Tangier Island

[falcon409]

Well, I had seen some interest a long time ago about Tangier Island, one of those forgotten small airports and now that I have an interest in photoimagery for ground textures I figured I'd give it a shot. The texture was easy to set up and drop in place, but the problem has become, how to get rid of the default Island. I found some info which said basically cover the area with a hydro-poly. . .draw another poly around the new Island shoreline, set that as a "hole", click on the hydro-poly as the parent-poly and presto. . .you've covered the old island with water and replaced it with the new photoreal image which basically fills the "hole" you made. . . .wellllll. . .no. lol

I've done everything just as I've done for all the other photoreal airports in that I drew a land mask and saved it. . .did a water mask and saved it, went back into SBuilderX, made the "map" active and clicked on compile, which takes the photo image and combines it with the land mask and water mask to produce an Island. Now none of that is working like it did for the other 16 airports I've done this way. . . .who knew? lol, lol

Film at 11, lol

[JoeW]

Falcon ......
Exclude all first, that should get rid if the original. I'm very interested in this as I was gonna do it too. Very interesting place. Just PM'd Jim D about this the other day. Look at the nearest airports and throw that in as well.

[harleyman]

I love Tangier island.

Have flown into it several times

Used to vacation at nearby Smith Island ( no strip there though!

[jdhaenens]

I concur on the "Throw out everything and start over" for Tangiers Island. I really couldn't tell from Google earth what was above ground or under water. I must've been the only guy that didn't know about the Island.:icon_lol:

Jim

[harleyman]

Best crabs in the world found right there....:bump:

[falcon409]

Falcon ......
Exclude all first, that should get rid if the original. I'm very interested in this as I was gonna do it too. Very interesting place. Just PM'd Jim D about this the other day. Look at the nearest airports and throw that in as well.
Well Joe. . .There is no option in the newest version of SBuilderX for "exclude all". You can exclude individual items and there's a long list so I won't go through them here, but a generic "exclude" nope. Now if I knew what landclass I was working with, there is an "exclude" that permits me to exclude LC and that might work, but I have no idea what LC they used in that area. Still working on it.

[jdhaenens]

I've had success excluding the water poly, then building it back using the photoscenery as a guide. The problems come in when the mesh does not cooperate and you end up with mountains of water.

[falcon409]

I've had success excluding the water poly, then building it back using the photoscenery as a guide. The problems come in when the mesh does not cooperate and you end up with mountains of water.
This has become a frustrating exercise in futility, lol. I'm sure this is nothing new to those who do this all the time, but for a novice it's a daunting task to get your head around what it is that's actually the main problem as no amount off excludes has any effect on the Island, I throw everything at it and it just sits there. . .glaring at me, lol. It's kinda funny. . .but not really, lol.

[falcon409]

The last thing I tried was to open SBuilderX, get my background image in place, set the QMID grid to 11. . .drew an exclude area to that size (luckily the Islands fall just inside the grid area) and set it to exclude all water polys. Compiled the bgl, loaded it into the Addon Scenery/scenery folder and loaded up FSX. . . .nothing. . .it's still sitting there, unmoved by my attempts to blow it out of the water, lol. Very close to moving to a project where no water is involved.

[kjb]

I was thinking of that as a possible next project after seeing the AOPA article (http://www.aopa.org/members/files/pilot/2009/september/drcoptr0909.html) in the September issue.

If you decide to drop the project I might take a stab at it, otherwise I'll move on to something else after KARR and KSDL are finished.

[falcon409]

You can have it. I don't know what the secret is. . .maybe you know and can knock this out in no time. When you're finished I'd like to know how you did it because everything I've read tells me that depending on who you talk to, it's done a different way. I've researched at least four different forums or articles specifically about either creating an Island or removing an Island and tried all their steps, each one saying theirs works perfectly and not once did it show any signs of working.

Good Luck

[kjb]

The closest I've come to a similar situation was doing the coastline for KBLI and I don't remember what I did there. It's a challenge (read: royal pain in the fanny) :icon_lol:

[falcon409]

The closest I've come to a similar situation was doing the coastline for KBLI and I don't remember what I did there. It's a challenge (read: royal pain in the fanny) :icon_lol:
I agree, on one hand it seems infinitely more difficult than it has to be, but then again, this is Microsoft we're talking about here. Good Luck!

[Meshman]

The problem for the initial exclusion was that it overlapped the QMID 11 cell, I believe. Here's my approach; make a smallish rectangular exclusion from the landmass out into the water. Use the Exclude_All_Water_Polygons tag in SBX, save compile, copy to something other than \Addon Scenery\scenery and start up FSX. The area around the island *should* now be all land, fitting a QMID 11 boundary. Also, shorelines would need to be excluded, as they are not a part of water but a seperate scenery item.

Once the land area is exposed the task becomes introducing more accurate water back into the sim. There's two ways to approach this. Make a new water poly that extends from outside the QMID 11 boundary and then make new new landmass poly set to be a hole within the new water poly introduced. The other method, which I use, is to introduce new water polys that by their own shape make the new detailed landmass. The polys are squared at the QMID boundary and detailed (very detailed!) along the inward side.

Why do I make many vs. just cutting a hole? Visualize an inland in Hawai'i, other than The Big Island. Trying to make a hole poly in SBX in one sitting wasn't an option, as things like sleep would interrupt the process. Making many water polys accomplished the same task and could be done in more than one sitting. Also, having many water polys means I can easily break them into lines and make the detailed areas into things like coastlines, of differing textures. I can take the broken out lines, trim them down and remake them as beach polys. It just offered more possibilities to me, without going through the ordeal of duplicating something I had already done.

