Complete_Spangdahlem AB

[falcon409]

I have a few pads in the lower right that I have to add (just a cut n' paste function) and do the night map and it's ready. I could have spent a lot more time placing every little building, piece of equipment, trash can, vehicle, but at some point the fps would begin to really suffer and despite the fact that the ground image isn't super hi res, the eye fills in what isn't there and I think it looks pretty good over all.

[swimeye]

I think it is awesome. Great job Falcon409. :jump:

[Bjoern]

There's a tree blocking a (slightly misplaced) taxiway in the bootom part of the screenshot, Falcon. ;)
Did you fix trhat already.

Other than that, excellent work!

[Bone]

Very nice Ed...I'm itching to download it. I've already got my Spangdahlem repaints ready for my MAIW AI F-4's and F-16's.

[Dag]

I've been following your progress here Ed, outstanding work on an otherwise dead Spang scenery. Gonna get me this for sure, my type of scenery entirely :salute:

Many thanks

[falcon409]

There's a tree blocking a (slightly misplaced) taxiway in the bottom part of the screenshot, Falcon. ;)
Did you fix that already.
Other than that, excellent work!
Nope, Placing autogen can be very persnickity at times. I included a closeup shot of the photoimage in "Annotator" where I place the autogen. The small green squares are where trees should be placed. As you can tell. . .there's no trees in the taxiway. They sometimes just show up in the "general area" rather than exactly where you place them.

[Bjoern]

They sometimes just show up in the "general area" rather than exactly where you place them.

Oh dear...I'm so looking forward to that when doing a few sceneries on my own (well, at least one) with that technique... :kilroy::isadizzy: :/

[Skittles]

Oh dear...I'm so looking forward to that when doing a few sceneries on my own (well, at least one) with that technique... :kilroy::isadizzy: :/

You can always put down a little exclude mesh. A hassle but it works.

[skyblazer3]

Ed,

This is one of the best sceneries I've ever seen! Your work is, as always, incredible! You have real talent and know-how. I don't think I'll ever have your talent for this, but would you mind sharing a little know-how?

What steps do you take (big picture) when it comes to making a new scenery? Could you give a rough outline of your procedure? I don't need anything detailed, but I would love to know the steps you take to build such a masterpiece.

Also, how much of the area around the airfield do you decide to make photo-real?

Cheers,

Chris

[falcon409]

Ed,
This is one of the best sceneries I've ever seen! Your work is, as always, incredible! You have real talent and know-how. I don't think I'll ever have your talent for this, but would you mind sharing a little know-how?
What steps do you take (big picture) when it comes to making a new scenery? Could you give a rough outline of your procedure? I don't need anything detailed, but I would love to know the steps you take to build such a masterpiece.
Also, how much of the area around the airfield do you decide to make photo-real?
Cheers,
Chris
Sure Chris,
Normally, I look at what's available in satellite imagery, there are areas of the world where Hi-res is just very hit or miss and while I'd like to work those areas (Alaska is one), I just have to bypass and go somewhere else. Anyway, like in the case of Spangdahlem, it was a good enough resolution to give it a shot. I use SBuilderX to get the image and do all the excludes and compiles I need, and I use Paint Shop Pro for all my artwork.

Usually, once the image is downloaded and workable I bring it into PSP, color correct, make the blend (to soften the edges so it blends with the default) and also any night maps and water maps necessary. once all that is complete, I save everything back to SBuilderX, load that back up and run a "compile". SBX takes everything (the base image, the blend and various maps) and compiles all of that into one photo bgl.

From there, I drop the bgl file into it's own scenery folder and load up FSX. I can tell the second it shows on the screen if everything worked, lol. It's not uncommon to have to go back and tweak the color so that it comes as close as possible to the default.

As far as how much of the image I use. . .it just depends on how close the outer areas of the photo match what's in FSX. I normally keep the blend pretty close to the airport limits, but from time to time, there are some nice small houses or villages that are on the photo and nothing at all in the default and I'll include that to make it a bit more realistic, or the wooded areas in the photo come close to matching the same areas in the default, but I have to use a bit more than normal so they all mesh together. You just take it project by project really.

Beyond that, for the time being anyway, I use Instant Scenery for the objects I place. I try to stay with default, but there are times, like Spangdahlem, when they just don't look correct and you have to use outside object libraries.

For the AFCAD, I use AFX. . .I bought it when it first came out because at the time ADE was still in the beta stage in a way and not at all user friendly. . .AFX was very close in the way it functioned to Lee Swordy's excellent AFCAD program and so I went that way. I can work both ends with AFX moving FS9 AFCAD's in and exporting them as FSX. . .I'm happy with it and wouldn't switch now.

I guess that's about it for a quick overview. If ya have any other questions, just let me know.:salute:

[CheckSix]

Ed,

You are a veritable scenery wizard Sir, thank you very much!

[skyblazer3]

Ed,

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the explanation. I've been doing the same thing for my scenery, except that I do not export to a photo-editor in order to blend the image into the background. As far as I've figured out, the maps that Sbuilder uses are only square, correct? I can not crop the shape of the image to the shape of the airport? Thus far, my photo-real based airport sceneries end up as a big photo-real square tile that looks very out of place from the surrounding scenery.

How do you blend the colors to match the background? Also, when you make the night textures, do you just darken the day texture, or do you do something more complex?

Thanks again for the great explanation,

Chris

[Marlin]

I've been a way for a while and in that time I can see that you have been getting better and better at making these things. Congrats sir, your work is pretty amazing.

After I get this 'pausing' deal worked out of FSX, I just might have to start installing your work.

[falcon409]

. . . . .As far as I've figured out, the maps that Sbuilder uses are only square, correct? I can not crop the shape of the image to the shape of the airport?
That's correct Chris, to do anything more than just compile the photoimage, it has to be moved to an image editor, like PSP or Photoshop. It also is almost imperative that at the very least, whatever you use must be able to do layers.

Reason being that just for the "blend" I use 3 layers:
1) base image
2) solid black
3) the actual blend layer done in white
I use a freehand marquise (lasso tool) and draw around the image to encompass the area I want to keep, then I fill it with white, apply a gaussian blur and convert the entire thing to grayscale. Then I save that back to SBuilderX (as a separate image with a "_B" suffix).


. . . . .How do you blend the colors to match the background? Also, when you make the night textures, do you just darken the day texture, or do you do something more complex?
Chris
When I get the photo into PSP I usually have a screen shot I've taken of general default terrain that closely matches the area of the airport I'm working on, kinda like a color swatch. I keep that open and then start using the "color balance" function to work the colors until they're as close as I can get them. Normally, even if it isn't perfect, by the time you add the autogen and objects, your eye tends to melt the two together and just a slight off color won't even be noticeable.

Night Maps:
Again, I load the photoimage, add a layer of orange and a top layer of black. I move the slider for the orange back to about 15% to 20% (this give the light effects a bit of color rather than stark white). The black layer I slide back to only about 90%. Now I select the eraser tool, set the hardness to "0", and the opacity to 40% or 50% to start (if that's too much, I just hit undo and lower it even more). Doing the lighting is kinda at your own whim really. What you're doing is looking at the underlying image and imagining where the lights would most likely be and then "erasing" the black to expose the next layer (orange). With hardness at "0" and the opacity set at half or most likely less, what you get is a nice diffuse "aura" of light. It takes a bit of time, but this is one area that you can really play with a get some nice looks for night lighting.

When I'm done, I save this "layered" version with an "_N" suffix and save it back to SBX as a bitmap. More comes after that, But I don't want to overload this, lol.

Film at 11, lol:salute:

[halvar342]

Great work so far. I like that much cause Spangdahlem isnt far away from my in real life. Great work again, mate and thank you for making this. :salute:

[strykerpsg]

Great job Falcon! Takes me back to a time when I was a kid in Germany and the NATO jets would come flying in extremely low level, rattling windows, something most American households now only experience during airshows. Now, if someone could do Zweibrucken and a good RF-4C......

Matt

[Bjoern]

You can always put down a little exclude mesh. A hassle but it works.

Excludes are standard features if you don't want autogen all over the place.
But that annotator "bug" is...well...bugging me. Or does the AFX file (containing the excludes) automatically get higher priority?

