Scenery not showing correctly in FS9 -Help please!

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
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APereira
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 7:38 pm
Location: Uruguay

Scenery not showing correctly in FS9 -Help please!

Post by APereira » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:20 pm

Hello all,

Just a quick introduction, my name's Alan, I'm from Uruguay and for all Portuguese forum members reading this, yes, my surname is Portuguese...;-)

About a month ago I started using SBuilder after having spent years swearing at other programmes which try in a non-user-friendly way to generate photoreal scenery.

Unfortunately my latest work on SBuilder has been slightly unsuccessful.

Hopefully by what you see in the attached screenshots I've figured out what needs to be done in SBuilder to make a photoscenery. I'd be thankful in hearing anyone's advice of course!

Objectives & Method: Create a photoreal island located in its real location. For this I had to define the photo coverage, add land and water fill where necessary, add a polygon which would exclude the default FS coastline for the island (this polygon for exclusion was removed from the screenshots for clarity).

Details on the problem:
Background picture set, 4.8m/px photo tiles created, excluding polygon created (affecting Layer 8 - coastline), land and water fills added.

Result from SBuilder: 3 bmp texture tiles with their correct alpha masks, the FILL, Exclude and scenery BGLs. Textures and Scenery files went into their respective folders.

Result in FS9: Scenery located and defined inj the Scenery Library. Scenery is visible in FS9 but it has never updated the textures whenever I made any change. For some reason FS9 has a copy of two textures inside some cache and no matter if I DELETE or replace the files in the scenery's "Textures" folder, FS9 keeps on loading the same old textures, with no alpha mask, it never loads the third photo tile I made either. It's like some of the LOD13 tiles became "untouchable". Even if I put land fill it still creates water...

Note: Screenshots reveal and hide the 'fill' tiles since they cover all the other things like photo tiles, etc.

I'd be very grateful if anyone can give me some suggestion as to how to proceed.

Thanks in advance!


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Alan Pereira-Pierce
CX-NUD

scott967
Posts: 67
Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2004 5:08 am
Location: O'ahu Hawai'i

Post by scott967 » Thu Mar 15, 2007 10:24 pm

Hello (Hola?0

There are 2 methods of making photo scenery. Most tools create photoscenery using the reasample sdk tool. this scenery replaces the normal terrain scenery.

Sbuilder uses a different method, using VTP polygons with photo textures assigned to them. this way the photo scenery co-exists with other terrain scenery, following the layering priority rules.

One effect of this difference, is that your texture bitmaps have to be placed into the
scenery\world\texture
folder, not
Addon scenery\Islas2\texture
which appears to be what you are doing in your shots. Probably you put the first set of textures in the right folder, but not your new ones!

scott s.
.

APereira
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 7:38 pm
Location: Uruguay

Post by APereira » Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:29 pm

Hello,

Thanks Scott for your suggestion, that did the trick with updating the textures, no doubt...

Now the problems still remaining are the fact that no matter what I put on the upper right-hand LOD tile, it will not display anything at all i.e. if in that LOD tile I added a LWM poly or whatever it won't appear (and this is visible in my previous screenshots, where the Northern tip of the island is chopped off.

To solve the sea texture in the BMPs displaying as "land" I added a LWM polygon, but still, I don't get it, since I specified a "Land" fill underneath the island, I cannot manage to make a smooth merging of the island's coast with the water around it.

Which brings me to the next question: how do you create a photorealistic coast using SBuilder? As far I can see, if say you have a photo tile showing coast, a "land" fill for that same LOD tile, when we look over the area where the texture's alpha mask says "transparent", what gets displayed is the underlying "land" fill and not the sea.
A LWM polygon can be added following the coastline as accurately as possible, but this wouldn't allow coastlines which merge smoothly using a blurred alpha texture...

How can it be done then??

Thanks very much...

Regards,

Alan Pereira-Pierce
CX-NUD

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