Photo Scenery

[Guest Richard Hill]

I have a few questions!1. I have my entire state of SID State Area Mapping files that are 10,000 x 10,000 feet. 5,000 x 5,000 pixel 24 bit immages. 2. I want to place photo immages of all airports only! Is there a minimum of area coverage?I want to use each individual photo, or should I merge them into say, 7.5 minute Quads of 5 x 5 immages, or should i use each and its coordinates seperatly?Richard;

[scott967 62]

In FS9, you either create photoscenery tiles, which must fill exact dimensions of any number of LOD13 areas, or you create a vector poly with the photo as the fill texture. Keep in mind unless you create 5 seasons plus night, the textures will only show during the day, and of course, the same one all year. It's probably best to scale the photos to 4.8m / pixel prior to atttempting to use them. Check out terrabuilder for the first method and ground2k4 or sbuilder for the second. There's some other options that give higher resolution, but you might want to try either of these first. These "other" options involve creating 3d objects that are single surface and are positioned right over the "ground" sort of like a sheet.In FSX, it is easier to use a source photo of arbitrary dimension, and the FSX resample program seems to figure it out. I don't know if a few big photos or many small ones make a difference. There's also a compression option in FSX resample that you might try. You need FSX Deluxe to get the FSX SDK which contains the reasmple program. Earlier versions of resample useful for FS9 are available from MS or around the net.In all cases, if you want "wet" water you must create alpha masks for the source photos with the water areas masked off. If you have the FSX deluxe SDK, or download the FS9 terrain SDK, under creating custom terrain it has a tutorial for doing photo scenery.scott s..

[Guest Richard Hill]

Scott;I read in the SDK 1.19 Meter per pixel is best. That would be about 2556 pixels per image. I will have to check to see what area LOD18 covers. I don't want it to be any larger than needed to cover each airport.Richard