Beginner Question

[Guest Andy Parton]

Hi everyone,I'm fairly new to flight sim scenery design, but I've managed to create some photo scenery of an area using the SDK tools and a few other bits and pieces without any help so far.I have the scenery working and it looks good in FS2004. I created it from an aerial photo and created my own land/water mask and everything seems fine. The area has a tract of water between the mainland and a small island offshore, for which I created my L/W mask so I get reflective water between the two. However, I have a question regarding the L/W mask and the textures that resample creates :-Resample seems to create blank/black empty textures for the water areas between the two land masses, simply because my aerial photo has these areas coloured as black, and FS doesn't display the black textures because the L/W mask removes them in FS. What should I do with these textures ? Are they actually required by FS ? Should I delete them or just leave them there ?Thanks for reading and thanks for any help offered.Andy

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Hello Andy,Congratulations on making scenery and welcome to our club.When you create custom (photo-real) textures, they are assigned individually to each quadrant. Those black, or rather transparent, textures each go in a specific place in the Flight Simulator world. If you delete them, then there will be nothing to display there and Flight Simulator will show a gray square. So, please keep them.By the way, you are correct in referring to this as a land/water mask, but this may create confusion. In the official Microsoft documents, Land/Water Masks refer to certain specific types of polygons that are used in terrain design for displaying default land and water class.Whereas in custom textures, you would have the source image and an alpha channel, also known as a transparency mask, that for us is a black/white bitmap that determines the land and water areas of the source.Best regards.Luis

[Guest Andy Parton]

Thank you for your reply Luis.I'm sorry if it took so long - I always like to reply to say thanks for an answer, but my father passed away shortly after posting this and things are getting back to normal now.Looking at what you said, it looks obvious to me now. In the end I also tried deleting a texture file to see what happened, and sure enough, a grey square was there in the scenery.Thanks again. I'll certainly come back here if I have any more questions.Andy

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Very sorry for your loss, Andy. My most sincere condolences.Luis