Rivers with Ground 2K4 Help.

[victorwest2 0]

Ok I asked a couple of days ago regarding other programs, apart from Ground2k4 for creating rivers for FS9. As I didn't get any answers, I guess that G2k4 is the best bet. I've therefore decided to have a go adding the rivers around Yellowstone NP using G2k4 and Holger Sandmann's satellite images posted to Avsim. After making a tentative start, I have a few questions.Do I need to exclude all the default roads/rivers? According to the G2k for beginners, I need to click on each area that I wish to exclude default scenery from. The image has hundreds!! Is there a "one click covers all" method?The main river I'm inserting is fairly wide in parts. The way I understand it, I need to enter this as a "poly without shore" "LWM poly" with underlying water class. However, when drawing a river, how do I decide when I should use "Line/Lake Shore" rather than "poly with shore"?When I come to draw the line, do I need to do the entire river at once or can I do it in sections. Also, when using "poly with shore", do I draw the line down one bank, cross over to the other side, draw the other bank to I reach the starting point and then let Uk24 close the poly? Finally, what's the best way of making sure I get smooth river banks rather than jagged ones? Many thanks

[Holger 0]

Hi Victor,Ground2K4 is a good choice for this kind of work but it all depends on your source data. If you have GIS data of a road network of good quality (i.e., better than the default network), you might want to have a look at Luis Sa's SBuilder (search the forum for a link). Someone else just sent me a preview of a great-looking road/stream network for a large area made "within minutes" in SBuilder.If you don't have any suitable GIS data then G2K4 with satellite or orthophoto background bitmaps are probably the way to go.For excludes you can work much faster with using DefArea, also by Christian Fumey. It can exclude entire LOD8 Cells or you can use it in-sim to exclude specific features.For LWM rivers I use "poly without shore" because otherwise you'll end up with pieces of shoreline where you move to the other side (there's a trick for avoiding those but it's pretty tedious). You don't necessarily need to have a shoreline but if you do you have to draw it in as a separate line on each shore. Whether you draw one long river or several smaller sections depends on whether you want the river to be mesh-clinging (without fixed elevation) or flattened. Fixed-elevation rivers need to be split into sections at suitable intervals (again, there's a work-around for that but it involves editing Ground2K4's .asm output code). If and where to split depends on the topography and match of the river with the terrain mesh. If you draw the river in sections you have to make sure that the end points (where the sections meet) are as close together as possible without overlapping. Zoom in as far as you can (turn off the background map) and use the point edit tool to move the points around. The more points you place along the river the less jagged it will become. It's very dependent on the shape of the river but mostly a matter of a bit of trial and error. Again, the move point and add point tools help with adjustments. As for Yellowstone: the area you pick is entirely your choice but I can tell you that someone else (not me) is working on Yellowstone N.P. and is pretty much done with it ;-) I don't think anyone is working on the Grand Teton image set; maybe you want to do that instead?Cheers, Holger

[victorwest2 0]

Many thanks for the reply, Holger. So someone is already doing Yellowstone. I better not start that one then! Perhaps I'll go for the Tetons. Or perhaps another area.