North Shore – Days 9 & 10

It’s been hot here in Portland this weekend. Beastly, in fact–so much so that I decided to pop a cold one and stay inside to model little buildings. The other structure at Plum Island airport came into being yesterday; the “terminal” (such as it is). It’s one of those weathered old New England buildings that looks appropriately wind-battered and salty, and it was a lot of fun to model it.

One of the challenges when using even good photos for 3D model texture sheets is that you can’t always get the angle you need. Case in point: I had a clear shot of the back porch of the building when I photographed, but it’s got a deep overhang, and was cluttered with lawn furniture, a grill, etc.

To get a clean version of the back wall minus the flotsam, I had to do a lot of Photoshop cloning magic and blending of textures. The final texture sheet for the back wall looks like this:

You’ll notice that I left in the lawn furniture and grill reflection in the window. I’m planning on adding those items if time permits, and I thought it’d be fun to have them reflected for just that little extra bump of reality.

I’m almost done with the building, just need to add some vegetation, a big tree, a flagpole, and some assorted bits around the perimeter. This is how it looks at this point, in FSX:

It’d be really easy to get lost adding every little detail, and since this is a very small field, I’m delving farther into the fiddly little bits than I usually do. Hopefully this little building will be done in the next day or so.

North Shore – Days 7 & 8

Having put the bulk of the phototerrain to bed, it’s time for some modeling! This is in many ways my favorite part of every project — seeing a collection of photos become 3D objects that bring the digital world to life. I’m not planning on building too many custom objects outside of the airport itself, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a better version of the Rt. 1 bridge over the Merrimac river. So, my first object is just that – a recreation of the auto and railroad bridges.

Modeling the bridge presented a challenge: do I create a high-res version of the road surface that looks good on the model but doesn’t match the surrounding terrain, or do I cut a chunk out of the photoscenery and use the softer, blurrier surface that’s guaranteed to blend nearly perfectly? This is the sort of decision a modeler faces constantly. I applied the distance test to come up with a solution – at what distance is this model intended to be seen in the sim? With the exception of nut jobs who enjoy flying under them, most people will see this bridge from a thousand or more feet as they approach or leave 2B2. In the end, I decided that the blend was more important than a crisp texture up close. Notice as well that the bridge deck is hardened, so the default AI traffic can actually use it. Seeing little cars zipping over it adds that little extra jolt of reality.

When the bridges were done, I moved to the airport itself to begin building. First up: the most prominent structure on the field, the big shiny dome of the hangar. I got great shots of it during my visit, so modeling wasn’t too tough. There are so few objects on this field that I decided I could spend more polygons than I normally would to build each of them, and by so doing atone for that blurry bridge deck. Ordinarily, I might just use a section of a cylinder for the hangar, but I decided to model the actual ridges in the metal.

Now we’re talking! I love this kind of detail. Matching the texture perfectly took a bit of futzing around, but it was worth it. I also included semi-transparent windows in the hangar doors, through which can be seen the wooden 2×4 supports for the door frames. This addition caused me some grief with transparency, until I figured out that I had to use a separate material for the windows in order to prevent draw-call confusion and z-ordering problems. Now that it’s sorted, things are good.

Don’t worry about the ground, by the way. I’ve got plans for much more realistic hard surfaces. This is just the stock apron texture here.

North Shore – Day 6

I’ll say this once (again) and then I’m done: I hate autogen annotating. It’s tiresome, boring, unrelenting work. At least when I’m done the result is fun to look at, though. I spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 hours today with my head down, drawing thousand

s of little rectangles on the screen. The result (below) is the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. For my money, you can’t beat a nice high-res aerial shot with carefully aligned autogen overlaid. Anyway, I’m too strung out to say much more. Think I’ll go have a beer and celebrate the birth of a town.

North Shore, days 3 & 4

Things are moving along nicely with the aerial shots. Having finally worked out a good set of summer textures, yesterday and today was all about creating the fall and winter sets. Normally, I skip spring textures and just use the summer versions, as they’re very close to summer for a project like this.

Fall was fairly straightforward. I replaced some of the greens with tan, generally desaturated the entire image just a little, and replaced my masked-in summer trees with fall variants.

