Texture transitions

[Guest DanielBu]

Hi all,I rather dislike the transitions that exist between certain kinds of ground textures, especially the forest textures. The transition is supposed to be "smooth" I guess, but it looks spotty...like a bad photoshop transition effect or something, if you know what I mean.Is there a way to change this? There must be some transparency texture or something that defines these transitions.In contrast, some village/town textures blend into the "ground" with rather hard edges, but it works very well. I'd like that with forests etc. too...-DanielPS: It doesn't look that bad in the screenshot. Sometimes it looks much worse though.

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi DanielAs far as we know, although it is really only a guess, the blending is controlled by the mysterious 32x2048 pixel 'mask' textures included in the worldtexture folder with names such as 004b2m11.bmp. If you want to change the blending, you could try experimenting systematically with these texture files (and let us all know what you discover!).Kind RegardsGerrish

[Guest DanielBu]

Thanks Gerrish, the 031F2m and 032b2m ones seem to have these fuzzy edges. Looks like a lot of work though to figure these out individually...Maybe I'll try smoothing some of those.-Daniel

[Guest DanielBu]

OK here's what I've got so far. Indeed these files are the alpha channels for texture transitions.I tried despecking them and smoothing them a bit, but the result is far from acceptable. Maybe I'll try to reduce the files to b/w, then despecking, and then smoothing a little. There mustn't be any smooth shades of gray, or FS will render such ugly patterns.That's it for now,-Danielhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/44054.jpg

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi DanielWell done, you're making progress. The bitmap format used is the 8-bit extended FS2000 format with mips and a 256-colour palette. There is no alpha channel. The palette is not the normal full-range greyscale palette but rather a reduced subset with only a limited range of colours used - but it does include some shades of grey. I think that the images probably start out as 4-bit greyscale (16 shades of grey from black to white) and are then processed by imagetool.exe to add the mips and convert to the FS2000 8-bit format. Are you using imagetool.exe to process your images into the required format?To summarise, I think you should create your images as 4-bit greyscale and then process them with imagetool.exe to add mips and save as FS2000 extended 8-bit.In order to get smoother transitions than the default masks, perhaps you need to make more use of the 14 intermediate grey shades? I get the impression that the default masks may start out as simple black/white demarcations and the grey shades appear only as a result of anti-aliasing in the 4-bit greyscale format, but you might obtain the softer transition effect you want by using more grey.One of the other things that needs to be understood is why there are eight 32x256 segments to each mask rather than four. How are the eight different segments applied to a tile and its neighbours? This is something you might be able to determine by using special test patterns.RegardsGerrish

[Guest DanielBu]

I used Photoshop to edit the files and didn't bother to convert them with imagetool yet (It works anyways, as there is no alpha channel). I'm afraid adding more shades of gray won't help - these strange transitions occur in the gray areas. There is no real transparency involved, just "pixel or no pixel". So I'm really trying to remove the grays...I have tried the threshold filter, so there is only black/white in the textures. At first I thought it worked, but some transitions still remain, for whatever reasons. Maybe these are due to fine grain that is left in some of the textures. I'll need to sort out the forest textures and go through them seperately some time. Using a noise removal filter doesn't seem to work (adds gray), I'll need to think of something there.I really don't know why there are 8 segments - I don't even know why there should really be 4 ;)Maybe they're there to add slight variation to the transitions?-Daniel