I can dig out a picture from the archives that illustrates my methodology. But for an area to be covered by photo textures the process still works much the same; old water out, new water in and some format of detailing the land mass to match up to the photo work's accuracy.

[falcon409]

Success!! Now I just have to see if the rest will work as well. I ended up making a folder for "Tangier Island" and a scenery subfolder with the exclude file in there, activated it in the scenery library, loaded the sim and PRESTO!!

[JoeW]

Great ....... U're off and running.

[falcon409]

Great ....... U're off and running.
Yea, makes me wonder now if the other things I was doing wouldn't have also worked had I used this method (making a seperate folder for this scenery and activating it).

[falcon409]

A few more shots, I reinstalled the photoimage and the hydropoly from early this morning to see what I would have gotten. . .I guess that answered the question I had. I was a lot closer than I thought.

[falcon409]

Ok, I've gotta stop here for a few hours, but I have succeeded to a point. . .the Island is now close to what I want, but there's also another problem. . .take a look at the pic. It's pretty obvious, lol

[Matt Wynn]

nice work falcon :applause: bloomin' shorelines i see pesky things :icon_lol: while we're talking scenery is there hedgerow object anywhere? or a way to place one, reason i ask is i just started my Baxterley farm mini-project and theres a hedgerow divide between hangar and apron...

[Railrunner130]

Very cool! I've been over Tangier several times but never had the opportunity to stop.

[falcon409]

Can anyone tell me how detailed I need to be when making the land mask? These Islands have many intricate inland waterways. . .do I need to draw around those when doing the white mask for the land area or just a solid white around the landmass and then come back with details when I do the black mask for the water?

[kjb]

What I've been doing in PSP is selecting the water area with the freehand selection tool on a separate layer, then filling that with black. The original photo is on the background layer. Once I have all of my water placed I fill the background layer with white and merge the layers.

[falcon409]

What I've been doing in PSP is selecting the water area with the freehand selection tool on a separate layer, then filling that with black. The original photo is on the background layer. Once I have all of my water placed I fill the background layer with white and merge the layers.
Ahh ok, well, That would have been my first option because it would keep me from doing what I'm having to do which is to hand draw the water areas. The water in my image isn't defined enough for the selection tool to pick it up. Not a problem, I'll be finished with the hand drawing before long anyway. Thanks.

[falcon409]

Well, it took the better part of the day to get to this point, but I've learned a lot too, so it's all good.

[jdhaenens]

That is looking really good.

[falcon409]

Thanks Jim. The one thing I need to work on now is the shoreline. The image looks fine and with vegetation, boats, aircraft, houses, etc, it should make it a pretty nice airport to fly out to, but the landmass looks disconnected from the water and I assume that laying in a shoreline will cause that to look a lot better. Right now, if you watch the wave motion it's moving "under" the island, rather than moving up to the beach area. I lined in a small section of shoreline, but I put it in clockwise and it needs to be reversed so that the water edge is to the water, lol right now it's reversed. Another day though, I'm goin ta bed.

We've got some weather moving in from the west and just over the Red River. Doesn't look like any of it goes near your area, but who knows.

Take care.

[kjb]

Doesn't FSX allow blending the water to the land? That might help.

[jdhaenens]

Yes it does. That requires a multipart .inf file for resample. Quite simply, instead of having only a single bit water mask mask (black or white), you also generate a blend mask. It's example 5 in the Terrain and scenery SDK

[falcon409]

Yes it does. That requires a multipart .inf file for resample. Quite simply, instead of having only a single bit water mask mask (black or white), you also generate a blend mask. It's example 5 in the Terrain and scenery SDK
Actually SBuilderX already does that in combination with the photoimage. I build one mask in PSP with a white knockout for the landmass, blur the edges (gaussian blur) and name that with a _B extension on the end of the file name. Then I do another layer with the detailed water areas and name it with a _W on the end. When I go back into SBX and compile the photoimage, it combines all three. The blur mask is what I've been using to make the photoreal images blend better into the default. With these island though I wanted some wave action around the edges and the shoreline is giving me that. I just had it turned around so that the wave action was moving out rather than in.

Also I looked at other Island areas in FSX, and they look no different than mine in that the water motion appears to move under rather than stopping at the edge. I think you just don't notice it unless you sit and watch it for a period of time, which you wouldn't do in normal flying. No one pays attention to it really, they just know that, there's the Island, set up for a landing, lol.

[Railrunner130]

That looks really nice. Any plans to do either the Delmarva peninsula or the Chesapeake?

[falcon409]

This is about the largest thing I've attempted so far and depending on how this turns out, I may look at others in the area. I won't get into anything larger than local airports and the area immediately around them though, I know that. This is a bit different because it's a relatively small chain of Islands and I was able to pull it off in one shot.

I'm populating the main Island with houses and buildings right now, anything that isn't seasonal is going in, including boats, docks, etc. I'll have to figure out the Autogen Annotator at some point because I want the vegetation I put in here to be seasonal.

[falcon409]

Ok, got the Annotator working. Gonna take some times as it's slow going even though I can create whole areas of autogen, it doesn't seem to placing vegetation in all the areas I designate, so I'll have to keep working on it. Getting there though.