Winter is always more challenging, and this time was no exception. In this part of the world, the stock winter and hard winter textures depict a snowbound landscape. To insert snow into my shot, I copied my base fall layer and renamed it winter. Then I replaced more of the greens with tan, and desaturated all the colors except the sand a bit more than fall to give everything that dormant vegetation look. Then I created a white layer over the top of my base image and gave it a mask. Stepping to the layer below, I copied the image and pasted it into the mask, then inverted it. This made the dark areas in the base photo appear snowy, with melted spots for the light areas. (see below) Finally, I added noise to the mask until the snow had a grainer look. Then I played with the brightness and contrast of the mask until I had what I thought was a pretty decent blend of ground and snow.

The resampling process took over 3 hours for this set of files with seasons included. Once I was done, I turned to the autogen annotator and added swaths of forest where appropriate, and the beginnings of the beach community on Plum Island, which you can see especially well in the winter shot below.

The pics I’ve attached are of the base photoshop files for fall and winter, and in-sim screenshots of the same. Now that I’ve got the seasons in hand, it’s time for the mind-numbingly dull task of adding in all those autogen buildings for the beach town and Newburyport itself. It always looks great when I’m done, but man is it ever fiddly work do to.

North Shore, Day 2

Now that I have the aerial photos assembled into a usable image, it’s time to color-correct it and pipe it into the simulator. If you’ll recall from yesterday, the color was pretty awful on the original source pic. I opened it in Photoshop, and quickly decided that I’d have to work on a small slice of it as a proxy in order to work out the proper color-correcting procedure–the original file is 1.4Gb! That means every save takes like five minutes on my rig. So, I cut out a slice around the airport and started experimenting with corrections, writing each down as I went along so I could formulate an action to run on the overall image. Here’s what I came up with:

• Color balance:
• Midtones  +14 +5 -20
• Shadows -19 -3 + 2
• Levels 36 0.96 211
• Add Noise: 2.51%
• Brightness/Contrast: 0 / +15
• Select color range: (hex: e4d087), fuzziness: 127
• Hue/Sat/Brightness: saturation -30
• Select color range: (hex: ddb984), fuzziness 200
• HSB: Hue +13 Saturation -4
• Overall brightness/contrast: -8 +8
• Overall color balance: blue +10
• Shadow color balance: Green 0 +7 0

Once I was satisfied that it was pretty close, it was time to apply those fixes to the whole image. The action took about 30 minutes to apply in total, while I twiddled my thumbs and watched. I had already created an INF file for the resampler from the data I got from GlobalMapper on the image, so I thought I had the compiling to BGL part licked. Unfortunately, when I ran it, I got a string of errors. After goofing around with the image for a while trying to fix the problem, I ended up trying it as a 32-bit TGA file instead of a TIFF. This ran okay in resampler, so I let it do its thing and went to bed while it crunched.

This morning, I got up and loaded FSX to find these results:

Hmm… apparently, the 32-bit TGA file didn’t preserve my alpha-channel masks – they appear as white in the final. So that’s something that’ll have to be fixed today. The color corrections aren’t too shabby, certainly much better than the original. Still, it needs a little less yellow in teh mid-tones and a touch of cyan in the shadows to kill the red. Today begins the agonizingly slow process of correct, compile, view, repeat. My goal by the end of the day is to have at least one season (probably summer) looking good and working as expected. Stay tuned!

New Work in Progress – Massachusetts North Shore

Hey, look! Bill posted a blog entry! Just to dispel rumors that I’m dead or have given up on FS, I’m starting a series of progress articles for a small project I’m working on currently. Last week, I went on vacation with my wife to a conference in Beverly, Massachusetts. While my better half did her attendee thing, I was free to roam about New England in search of… well, whatever. What I found (in addition to excellent lobster rolls) were a couple of small airports with great regional charm. I liked them so much that I arranged to do photo shoots in each so I could model them for FS.

What I’ll be showing here is the first airport on my list, Plum Island. According to the airport owner, this is the oldest continuously operating airport in the U.S. (interestingly, I’ve heard that claim made about Pearson Field here in the Northwest as well). It’s a tiny field full of L-10 Birddogs, a glider, and a smattering of other GA planes.

What struck me about this field, as much as its New England charm, was the surrounding salt marshes and Plum Island itself. Fortunately, there is high-res aerial photography available from the USGS for this area. Unfortunately, it’s not the best quality. Below are the shots I have to start with. Follow along as I turn this into a flightsim environment…