Terra Firma Ground Detail.

[Mithrin]

G'day everyone and Happy Easter to everyone posting here at Sim-Outhouse. May peace and happiness prevail. :D

You gotta love a 3 day long weekend. I found myself fiddling with textures and especially with the detail1.bmp texture. You know, the one that is activated when you have the land detail texture checked in your FSX scenery settings.

I have used quite a few different detail1.bmp textures for both FS9 and FSX. Some were good, some were not so good and many of those seemed to be aimed at achieving a grassy look. Now certainly this looks great on certain parts of the terrain but I can't say I liked it on dirtpatches, rocks etc.etc. So today I loaded up some old landtextures I did for another game called Morrowind and I started messing around with it trying to create a texture with more...well..texture hehe yet it needed to be a seamless tile and shouldn't be noticable repetative. I kind of like the result so in case anyone else would like to use it. Also please keep in mind that I am what you'd call a virtual bushflyer I guess. I don't fly around cities much so the result over such areas may be less desirable. However I don't think it looks that bad.

Then another thing. I know there are some super high rez detail1.bmp textures out there. However, I kept the texture size at 1024 x 1024. I think this texture is meant to enhance the underlying textures, not dominate it and by sticking to a relatively low resolution it will blend in a lot better in my own opinion.

For now you can download it from here but this file should also be up on avsim in a couple of hours. Make sure to read the included readme file.
http://mithrin.net/modules.php?name=Downloads

Then here are a couple of screenshots to compare how the sim looks withouth the land detail texture activated and how it looks with my new texture in place.

Plains - Off (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail01-1.jpg)
Plains - On (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail01-2.jpg)
Aeropelican Hangars- Off (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail02-1.jpg)
Aeropelican Hangars - On (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail02-2.jpg)
Aeropelican Grass- Off (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail03-1.jpg)
Aeropelican Grass - On (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail03-2.jpg)
Arid Terrain - Off (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail04-1.jpg)
Arid Terrain - On (http://www.mithrin.net/flightsimflicks/repaints/TerraFirmaGroundDetail04-2.jpg)

[Anneke]

Very neat, thanks this was what I was looking for!:ernae:

[hobofat]

much more subtle than other ones, I like this! just enough to take away some of the fakey look, but not so much that it looks worse than before!

[Mithrin]

File is now up at Avsim.

Anneke, bedankt. Lemme know if you have any trouble with it. I've heard one report now where someone experiences a grainy effect when flying at around 1500 feet. I think this really depends on your AA and Anisotropic settings. For me I run both those settings at 16X so I didn't really notice the effect. If anyone else is running it lower and can't crank it up higher without losing performance then I can offer a slightly softer variant that should get rid of most of the troubles. ;)

Thanks for the replies both of you!:ernae: