Hard Winter Ground Textures

[falcon409]

I don't know about anyone else, but hard winter ground textures is something that, up until now, I would have rather had a root canal than try to produce. I have done them even as recently as the Cherry Ridge project, but I have never really been satisfied because they did not come close to the way the default ground textures appear and so the scenery tended to stand out from the default because it was "too white". Amazingly, I have never found anyone, even the braintrust at FSDeveloper who could tell me how the default textures were done.

I have looked at default hard winter scenes and could never quite get how they made the textures. . .until now. I had to do a hard winter for George Kalko (was Cold Springs) and used my current process to produce the winter texture. When I loaded the Sim I was on the runway and it looked great. . .but when I slewed to about 1000' the scenery area stood out like a sore thumb. . .a solid white area surrounded by a mottled snow scene. No Good! So I began experimenting until I hit on one I think mimics what the default ground looks like. I can't say that this technique is actually how the ACES folks pulled it off, but it made the George Kalco scenery melt into the landscape and that's good enough for me.

I may be the only person who didn't know it was done this way and everyone else will be going. . .well duh! But if by chance you were as frustrated as I was trying to hit on a good solution, try this and see if it works for you.

 

[falcon409]

If anyone does try this, let me know here if you found it to be a good way to easily produce a winter texture or even if it didn't work, I'd still like to know. The other seasonal variations are simple, but hard winter, not so much.

 

[Dimus]

Ed, I had a look at your method. The basic moves about brightness and contrast are similar to what I do. However, I sometimes also keep a layer of the plain winter texture below, with reduced saturation, not completely greyscale. This way I can erase some of the white areas to reveal clean ground or spots below. Another method which is faster and still keeps the color in the non-snowed areas is to use the "magic wand" tool to select specific areas to "white out", usually whatever is green/grass. I then soften the selection edges using the "feather" option. The selected area can then be turned to greyscale and "whitened out" by contrast-brightness. The below shots are from photoshop and the textures for winter and hard winter for the Inconnu Lodge scenery and were done with the magic wand method: