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Background SynthWizard© Introduction - The scenery designer for the rest of us! Microsoft© Combat Flight Simulator (MSCFS) contains a set of almost 300 BMP textures with which a part of the MSCFS world has been built. These textures are categorized into several different landscape types. Each type of landscape has a set of textures that can be placed next to the other type without a visible seam (that is, the texture edge transition is smooth). This makes for an ideal approach in designing Flight Simulator sceneries where Photorealistic Scenery design is prohibitive due to:
Also, this type of scenery will be easily shared among users owning MSCFS: all they need to do is download accompanying BGL file. The textures will be the same textures they already own in the MSCFS. TerraBuilder v2.0 can use these textures to quickly and accurately create sets of scenery grids using all or some of the landscape types. The SynthWizard© will, with a few mouse clicks, create a grid of desired size and populate it with the selected landscapes types. The grid textures will be randomly selected from only the subsets that match each other. The result is a seamless, Photorealistic-looking synthetic scenery texture map, ready to be assigned altitude maps. The SynthWizard© will also be able to detect the altitude changes within the area of interest and accordingly select the landscape types. This means that, for instance, if the tile area lies at sea level, the SynthWizard© will automatically select water texture for that area. The coastlines will be seamlessly matched according to the positioning of the altitudes of the real terrain, and, although synthetic, closely follow real coastlines on the large scale. If the tile lays between sea level and a certain altitude, Farmlands type will be selected, and if it lays above a certain altitude, Mountain type will be selected. Finally, any and all of the SynthWizard©-selected landscape tiles can be user-selected and overridden, for the final fine-tuning of the scenery appearance. This will, for instance, come handy when features such as urban development need to be defined. All user needs to do is select one or more scenery grid tiles and replace the existing landscape type to urban landscape type. TerraBuilder will automatically match the surrounding scenery tiles to seamlessly fit to the new urban "patch".
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