Water masks: Time to X-Plane

By Lyndiman on December 6, 2024 • ( 0 )

Previously, I edited water masks around Whitianga resulting in the inlet / harbour displaying some striking colour and natural beauty:

I’m not sure if this was released, or not, so potentially I’m the only one that has it looking like this.

I spent a bit of time looking around Tauranga Harbour. I had previously edited the masks that blend into the water to a limited degree and can take this a lot further in selected places to bring out a lot of detail that is hidden away.

But I identified a pretty serious issue with applying the bump mapping in Ortho4XP. It actually blankets every terrain file with the bumps, including water. SO I ended up with the surface of water having a weird effect that looked like all the water was 2 inches deep.

The ground here highlights what the bump mapping looks like close to the ground. It’s pretty important to include this bump mapping as the Ortho would look like a blurry mess when close to the ground without it.

You can see the grass is bump mapped in a similar but different way to ortho is.

I created a little script in Python that swept through all the terrain files that are for either sea or water and removed the bump mapping, so now the water looks like real water again when zoomed in:

To edit the way ortho blends into the sea, you have to edit the black and white images, the more white, the brighter the ortho under the water.

A mosaic of water masks. Guess which lakes these are.

I’ve installed GIMP (terrible name) to edit the files, as it’s free. Then I built a mosaic of the water masks (as above) for Tauranga Harbour. I edited the image so it no longer goes black, removing the ortho underneath.

So far it looks like the result is great:

Let’s look around Raglan to see a simple before and after:

Before:

After:

Based on this I think I’ll select some good candidates for exposing the imagery under the water in significant harbours and perhaps around islands. It’s not always good though, as the light reflecting off the water often gives it a frozen sparkle effect and you can end up with odd waves frozen in place.

OSM data is doing a terrible harsh line across the mouth of Thames. I tried to install JOSM to edit the information, but JAVA didn’t like it. I’m not sure if it’s worth fixing for the hassle.