HD Terrain and Baseboard Conversion

[haypsalms149]

I converted my South Korean route that I have been working on to HD terrain and noticed that some baseboards have failed. Another words it says that it is in HD terrain but when I try to paint the terrain on that baseboard it can only handle one HD Terrain. When I go to paint another terrain, it deletes the previous painted terrain. I have found 9 total baseboards performing that way on the route but are still counting, there could be about 25% of the route that will only allow one Terrian paint.

 

[pware]

some baseboards have failed

This usually indicates that those baseboards (the report will give the x,y coordinates of each) have exceed the 16 textures per baseboard limit in HD terrain. In those cases the textures that are over the limit will be replaced by other textures on that baseboard.

Much has been discussed in these forums, some of it hysterically, about this 16 texture limit. It is important to realise that:-

• it is a hardware limitation, not a software (i.e. Trainz) limitation. Other sims/games that use HD terrain impose the same or even lower limits (Unreal Engine, for example, has a limit of 8 textures).
• it is 16 different textures per baseboard, not 16 per route. Each baseboard can have 16 totally different textures.

paint another terrain, it deletes the previous painted terrain

By "terrain" I am guessing you mean "texture". Trainz will replace that "extra" texture (i.e. number 17 for that baseboard) with one of the existing textures to stay at the limit of 16 textures.

 

[pware]

In addition to the above, when HD Terrain first became available in Trainz Plus I did a trial conversion of my two largest routes, both built at 10m resolution, to the new HD resolution. Only one of the two routes had a single baseboard out of hundreds that was over the 16 texture limit, and that was without me ever counting how many textures I had used. But I appreciate that some creators do push the limits (I believe it is 256 textures but could I be wrong there) for non-HD terrain.

The main problem with converting old routes to HD is the increase in the size of the resulting file. In my case one route went from about 57MB in size to over 300MB. Others have reported that their large routes, after conversion, were far too big to be saved as a .cdp file (they exceeded the size limit) and thus could not be uploaded to the DLS.

A HD terrain 10m x 10m grid square contains about 16,000 more data points than the same grid square at 10m resolution.

There is at least 1 HD Terrain route on the DLS - <kuid2:642837:100268:1> Aston Heights - Switching industrial Layout and it uses up to 16 textures per baseboard without any obvious aesthetic defects.

 

[philskene]

HD terrain routes. Aston Heights. Must try that. There are two others -- two versions of Clear Lake Mining. The HD versions are updates of earlier T:ANE layouts. The file size jumped from 3.08 MB to 8.9 MB, almost three times the size.

 

[haypsalms149]

Here is a picture of what I am talking about. In the Red box, You can see when I add a HD terrain it erases any thing but that terrain paint. I only have Transdem colors on the baseboard and you can see the error on the picture when I converted it to the HD. When I change the baseboard to 5m the Baseboard rases and you see a blank space around the baseboard.

Next is the shot of when I try add a different HD terrain to the baseboard. I dont think that I have 16 HD textures on the baseboard.

 

[pware]

I don't use TransDEM but there is a thread on the issue of using TransDEM with HD terrain. See hd-terrain-and-transdem-textures. In particular read the post by ZecMurphy - post #8.

 

[JCitron]

The textures poking through the spline appear to be the effects from PBR textures and not HD terrain. The way to get around that is either set your graphics performance to Basic from Standard or higher. Basic in the current version is what Standard was in the previous build, or paint over the area with another PBR texture to spread out the texture over the area.