SBX-New Landclass Not Appearing Over Photo??

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
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boleyd
Posts: 402
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 10:57 pm
Location: USA

SBX-New Landclass Not Appearing Over Photo??

Post by boleyd » Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:33 am

The water area of photo scenery of San Francisco's upper bay is of poor quality (color bands). I want to use Tiger polygons to use the original FSX water landclass. No problems using and compiling the shape files from USGS. The problem is that the new water landclass does not appear. So I created a very large polygon and gave it an ice field landclass to make it stand out. It went beyond the photo areas. It appeared ok ONLY in the non-photo areas. It is the only BGL in a scenery folder that is at the number 1 priority in the Scenery Library list. If I remove the photo scenery the full ice landclass appears in its expected shape. Therefore, it seems that photo scenery has some higher priority than synthetic landclass. Looking at the SDK I have not seen anything that relates to this. ????

Dick Boley near 5G8

rhumbaflappy
Posts: 420
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:11 pm

Post by rhumbaflappy » Sat Mar 24, 2007 5:04 pm

Hi Dick.

In order to get FSX water or land vector polys to show while using photoreal, you need to use a blend mask to create a "hole" in the photoreal. Blend masks can also create transparency.

A blend mask can be an alpha channel or can be a separate greyscale, 8-bit, bitmap or tiff.

The FSX photoreal watermask is only to create wave action and specular highlights of the <i>photoreal</i> water. In your case, it sounds like you don't like the photoreal water, and want ot use the default FSX waterclass on a water poly.

Your water vector poly can be slightly oversized, as the photoreal ( with it's "blend hole" ) will cover up the unneeded excess water. Put both the photoreal and the vector BGLs in the same scenery folder.

Usually a single alpha channel will be used as a photoreal watermask. What probably want is to use the single alpha channel as a blend mask, with value "0" ( black ) as the hole. To do that, you need to add a line to your INF file ( SOURCE section ):

Channel_BlendMask = 3

This forces the blendmasking to the #1 alpha channel. Greyscale values other than black, will be shades of transparency, allowing you to blend the photoreal into the default landclass/waterclass underneath.

By default, Channel_WaterMask = 3, which just gives wave action and specular highlights.

Dick

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