Two questions for photo real terrain textures...

[Guest aqui]

Hi all!I'm a new user here!I've two questions for terrain textures.1) Can I use a 8bit photoreal texture in FS2004? Or I have to use only a 24bit photo?2) How can I create transparent areas in my photo real texture? With Alpha Channel I can cut a water area in my texture, but if I want to preserve the original terrain in some areas?Thank'you very much.Maurizio (Italy)P.S.: Sorry for my bad english.

[bob.bernstein 0]

1) possibly, but I'm not sure why you'd want to. You have to have the color depth at 24 bit to use any of the features of most graphics programs, so you might as well not reduce the color depth when its time for resample.exe.. 2) Using resample.exe to prepare the lod13 textures, and tmf2bgl to create the bgl, there is no way to create transparency, although there is a fine way to create the "illusion" of transparency. Using tmfviewer (from the sdk for fs2002) you can see the names of the default landclass. Then return to the sdk to the table that shows the corresponding texture used in the default. This will look similar in file name form to 24b21su.bmp. Do a search on your computer for the filename, there will likely be 6 or 7 variants and all seasons plus lm. What I do is take all 7 variants and composit them into one file. Then I'll create a new layer under my photo and do a bitmap fill (corel lingo), its done as a define pattern/fill/pattern in photoshop...onto the new layer.Now I can select (feather one or two pixels to your taste) portions of my photo that I'd wish to be transparent and cut them from the original photo. This will expose the default texture.This results in almost the same appearance as transparency.Good luck,Bob BernsteinPS...The other way to acheive transparency in a photoimage is to create your photo area as a vtp2 polygon. Then texture your polygon using 253..custom texture. This will let you show your alpha channel as transparent. The only bummer about this is that you must prepare your texture carefully, using 8bit with alpha fomat, mip it, and flip it vertically, and place it in the scenery/world/texture directory. This is the big bummer to me, as I like to share my scenery designs with the public, and I don't think folks want to install into the sime folders...at least I don't like to.of course if you decide to go this way, all your water must be placed using lmw polygons.