Water and Photoreal

[Guest Checkmate]

I'm working on photoreal scenery for the west coast of Florida, USA. The only other time I did PR was a small town in the midwestern US and I just colored the one small river to match as closely as I could and it didn't look too bad. That won't work here because there is ALOT of water and it should be usable for floatplanes! First off I'm not really sure how to do Microsoft's water effect. My understanding is you create a water "mask" that you import to the "alpha channel" of your source image which you then process normally.Secondly I'm not sure it would look good here. There are alot of shallows/mudflats/channels that will dissappear if I do that.I'm attempting to upload 2 (reduced size) images. One shows Sarasota bay with Longboat Key and the Gulf of Mexico. Alot of the bay is just a few feet deep but should still be landable. I tried painting over the area just west of SRQ to see what it would look like and it loses alot of character.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/42514.jpgThe other is the entrance to Palma Sola bay and again it's mostly landable but you can see how much detail would be lost.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/42505.jpgAny suggestions?

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Checkmate.You could try to make a regular waterclass file. If you include a localised set of textures in a twin texture folder, it will work to make the water look a little better.You'd need to study the SDKs released for FS2002, and old AVSIM "waterclass" posts.Or...You can make surfaces behave as water with SCASM code's "SurfaceType" command, and that might be what you're looking for.Dick

[Holger 0]

Hi Checkmate:I'm working on a photoreal area for SE Alaska where I have similar issues, i.e., lots of mudflates and different-colored water.Based on some testing, my compromise is to keep the mudflats and very shallow areas as land and the rest as water (I'm not sure how well the screenshot shows this). As Dick says, waterclasses are a good approach to giving water areas different hues.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/42568.jpgOne other thing I noticed: if your photoreal images are very low in detail and contrast, typical for mudflats and ice fields, the resulting custom textures will look very "blah" in FS and show a slight but distinct honeycomb structure (at least on my system with a Radeon 8500). Not very pretty, so you might need to use your photo software to artificially enhance those areas.Cheers, Holger

[Guest Checkmate]

Those both sound worth looking into and I'd not heard of either! Thanks again.John

[Guest Checkmate]

(and in Florida, the mangroves) It's the shallow water that needs special treatment because as you fly over it you can easily see the ocean floor to a pretty good depth. The boat heading out of Palma Sola bay doesn't look like he has any place to go and yet if his boat draws 2ft he's probably got 4 feet to spare.This is from my source data at about 1.4m/pixel. The dark shape I circled is what's left of an old sugar barge that tried to scuttle itself off of Anna Maria Island a long time ago. It's about 25 feet deep! http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/42598.jpgYour Alaska scenery looks great! And it brings up another question I've had. How much and what type of "artificial enhancing do you do.I've got two big issues. One is color matching. You'll notice a bright band down the center of Sarasota Bay where it was alot sunnier one satelite pass than on either side. The other is the artifacts that appear in some of the source stuff where the original pictures didn't quite project correctly. Notice the line up the beach in the center of the red rectangle near the barge.I'm using PSP6 for image manipulation.Best regardsJohn