I decided to be a little more realistic with the scope of my first project and moved to a small valley area just northwest of KROA (instead of trying to do the whole Roanoke Valley+ KROA as I had planned - maybe later). There is a small grass strip there (VA85 -"New Castle International Airport" - I'm not making this up), a small town and a creek/river; so I thought it would make a good test bed.I'll have to say I'm pleased with the results so far. Getting close to blending in the colors with the default textures. This seems to be more a function of the image brightness as much as color.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/39401.jpgYou can see the Roanoke valley in the distance.The existing field is not placed correctly. I need to move it over to the southwest a bit. Put in a couple of quonset(sp) huts an such. This is mostly a glider place with small singles and some helicopter training thrown in.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/39402.jpgI'm just to the right of the real 'port. You can see the FS strip to the right.I think I'll expand the area I'm doing by a factor of three. It might turn out to be a cool little addon...Cheers,

looks very nice. One trick I find works well is to view the default landclass of the area your scenery covers using tmfviewer. The default is found in worldlc.bgl. You'll note the landclass number relates to textures via a table in the terrain sdk (I think...or a table released by Orlando Satolmeyer). Now you can open the default texture file that's exactly what the program draws at the boundary between default and custom. You can edit your photo by feathering in portions of the default texture at the border..Makes the transition MUCH harder to see.Best,Bob Bernstein

Thanx Bob. During my research I had seen another post of yours on this subject of 'blending'; but it was a little too advanced for me at the time ;)I'm still not quite sure what you mean tho. Are you saying to paint with the colors from the default texture(s), or do you somehow place the actual default texture to mix in with the custom tex?Cheers,

Another way to blend is to take your texture, and change it from a square to a more irregular shape. This sounds pretty obvious, but by using roads and other man-made objects as borders, the transition seems more natural. After all, it's not uncommon to see two different shades of grass across the street from each other. Also, you can take a screenshot in FS of your area, and use the darken and lighteen tools in PSP (or whatever) to adjust the overall look of your scenery to match that of the surronding area. For some reason, it seems better to make your textures darker rather than lighter than the default ones. Finally, cover it all up with autogen.- Martin

Bob Brown and I prodoced a " Catalog" of the Landclass tiles when we did the Florida Landclass. It's here at avsim in the library under " Catalog". It's quite large as there is a graphical reproduction of each tile. Some of the tiles have 3 or 4 varations and the graphics of the tiles in this are a screen shot of a rectangle 5x4 tiles so you will get all the varations. Joe W.

Thanks for the tips Martin. Your right about the textures needing to be darker. I keep reducing the brightness of my working image a little bit at a time to get a better match. But I don't want to go too far because the default textures are just too damn dark IMO. The default textures almost completely obscure the mountain detail in the area I'm redoing.I'm saving the autogen for last. I want to get the airfield done and put in some deliberately placed buildings/trees nearby first.Cheers,

Thanx Joe. I'll check into it. I's still not quite sure what to do with the tiles tho'.Cheers,

Hi,One way to blend photo textures with the default landclasses is to use an alpha channel in the phototile.In order to avoid water to appear in the transparent regions of the texture you can create a BGL using VTP2 areas. Then the landclass texture (not landable water) appears underneath. So you can generate the phototiles with the MS resampler. You flip vertically the phototiles. You add an alpha channel to the photiles with white in the center going black to borders that you want to blend. Then you convert the photile to DXT1 format.Here is an example for a tile:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/39614.gifand the corresponding alpha image that blends North South and East:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/39615.gifHe is a shot showing the blend between photo scenery (left) and defaulf lanclasses (right):http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/39619.jpgRegards, Luis

Hi all;thanks a million!!would you explain us - how to create the vpt2 bgl files?thanks a millionJohn

>Hi all;>>thanks a million!!>>would you explain us - how to create the vpt2 bgl files?>>thanks a million>>JohnI use Ground2K, which is available in the library. There's also a tutorial there, and lots of posts already in the forum that can help you with it.- Martin