[lowfighter]

It see ms to me we can achieve maybe 10-20 meters wide rivers. If you draw with pure black one pixel wide rivers and then blur it in gimp then on some portions the river disappears altogether while the surviving water can be as narrow as 10-20 meters. So the question is how can we achieve continuous narow river? It seems to me that maybe if we can find the right gray colors pattern for that...
Any ideas or other findings?

[fabianfred]

when rivers are reduced to their minimum width they tend to look too straight-edged so most of mine are unrealistically 3 pixels wide so that I can get some semblance of curves in them

[lowfighter]

2 pixels look smoothly enough too if you apply blur on them.
With gimp there's the Gaussian blur option too, but I don't know what's the best settings for it.
I did a bit more experimenting:
Draw one pixel wide river
Blured it
Rezult was (as said above): portions of narrow water and portions of missing water
Looked at the blurred river and picked the most gray color from the blured pattern and painted again one pixel wide over the river. Result is encouraging with water having widths under 50 meter sometimes under 20 meter maybe. But we neeed a more systematic approach...

[asheshouse]

The minimum I have used is 3 pixel paintbrush tool, which retains softened edges.

[BBury]

Yes, I've been trying to make the Sweetwater canal in Egypt and other small mountain streams for my MiddleEastern map and have experimented with how narrow we can make water as well. As most have already discovered one solid pixel will work for East/West, North/South straight lines although shallow angles with one pixel produce a sawtooth edge and other angles leave blank spaces as well unless made much wider.

I concur with asheshouse in that the easiest and best result, for minimum water width, is with a 3pixel brush. I've manually worked small streams with 1 pixel pencil and blurring and to get a decent final result it ends up being pretty much the same as with a 3pixel brush. Even with a 3pixel brush, on some angles, some areas are blank and have to be widened even further.

I don't think the game will allow anything narrower. I think we'll just have to live with this limitation of having small rivers and streams that are much water than scale.

BB

[dunkelgrun]

I used Gaussian blur 0.3 on a 1-pixel river and got the same as already said. I then merged another copy of my originial on top of the blurred layer and repeated the Gaussian blur.
It looked a whole lot better in places; narrow continuous rivers for the most part, but still dead staight N-S and showing pixellated edges elsewhere.

My original rivers had corner-to-corner pixels on the diagonals; I'm upgrading them to eliminate these and ensure that all pixels meet the next side-to-side. Then I'll try again :roll: .

:cheers:

[lowfighter]

Yes, I think too they need to be side by side. Dunkel, don't forget to tell us if you get any good. I'll experiment more tomorrow too. I'm pretty confident we can get reasonable looking rivers with widths less than 50 m, but the question is to find a good method such that we don't spend ages doing that for each 1000 meter length of such rivers...
Ashes and 2bits I think you got something like 100 meter wide rivers using the 3 pixel soft pencil?

[BBury]

No, they aren't that wide. Maybe in some places but the 3 pixel brush lays down fairly solid 1 pixel line with the other 2 pixels feathered on either side. If it was a solid 3pixel pencil then yes it would be 100meters wide or more.

[fabianfred]

Not forgetting that the minimum width of 50m is for 1:1 maps...3:4 =75m and 1:2 = 100m.

[Leady]

How about making a skinned river object ~10-20m wide that can be placed with FMB. If you had 3-4 types of each 250m long, left & right bends curves, straight runs and straight squiggly sections you can have any small river or stream you like. The only problems may be object pop up and object count.

[shakthamac]

im not familiar with the map making process here, but i am pretty knowledgeable about photoshop.

Lets say you have a 500 x 500 px map. what would happen if you took the river layer and made it 1 px wide on a 1000 x 1000 px map and then scaled it back to 500 x 500 px, thereby basically giving it a half pixel dimensional width. The other option here could be to do the above mentioned, and then lay it on a 50% opacity 500 x 500 px river map created on a 500 x 500 map (so its a true pixel wide), then merge the 2 layers together

i guess one other option would be to take that river layer and make it 2 pixels wide at 2000 x 2000 and then blur it. you'd probably get better control that way.

just thinking out loud. my apologies if the above mentioned has been discussed before.

[lowfighter]

Couldn't do tests today, RL stuff to do...tiresome
Shakthamak, it's not so hard to learn how to make/change water in il2, maybe you can give it a try?
Keep talking! 8)

[shakthamac]

well, my time is pretty limited, with the regular job plus freelance on the side, but i'd be interested in doing a test on the matter. The only prob now is i only have photoshop on my mac. I'll see what i can come up with later on this week or weekend.

no promises though.

[fabianfred]

I got a large Plate from FC.... and I use it in various forms on my Thailand map... to represent Angkor wat and the old city at Toungoo in Burma ...and also as airstrips which are 300m.x 1500m. size

I can make it any size...but the size in kb. for each plate probably depends on the tga file used

if we make a plate for a straight section of river....say about 3 pixels wide by a km. long we could paint the river on that only half a pixel wide by doubling it in size before painting...and then halving it after...but to be effective would require the remaining area to be invisible or an alpha channel....doing that bumps up the size and means in needs to be saved as 32 bit

thoughts anyone??

[fabianfred]

I tried it out on my Thai map with a plate... I made it 1000m. x 50m. and the tga is 1024 x 64 pixels which gives an alpha channel 32 bit file size of 256kb.

Here it is overlaid upon the single pixel wide canals in Bangkok...I used brown at first but am changing that to match the river colour with a little brown showing at the edges for muddy banks....

the only thing is that the plate is flat so the ground must be too...or it will disappear in places....it would be easy in the static.ini to make a duplicate object which followed the land instead of being level with the sea...if that would be any use