Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
Guest Checkmate

Some questions about photoreal

Recommended Posts

Guest Checkmate

I played around with this a little in 2k2 but my real intent there was to add some hires mesh to an area with some rivers and the MS mesh had no valleys for them. I ended up throwing photoreal on top because when the mesh was in the right place all the rivers and roads weren't. I only had greyscale images so I spent forever coloring them. I tossed in some autogen and a few GMax buildings and bridges and I thought it was a big improvement.This time I've got color sat pics of the west coast of Florida. Mesh isn't an issue because there pretty much aren't any hills on the coast of Florida.My first issue is water. The sat pics I've got show alot of color variation. Especially in the bays where there are sand bars, silt, mangroves etc. If I put MS water (using Ground2K?) all over I'll lose all that. If I don't, how do I transition to MS water without having waves lapping up onto my, umm, water? Also I'd lose all the water effects wherever I keep the photoreal. Suggestions?Secondly the area I want to do is pretty large. I'm starting off with the area around SRQ and eventually I'd like to cover all of Sarasota, Manatee (Bradenton), Hillsboro (Tampa), and Pinnellis (St. Pete/Clearwater) counties. At least everything west of I75 and along the I4 corridor. Last time I had a 2m/Pixel GIF file that was about 13000x10000 x 256 colors. I converted that to a roughly 7000x5000x24bit bmp at 4.8m/pixel for coloring, stretching, rotating, and tweaking so the roads/rivers met at the edges.I'm guessing each county will be 4 to 8 times as big which is really too big for my image editor (PSP6) to work with. How big of a file will the resampler process? Since it's tough to figure out exactly where the resampler will cut the textures, if I cut my project up into smaller pieces and made a BGL for each should I overlap the smaller pieces or will having 2 or more textures for a given area cause problems.Lastly (for now anyway) how does everyone else handle the transition from photoreal areas to the default areas. Especially roads and rivers?Thanks in advance.John

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi John:I'm new to photoreal texture work myself (there's a couple of recent threads here where I'm the one asking questions) but I can answer a few of yours.I just compiled a 250MB(!) *.bmp file with resample.exe (v.1) without problems, even though my computer only has 256MB RAM and a 'slow' PIII 750 processor. It less than 10 minutes plus another ten for imagetool to create the DXT1 format.I cut my ~150 x 150km area (Landsat 7 ETM) into 4 equal slices, with an overlap of one LOD13 area on each side. Since the names of the slices are fixed (they reflect their exact location in the FS world) there's no problem with overlap; some of them will end up getting compiled twice and you'll have to pick one of them to place in the texture folder (that's why I'm using v.1 of resample - I don't have to worry about black borders along edges that don't completely fill a LOD13 slice).Don't have any first-hand knowledge about water masking yet - I'm compiling the alpha map as I type this.Cheers, Holger

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest Checkmate

Thanks Holger!Have you used Ground2K and do you know if the current version (4.0) requires FSIUPC and if so what version?Also What do you do at the edge of your scenery where the roads and rivers don't meet? Do you retouch your photo or is there a good way to move MS's Road?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  

  • Tom Allensworth,
    Founder of AVSIM Online


  • Flight Simulation's Premier Resource!

    AVSIM is a free service to the flight simulation community. AVSIM is staffed completely by volunteers and all funds donated to AVSIM go directly back to supporting the community. Your donation here helps to pay our bandwidth costs, emergency funding, and other general costs that crop up from time to time. Thank you for your support!

    Click here for more information and to see all donations year to date.
×
×
  • Create New...