Water colour with photoreal scenery texture.

[Daviddv 0]

I hope this doesn't seem too stupid a question for the scenery gurus, but I have installed some photoreal scenery and I want to change the colour of the water in some estuaries from what I think is an unnatural green to a darker blue/grey.I have viewed the textures having read them in using DXTBMP and saving them in a temp area, but I don't really want to have to change the textures pixel by pixel.I presume that waterclass route is not the right approach.Any ideas would be welcome.David

[Guest jimkeir]

Hi.You're right in saying that waterclass isn't going to help. Waterclass is used to pick a texture for LWM water polygons such as the default lakes and sea. Most photoscenery won't come with new detailed water masks, just using a picture of the water instead.I think you've got two options, neither of them particularly quick. First, you could create LWMs for the area. This will give you 'proper' FS water with the usual effects, landable by floatplanes etc. and textured according to the waterclass. If it's a small area it shouldn't take too long using something like SBuilder or G2K4. Then you can tweak the waterclass data pretty quickly until you're happy with it.Second, you could modify the images as you mentioned. If you've got some decent software, it shouldn't be *too* painful. Most newish paint programs have a feature where you can select areas by colour, with a variation. You could use this to select everything watery (blue/green), feather it so you don't get a sharp edge and then use one of the other tools (hue, levels etc.) to modify the water's colour. You'd need to do this for all of the affected tiles, and be careful to match the colours between them.Cheers,Jim Keir

[arno 1]

I think what you can best do depends on how the scenery is made. Do you think the water is just in the photo now or does it look like the default MS water? In that case the photos probably use an alpha channel to let the default water come through it.If that is the case you should be able to change the water color by adjusting the waterclass of the area, but if the water is on the photos itself then you would have to repaint it there. As Jim pointed out this can be quite some work, depending on the size of the area.I don't think that making an LWM scenery will work, as most photoreal scenery is made with resample and this will cover the LWM polygons you made. Only if the photoreal is placed with VTP polygons this is an option.

[Daviddv 0]

Thanks for the two suggestions.The water is definitely in the photo (it doesn't look like the default MS water at all). In fact there is a very sharp boundary where it joins the sea, and this looks most unnatural. Is it possible to get the polygons to have higher priority than the basic textures, and therefore be visible?Perhaps I will have to experiment.David

[arno 1]

If the photos have been placed with resample that is not possible unfortunately. The photos then have priority over all other mesh polygons.