High Resolution base images mastered!

After some cogitation I realised that my previous blunders with SBuilderX trying to make high res base images were somewhat off the mark!  Oh how clumsy those flat sketchup planes with textures reverse mapped onto them were...and look now unto the lovely base images for Spindus Road Industrial Estate, the fire station and factory beyond.  You can clearly see the previous scenery to the right, and the sharp eyed will have noticed that Owen Drive is now sporting a high res base image as well.....

I've played around with SBuilderX some more and worked out how to import non geo-referenced photos and reference them over the ground.  This is cutting some corners but I had to overcome understanding that images had to be a 32bit bmp, there needed to be an alpha channel, which was completely white, the filenames had to have no spaces, that the project name in SBX had to start with 'Photo', and that you had to create a data file, an info file and have both of them with a copy of the original texture in a specific SBX folder.  Sounds easy but it was a lot of trial and error.  Even then I only had a square image that didn't blend in with the surrounding GenX at all.

Just for amusement I've included below a screenshot taken during the development process, showing my first successfully imported phototexture, but unfortunately showing as a big blue reflective water texture.  The alpha channel was completely black fooling FSX into rendering it as water.  A quick change to a completely white alpha channel fixed the problem!

To fix the square issue was relatively simple, but only because of a background in Photoshop.  I can explain in detail if anyone would like make their own scenery as well, but it involves laying a path around the exterior margin of where you want the base image to show, turning it into a selection, inverting it, selcting the image layer and deleting the excess image to leave a white space which FSX renders as GenX scenery.  I just saved the resulting file to a different name, copied into the SBX folder, renamed it back to the original filename used to reference the image square in SBX and ran the compiler from within SBX again.

Hey Presto, the bgl file that SBX subsequently output only showed the cropped high res image over the area I want :)

This sounds difficult but is completely do-able with freeware tools and a little time.  Anyone could do this having built up a little bit of knowledge about how to process images.  It's GCSE stuff.  I'm more than happy to explain how I did it in detail if anyone is interested in doing their own, and I might write a tutorial on it at some unspecified point in the future, as I couldn't find anything that told me everything I needed to know in one place.  The only surprise with this is that there isn't more scenery out there like mine seeing as it's this easy????

End result, loads of high res base images mapped directly to the terrain, including Owen Way and Bleinheim Drive.  Now just to get on in time with making the scenery to sit on top of it.......