scenery builder

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
Lurch
Posts: 33
Joined: Sat Mar 19, 2005 10:31 pm

Post by Lurch » Sun Apr 03, 2005 10:19 am

Hi Luis,

In the meantime i had also thought of the strategy of making a separate land mask file and then did the photos at level-7 and the Water mask. Now the river and water show exactly where theyre supposed to be. The -9999 setting for the land should do the trick without messing up the surrounding terrain.

I just realized that i have been doing the photos and river polys at the same time

The only problem left is that the old FS9 shoreline shows up on top of both the land and water. If the FS9 River shoreline is at level 8, how do i get rid of it? Will renaming the files in a alphabetical sequence solve that?

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Sun Apr 03, 2005 10:25 am

Layers define the order in which Flight Simulator applies the textured polygons to the ground and in which phase of the texture building process they are applied.
• Layers 0 to 3 are applied in the water texture layer. These are applied before the water texture is masked into the land texture. These polygons appear only in the water and are clipped by the land portion of a texture.
• Layers 4 to 7 are in the land texture layer. These textures are applied to the land texture before the water texture is masked in. Polygons used at these levels appear on the land texture but are clipped by the water portions. For this reason, airport skirtings and park polygons were placed in layer 4.
• Layers 8 and above (the number of layers is capped at 100) are applied to the texture after the land and water are masked together. Polygons applied at this level appear over both the land and water portions of the texture. Shoreline polygons were placed at level 8 to provide a blending effect between the land and the water.


Hi,

That is from the MS Terrain SDK and it explains why you are getting the results you describe.

You could define several strategies depending on the particularities of your area:

One possibility is to make a BGL file with one rectangle polygon of type LWM = land and altitude = 1999. The polygon should coincide with the rectangle of your bitmap. Generate that file and rename it as 1_land.BGL. Then generate the river polygons LWMs and rename the file as 2_river.BGL. Then generate your VTP photo BGL with layer 5 (for example) and rename its as 3_photo.BGL. Note the alphabetical order for the names of the files. FS will process the files by that order. Read the SDK bit again and try to understand my suggestion on that basis.

Another possibility is to divide your project (and your raw bitmap) in 2 projects - project A and project B. Project A will cover land only (layer 4 up to 7) and project B to water only (layer 3). Bitmaps A and B will have alpha masks which will be the negative of each other (opaque areas in A are fully tranparent in B and vice versa).

Luis

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:03 pm

Hi,

Please read in the SB help (or search in this forum) for:

VTP exclusion

Coexist/Replace

Luis

Lurch
Posts: 33
Joined: Sat Mar 19, 2005 10:31 pm

Post by Lurch » Mon Apr 04, 2005 9:32 am

Hi Luis,
Tried a couple things and finished my project exactly the way I wanted.

The Sbuilder program works perfectly. More versatile than anything i've used so far.

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