Let's try to setup for a Landclass for the Plaridel Area - Part 3
Step 3. Create the Custom Terrain Textures
3.1 This is the close up of one sector in the Area in the last screen shot of Step 2 after drawing in the new terrain.
The reference runway is already covered by the generic looking tropical countryside texture which I cut and pasted from the generic texture 010a2su5.bmp and 010s2su1.bmp found in the FS9\Scenery\World\Texture folder. A search on this folder for other terrain bitmaps can help you compose your own realistic looking terrain cover. In my case it was just a simple copy, cut and paste.
The texture boundary dashed lines are actually on another layer in the image so these can be easily removed when making the final texture.
3.2 Again, another close up of the touched-up Terrain bitmap above but with a slight difference:
If you noticed, the lower picture looks like a distorted copy of the first picture. Let's call this the Master Bitmap Image.
The first picture actually had the grids (the dashed lines) in a 328 pixels horizontal by 251 pixels vertical spacing. This means that if each rectangle is a texture bitmap, the bitmap is a rectangular shape with a size of 328 x 251 pixels.
As we all know, this bitmap size does not work in MSFS. Terrain Bitmaps in MSFS should be sized 256x256 pixels, or a multiple thereof.
The lower bitmap has been resized so that each grid becomes 256 x 256 pixels in size.
3.3 Question: Why not just cut the first texture into 256x256 segments and assign the texture number?
Answer:
In MSFS the earth is divided into what are called cells that may have the same vertical dimensions from the poles to the equator. The lateral dimension, however, is different for each latitude location. Cells near the poles have the width smaller than height while cells in the equator have cells that are wider than the height. Since the Philippines is near the equator thus the ration of the cell width to cell height at Plaridel is about 1.3:1.
In FS, if the undistorted bitmap in the first picture is used as it is, in the sim, the square texture will be stretched to cover the rectangular cell. This results in a distorted terrain cover when viewed in the top-down view.
To correct the distortion, we compensate by compressing the texture horizontally so that when it is stretched in FS the bitmap returns to the correct perspective. Use the 1.3:1 (328 divided by 251) ratio to resize the Master Bitmap Image into the correct size.
3.4 Individual bitmaps are cut from the Master Bitmap Image shown in the picture above.
In PaintShop I do this by cropping the bitmap using the Canvass Size option. The rest of the image is cropped out so that I end up at the dashed lines boundaries of the target bitmap. Make sure the bitmap size is 256x256 pixels.
3.5 Save the bitmap using Ground2K4 as reference for the correct texture name shown in the lower right portion of G2K4's status bar.
3.6 That concludes the my procedure for making the custom landclass textures in Grund2K4. For questions you can post a question at www.philskies.net/forum or email me at eya@philskies.net.