[falcon409]

As long as you're working with "autogen", an exclude poly with always take it out. I don't know that the problems, if you want to call it that, with autogen popping up where you didn't place it, is a bug necessarily. Depending on what season you choose, the placement changes even in those cases. What's there in the Summer, may not be there in the fall.

Also, in the Annotator, you can select a "Group" or an "Individual" Tree. I tend to go with groups, because it fills the larger spaces better. That has a little to do with where these trees pop up as well. One little exclude poly here or there is no big deal really.

[Bjoern]

Thanks for the insight, Falcon!

[JoeW]

Normally excludes are named with 000 in the first part of the name. As in " 000_last_Exclude.bgl". This insures that the exclude will be read before everything else.

[skyblazer3]

Ed,

Thank you so much for the lessons on photo-real scenery. Your work is inspiring me to get in a bit over my head. I just finished my first paint job of an aircraft (Conrad's T-33), and now I'm slowly moving forward on the F-100 repaint.

However, this scenery stuff has really got my attention. I've been able to use SBuilder to create large areas of photo-real scenery no problem, but blending the photo-real with the default textures is giving me a real headache. I've read a very good tutorial on making photo-real scenery with Sbuilder, but I'm still not getting it.

Here is what I've produced so far:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4068/4636956905_6a19ccb88f.jpg

That was a layered image that I made in photoshop assuming that black was transparent in flight sim. I loaded up that image into Sbuilder and the compiled it as a BGL. Perhaps white is transparent? Perhaps a flattened image will not work?

Scenery noob,

Chris

[falcon409]

Hard to see what is going on in that pic really. If that's the result of the blend, the steps should be:
Import the bmp image into Photoshop
set a middle layer for "solid" black (0,0,0)
set a top layer for "solid" white (255,255,255)
On the top layer, using the lasso tool (freehand is easiest) draw around the area you want to preserve for the scenery and fill it with solid white. Do that for the other areas I see in that pic. When you have all the areas filled with white, apply a gaussian blur which will blur the edges of each area. You might have to play with the strength of the blur to get it right, you don't want a huge blur, just one that lightly smooths out the edges.

Now, make sure that all layers are solid color again so that what you have is an image that has a solid black background and white areas marking the ground cover you want.

Convert this image to a grayscale. Whatever you've named the image, now give it this extension (this is just a "what if") "groundphoto_B.tif". It must be saved as a grayscale with that "B" extension done just as I did it there and it must be saved as a "tif". It will probably ask you if you want to save as a single layer or whatever photoshop refers to a flattened image as. . .click yes and it will save it back to the "Work" file folder as a single layer tif image.

Now, when you load your project again and click the compile button, it will recompile the original photoimage with the "blend" you just did and the results will be a nicely meshed photoimage in FSX.


UPDATE:
I just noticed what you said on the last line. You don't load that image into SBuilderX, you load the original photoimage. Once it's loaded, click on the edge to hi-lite it and then compile. The compiler already knows to look for the various components, it will find the "_B.tif" image you just did and compile it along with the original image.

[skyblazer3]

I can't believe it! It WORKS! THANK YOU - THANK YOU - THANK YOU. It works wonderfully!

I did not follow your procedure exactly (as for the ordering of the layers), but I did end up with a black image with white spots for transparency. I placed the photo as the background layer, then a white layer, then a black layer on top. I then drew black onto the black layer which revealed the white underneath. Applied the blur, converted to gray scale and saved as TIF. Thank you so much Ed -- I can tell that this is going to be fun.

Many thanks after a day of head-aches,

Chris

[falcon409]

lol, "IT'S ALIIIIIVE", lol, good for you Chris. Once you do a few of those, it'll become second nature, then the biggest problem is finding tiles suitable to use that are sharp enough to look good as ground textures.

Post some screens too when you have time in a new thread so it doesn't get lost in here.:salute:

[strykerpsg]

Falcon,

Can you list all of the bases you've ported over or fixed for FSX? As a former Air Force brat, I like flying out of bases my Dad was stationed at or had visited during his twenty year career. Also like flying out of bases I have visited during my stint in the Army. I think the work you do is phenominal and wanted to say thank you.

Matt