seems a VERY handy tool for this job !! Cuz I end up with over 80 (and it will be plenty more tomorow) BMP files which need to be converted to DXT1 and then add mipmaps. Boy does this util work fast and nice ! :)check what i've got so far (people from Belgium can recognise the southern part of Kortrijk)http://users.skynet.be/porreke/kortrijk.jpg

[Guest R5D4]

I would definately recommend terrabuilder lite if you can get it to work. I published a freeware photo-terrain file on avsim a while back and used the SDK, and while it looked good my second version using terrabuilder fits much better into the default terrain - it allowed me to play with positioning more accurately and line up surrounding rivers/roads, and produce alpha layer to give reflections on the water. Plus the tool gives you guidance on resizing your image so that the resample tool does not corrupt it when resizing the image itself. Perhaps one day I'll get round to uploading the updated version...

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Hmmm..Maybe i'll be doing the same as you. First finish the job with the SDK and then later try again with TerraBuilder.Cuz i'm getting the hang of it now and I don't want to ruin my rithm now.I've got however 1 problem.Once you got 1 "zone" fitted into place and got the size right, you can base the other bmp files on that first. However, therefore you each time need to change the numbers in the inf file.Therefore my question: does anyone know the size of 1 "cel" in FS ?To what I got from guess-work it must be something like 0.110 high.If someone got a more exact dimention and if someone maybe can tell me if they are squared or not .. would be a great help !Cheers

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi PoRrEkE.The 'cel' you refer to is a single LOD13 Area. This is the same size for VTP polys and LWM masks ( for water and land ), and the same size for bitmap "slices" created by resample.The size is in degrees! 0.010986328125* latitude by 0.0146484375* longitude. The earth in FS is 20003500 meters from pole to pole... I calculate the NS "height" of an LOD13 Area as 1220.916748046875 meters.But the EW width of an Area depends on it's latitude... near the pole, the Area will be very narrow. Near the equator, it will be fat.If your Aerial photo is in geographic ( lat-long ) projection, it will be fine for use with resample. But if it is orthographic in projection ( measured in meters instead of degrees ), it will never accurately fit in the sim. It will need to be reprojected, or you'll just have to live with the distortion.To further complicate this, the 'datam' should be WGS84... although that may not cause as much mislocation as having the wrong projection. ( The datum basically is the reference to the center of the earth and accounts for the "bulge" of the planet at the equator, if I understand this correctly ).===========================================In a large photo-mosaic... say 20km x 20km, the distortion of an orthographic photo may be 'off' as much as 200 meters near the corners of the photo. Using photos of relatively small sizes reduces the problem. Reprojection is the best solution, but there are no freeware tools to do this accurately... sometimes simply using a paint program to warp the photo works alright.So you need to be more concerned about the projection of your photos, rather than about how many meters wide or tall they are. You need to think in degrees, not feet or meters."old hands" at the art of photoreal will tell you to use 2 or 3 known points of lat-long to try to align the photo, to attempt to compensate for the incompatibility of orthographic vs. geographic projection. If the photo's projection is geographic, it is absolutely precise when resampled, and needs no 'adjustment'.The best source for photoreal info is the TerraBuilder forum, whether or not you use that program.Dick