How to Improve the Water in Ortho4XP 1.30 [Tutorial|X-Plane 11]

[@airkibris001]

after 4 years later your tutorial help me to solve the problem captain. appreciate your work.

[@eriol_mits3121]

Than you so much. I just made the area between Montreal and Toronto to fly in. Was confused either by this lake error or to the east in the next tile there was a massive open square with the error message. "No image" kind of broke some otherwise nice looking scenery. This has solved the issue so thank you so much.

[@theflightsimboy4310]

Thanks for this tutorial! Very useful!

[@DanDiMaggio]

Excellent info on the orthoXP stuff! I think I have watched all of your videos on it now. Been using the older version some but it is hit or miss for me. Didn't even realize this newer version existed. I just subbed and I would love to see a video of your pics of the best freeware/payware airports. I am a pretty decent guru on the sim racing end of things but these flight sims are so deep it gets me lost at times lol. Been trying to learn as much as I can lately and that's how I ran across your channel. Thanks again!

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

Thanks a lot mate! Yes, flight simulation is a very deep and complex hobby and it will take some years until one has solid experience and expertise in it, not only the flying and navigation part, but also all the available addon programs, aircraft, scenery, tweaking and all that stuff :) Just as a reference, I'm doing this since 2013 and I have also been absolutely lost and overwhelmed at first, one has to invest some time into it for sure. In my opinion airport scenery isn't that important when starting out, and I also must admit that I don't own many addon airports for X-Plane lol :) Usually I'm looking on the x-plane .org forums for good freeware scenery, that site is an absolute must for "X-Planers".

[@DanDiMaggio]

@@SimulationChannelDeluxe Oh you are very welcome! You put great detail in your tutorials and I appreciate that!. Yeah I have been checking out the forums a lot. Lots of great stuff in there and I can see what you mean about it taking a lot of time. Last night I spent a few hours loading scenery just to go on a 30 minute flight lol. Honestly I am kind of torn between the default scenery (with HD mesh V4) and the ortho scenery. The ortho scenery looks great when you are right over top of it, but off in the distance it looks quite flat. That seems to be more so the case the higher you get in elevation. In comparison the default with the V4 mesh looks more realistic from far off (not as flat) but man does the repeated textures kill the immersion when you are right above them. Especially in very flat open areas like Upper Texas and Oklahoma. So I will play with it some more and see what I prefer. But thanks again!

[@gvrose1]

Using your tutoring I have Ortho4XP's custom scenery running without overlays! Now I don't have any phoney trees and the gravel roads are no longer paved! The scenery looks much better. Now I would like to improve the texture some how.

[@mb2308]

without overlays, how do you get moving vehicles or street and road light? Thank you for any response....

[@gvrose1]

@@mb2308 Your correct, I fly over still imagery, but I use XPlane to become familiar with terrain features such as dirt roads, open fields and lake shapes. Overlays usually show trails as being paved or miss them completely. When I fly in the real world, I can reference the dirt trails, and lakes and that tells me where I am.. Also, I don't like the artificial trees that are placed where no trees are supposed to be.

[@colman787]

Thanks....had the same problem with a portion of lake Ontario

[@speedbird8326]

Excellent tutorials !!

[@gvrose1]

Your correct, I fly over still imagery, but I use XPlane to become familiar with terrain features such as dirt roads, open fields and lake shapes. Overlays usually show trails as being paved or miss them completely. When I fly in the real world, I can reference the dirt trails, and lakes and that tells me where I am.. Also, I don't like the artificial trees that are placed where no trees are supposed to be..

[@GunniesLetsFlyVFR]

Great info .. Just downloaded 1.30 so ill watch you video as well. Subbed. ;)

[@likes2fly]

I did change use mask for inland and ratio water but when I make tiles of the Bahamas it only shows the pretty water next to the beach. How do I extend the water photos further out?

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

This tutorial shows you how to NOT get photoreal water, for example when there are problems with the imagery like in my example. When you WANT to get photoreal water just use the default settings.

[@likes2fly]

@@SimulationChannelDeluxe I changed experimental water to 3 from 0, that worked.

[@effem65]

Great Tipp, made my day!

[@ripper8771]

Very useful thank you!

[@bencalhoun8216]

i got that water problem over an area in the Mediterranean where I did not have ortho

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

I think there are some spots in X-Plane's seas and oceans where such large white areas appear also without any orthos nearby. Must be some sort of scenery error.

[@hooryricardo]

By mistake I used the "open with "option to associate dsf file with notepad. I could restore this association to unknow however I cant now do the step to use the tool of hd mesh 4 dsf to dsf.7z. it wont give me a message if I am sure I want to change the format o the file.Any thoughts ??

