Near-coast Light Blue Water and Mesh

[Guest vastunghia]

Hi guys,I created a LOD12 mesh scenery for a small island (digitized a map, created a grays-layered bmp image, converted to DEM etc) and I'm quite satisfied with the results. I'm using LOD12 (against LOD10) because terrain is almost plane except for some very small "canyons" which look bad under LOD10.Unofortunately, coasts do not show up properly, they're too "steepy", though even when viewing the bgl file in TMFViewer, they look correctly shaped - that is, they dive in water more gradually.I would like you to take a look at some sample pictures:http://simflying.de-zordo.it/prodotti/licd/screens.htmlToday, being wondering about the way to make the water look light blue near coasts, I mentally turned up to two solutions that might solve my problems:1) Using Coast-Line-Maker to redefine coast-lines might tell FS where to start drawing meshes actually. Or2) Maybe FS uses some bathymetric data so that, in order to go up from, say, -2000 to 10 meters, it is somewhat forced to do it muuuch steepy. In this case, how could I modify these data? Simply adding some -10, -20, -30 elevation spots around the island? Anyone tried?Thank you in advance,Sergio De ZordoISD Project Member

[Guest vastunghia]

Hi,I did my homework, so let me answer myself:light blue water is obtained using gray-colors insted of B&W texture masks.So water is ok. Now about coastal mesh. Too steepy. Any clue?:-)Sergio

[Holger 0]

Hi Sergio:that's a nice-looking island you've got there ;-)Water colors can also be changed by making waterclass replacement files with one of the utilities (Ground2K, Landclass Assistant, EZ-Landclass, etc.).FS doesn't use water depth data as all oceans are flattened with Land-Water-Mask (LWM) files to zero. It seems like your island does exists in FS albeit with different shorelines. At the edge of those default shorelines is where the flatten switch overrides your LOD12 mesh. Here's a recent post about the same problem and options for solving it: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=15659&page=Cheers, Holger

[Guest vastunghia]

Holger,thank you a lot for your help, and let me apologize for writing so late. I found that deleting (or renaming) SceneryEurwSceneryHP951190.bgl, my coasts show up just the way they ought to. Actually I realized that, without this action, my mesh was being brutally truncated at some spots by the LWM.This is quite a bit annoying inconvenience though, as my scenery was (and still is in facts) intended for (free) release to the public. So we'll have to think about some Installer trick to get rid of that bgl - which seems to cover nothing but water, except for my small island. This is some additional homework for the guy compiling Installer routines down here at ISD Project! ;-)Lately I've been busy trying to understand all features of Ground2k4, and I must say that I found editing coasts with this powerful tool being pretty much easier than with other programs such as Coast-Line-Maker etc.Just two issues: WaterClass replacement cannot work for me as WaterClass Areas are way too big (1.2km x 1.2km) if compared to my island (13km x 7km): this makes it impossible to have light blue water for, say, one specific beach. I hoped that I would be able to define color changes for water within small areas, around 100m x 100m, using VTP2 Polys. But my guess seems wrong as I can only use a "Reef"-textured Landclass VTP2 Poly which of course looks like a ground textured polygon floating on water. Very bad-looking.Last, I've been trying to obtain default-looking coasts AND Custom-Textured ground at the same time, like PTSIM made with their tremendous Madeira Islands, but no matter which method I use - be it a VTP2 Poly "without shore" and a Coastline on it, or a VTP2 Poly "with shore" - FS2k4 will stop loading the scenery somewhere near 50% and suddenly exit. Whilst, as soon as I get rid of the Custom-Textured Poly, everything goes plain and smooth. This is so weird.Oh, well. :-)SergioISD Project MemberP.s. My guess about using grays in the bmp mask to obtain different "depths" of water and, consequently, different water colors, turned out to be completely wrong.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Sergio.You cannot mix texture references of #252 or #253 ( CUSTOM ) with other texture references in the same BGL. That might be a problem you are having. Just keep CUSTOM to itself. You can do this in Ground2K by saving the LWM as a different name ( "CUSTOMwhatever.LWM" ) and alter the file saving preferences to reflect a new BGL name that will display the CUSTOM polys.=========================In a post to the Scenery forum:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=15902&page=I discussed how FS9 does allow remeshing... but until someone automates the code generation, no one will do much with it.Basically, you can make a square, north-oriented poly whose verticies match the mesh verticies. Then each vertex can be assigned an elevation. A single LOD8 Cell would need 255 x 255 LWM polys... but if we only need to remesh areas such as your coastline. A single LOD13 Area would need 7 x 7 square polys to remesh it. I haven't experimented much with this, but it should work.Dick

[Guest vastunghia]

Dick,your advice sounds to be the correct way out! I'll try this as soon as I get some spare time, and come back to you with the result.Thanks a lot,SergioISD Project Member

[Guest jimkeir]

Hi.I have a prototype of a tool which will automatically create remeshes (and everything else) for an area, given an elevation map as input. If you'd like to try it out there's a copy at http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/Strip.zip and examples at http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/Volcano.zip and http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/Brunt.zip - this last one includes remesh.Bear in mind this is still under development, so there are lots of rough edges and no docs, but it might just solve your immediate problem.I don't know how it will work for photoreal scenery, but you should at least be able to take the generated remesh BGL and put it in your scenery folder.You might also find a use for this : http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/LWMViewer.zip , which will show you the exact contents of the default MS files. This may help you to see which parts need to be rebuilt manually, if 'strip' fails.Feedback would be welcome for both programs.Regards,Jim Keir.