[@Spartan536]

This works great for this scenario but for things like water near Key West or around Florida in general there are some very good reasons to keep the orthophotos for water, but there are many anomalies sadly, I wonder if there is a way you can use a sea and land provider separately like in 1.20b?

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

Yes there might be areas where water orthos may look more realistic, but I didn't deal with such areas until now. All in all I prefer "clean" water where I'm flying. I can't tell you how a sea provider can be chosen, I did never use that functionality until now. Cheers :)

[@Spartan536]

@@SimulationChannelDeluxe Darn... I am testing an idea in 1.30 right now... using ARC GIS for my Tampa Bay area land, custom marking all of the land zones in a base of ZL16, and custom marking around airports at ZL19 - ZL17 respectively. I have ZL14 set for EOX where land is not, and hopefully combining that with water at 0.5 it should blend nicely... I should have it done and ready to test within 45 minutes of this post, and I will let you know if it worked or not. It's definitely a lot of work for just 1 tile, but if you use that area as your main hub or frequent it a lot, it might just give you that feeling you were looking for.

[@LeadNarrator]

Ok, so this video is only half right really. When you use the same masks for inland bodies of water, it overrides the water ratio value. So you could set that ratio to whatever you like... nothing will change unless you adjust the mask width for the tile setting overall. In order to make the water ratio value mean anything again, you would need to NOT set the masks for inland to TRUE and leave it as false. Additionally, it should also be noted and passed on that the VRAM usage does bump up a noticeable amount when using setting masks for inland to true. While the solution to your problem was correct... your reasoning and explanation of why is VERY inaccurate and will cause a great deal of confusion for people thinking that both masks for inland and ratio water values can be used at the same time.

[@speedbird8326]

So can you give us an example of your two solutions to this problem. You are saying one solution is: masks for inland = TRUE and the water ratio is irrelevant. The other solution is masks for inland = FALSE and water ratio = ?? and mask width = ?? What would be your settings for these two values ?

[@swappy3010]

Do i have to recreate everything? Download all? Again?

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

I think there is no other way to apply these fixes. I also wish I would have known this sooner ;) For now I'm only recreating tiles with very obvious water errors.

[@piloto_loco]

the answer is no. find the downloaded area in your \X-Plane 11\Ortho4XP\Orthophotos folder . look for a black-white .png that defines water-land areas. this is called "water mask". now paint the watermasks with photoshop the way you want it. always remember: land is white, water is black. you can use blurr effect (make coasts going softer into ocean=beach) or manual paint with some transparency to modify. Save it as .png and then convert (download tool) to .dds. (goes into \X-Plane 11\Ortho4XP\Tiles). This is a 3 minute job. if you have a paint program and the png2dds tool. Second possibility is: repaint your .dds-files manually. convert it to .png first and when done get it back as .dds.

[@piloto_loco]

i would expect a better explanation on why this happens. the answer is easy, and the ways to improve water areas are many. users should understand the water masks and the black vs. white water-land definitions. in this video i don't think users understand what the change did in the background. sorry, thumb down.

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

Oh I don't care what happens in the background and Ortho4XP is way too intransparent to let any normal user understand what's going on under the hood. What matters to me is that it looks way better afterwards and errors like this shouldn't happen at all with the default settings provided by the developer imo.

[@noahpulfer]

You realize he is trying to help you... Thumb down= Dick move

[@CraigMansfield]

Come on. This is a tutorial which offers users a fast solution to an awful problem. It allows people to carry on flying, without superfluous information. I am just beginning, and I don't know one thing about flight simulation, so these videos encourage me. You may understand why it happens - and I agree that it's good to fully comprehend something - but why not kindly share your knowledge with the community, instead of attacking somebody because they didn't provide what you expected? The fact that you expected something, led to your frustration. We all enjoy the same thing, share your knowledge instead of criticising someone; please. You're valuable in the community. Personally, I appreciate this video (and he's narrated it in English, which isn't his first language. He could easily stick to German and say shite to me. So he's helping people for free in his second language. I won't have anybody putting him down.)

[@SimulationChannelDeluxe]

Thanks so much for your kind words mate. You are right, in this case I decided to not do a 20 minutes tutorial, because I just didn't see the need for it. What matters in this case is the result imo. For me it wasn't too important that some additional masks files get created by Ortho4XP ;)

[@piloto_loco]

@@CraigMansfield i partly agree with what you are trying to say, and i appologize to /sorry, don't see a person's name/ for asking the extra mile. It may have come down to the overall decreasing quality on youtube tutorials that i feel frustrated and wanna coach others how to improve. i gotta deal with that as personal social incompetence, trying to improve of course. however, i have a point too, and i would like to encourage anyone uploading videos to give ones best, before uploading, not after. This channel considers itself (by its name) as a dock of competence, advertising itself as such. so, that's why i not necessarily see the "poor guy" behind, but the "simulation channel deluxe".