Help needed with basemap

I hope I have posted this in the right place.

I need some help with the following as I am a novice with this sort of thing I am a bit lost.
I have downloaded the basemap pack and I have the maps I want to scan on file on my PC.
The photo editing program ,I have windows live photo gallery, can I use this.
I have used red writing where I need more info how to do what is asked.
I am using Trainz 2009 and have window's 7
Any help will be appreciated very much, very keen to use maps I have as basemaps

1km Basemap Pack Tutorial:

The 1km Basemap Pack is used for 'tracing' contours, roads etc. over, to enable easier positioning of items on prototypical layouts
•Download 1km Basemap Pack v1 (275k) .cdp file here, or from the Trainz Download Station using this link: 1km Basemap Pack


•Scan a printed map of the area you wish to make your Trainz layout from.


•Using a Photo Editing program (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro etc.), copy an area of the map at the 1km grid square lines to the clipboard


•Create a new image


•Paste the copied map to the new image


•Resize to 1024x1024 pixels


•Save the new image to your hard disk over the Basemap file '1km square X.jpg' where 'X' is the letter A-I appropriate to the section of map being used - See picture below. (1km Basemap files are normally stored in directories "C:\Program Files\Auran\TRS2004\World\Custom\Scenery\1km Basemap A" to "..\1km Basemap I")
NOTE: Your scanned map file must have the same name as the basemap square file it is replacing.
section of scanned map ready for cutting into 1km square areas



•Repeat for all sections (A-I) you wish to use


•Restart Trainz


•In Surveyor, add the Basemap objects (from the Scenery section) to your layout


•Change the view to grid lines only (the button at the top right in Surveyor that looks like a silver waffle)


•Raise or lower the height of the Basemap as necessary, so you can see the picture of the map you have scanned


•Trace contour lines, roads, track layouts as required


•When you have finished tracing over the Basemaps, delete them from your layout


•The reason the pack consists of 9 individual Basemaps, is so all 8 squares around the one you're working on can be seen, and you can continue from one to another.


•NOTE: Depending on the scale of your baseboards, these 1km squares will probably be larger than 1 board. (Why Auran chose baseboards 720mx720m is anyone's guess. I've never come across a map with grid lines at 720m intervals!)

The basemap journey can be quite difficult and confusing to start with. Your problem list is very familiar!

It’s good that you have highlighted, in red, the problem areas. It makes it easier to advise on the answers.

Rather than trying to answer all of your questions in one go it might be worth doing it in stages and get you past each one before moving on.

Let’s start with the image.

To get an accurate 1km square image into Trainz you need an image with an accurate 1km square drawn around it. You may be lucky enough to have a map with a 1km grid which has the lines in exactly the right position, but that’s unlikely. If not, and you have lat/long scaling at the map edges you can accurately plot and draw the square on the map in pencil. (You can rub it out later). Draw it north up. Scan it into your computer. It’s impossible to get an accurate 1km basemap without this visible square being placed at the very beginning.

I use fairly high resolution images (Basemaps will take 2048x2048 pixel size with no problem, even though the advice is to use 1024). The higher resolution makes it easier to see the contour lines and other details in Surveyor.

If your original scanned image is initially larger than 2048x2048 that’s good. You will probably need to edit the final image into a perfect square anyway, and reducing the size from a larger original will give a clearer result than increasing it from a smaller one.

What you next need to do is make sure that the square is made up of the same number of pixels on height and width. Forget the 1024 (or 2048) sizing for now. At this stage it’s important to get that perfect square. Even with an accurately drawn 1km square on the original map I’ve noticed that there can be some mismatch with the height, or width, being a few pixels out (probably due to the projection problems of the curved surface of the Earth being mapped onto a flat plane!).

I select the whole map in the graphics package and drag it so that the top left of the drawn box sits neatly at the top left of screen. Then I check the four sides of the box for vertical and horizontal alignment. Sometimes the line will “jump” a pixel and not be quite straight, so I adjust the grabbed image and move it to ensure that the map and lines all show up to the edge of the frame. I then trim off the excess at the bottom right of the image. The drawn square should then be almost square (it’s rarely perfect).

What I then do is to check the map along the side which has the highest number of pixels, and extend the other to match. For example, if the neatly trimmed map is 2101x 2109 pixels I then extend the area so that both are 2109. Use a graphics tool which allows the attributes of the image frame area to be changed so that you get a strip of 8 additional pixels shown as a clear area. (Don’t use an automatic resize for this part, otherwise you will distort the map and that stretching will cause problems for matching up any adjoining Basemaps at a later stage). You can fill this clear strip with a colour similar to your drawn line if you want. The important thing is to ensure that the image is a perfect square.

Now you can use your graphics package to resize the image to the required 1024x1024, or 2048x2048, and save it as a .jpg file.

Apologies if this is a bit of a lengthy ramble, but I spent weeks getting Basemaps to work, and this is as short as I could make it in order to cover all the angles. I found that there are no real shortcuts at this stage if you want high precision. Don’t be put off though – it’s well worth it in the end!

Come back here, if you want, when you’ve got your correctly sized image and we can move on to the next stage of placing it into the Basemap asset.

I don’t know your graphics package - windows live photo gallery. Hopefully someone can advise as to whether it’s appropriate. I use MS-Paint and Gimp.


Cheers
Casper

Hello,
I have not been too well, so I have not been able to get back here until now.
I did not have a map to scan ,so I used Google earth and roughly measured out 1km square area I wanted (Toowoomba station and goods yard), squared this up with MS live photo Gallery then resized to 1024 x 1024 using Irfan. Edited in CMP.
I am not too happy with the results. Google earth map seemed to be out of scale e.g. station building on map much larger that building in game and the railway lines very hard to see and did were not in the correct place or were missing on Google map.
Overall a learning experience, Google earth map may be ok for less detailed route's, but it seems to me not too good for more detailed maps like I wanted.

Using the Google Earth ruler/metric/meters/path, zoom in on an area, center the area on your monitor, draw a box, with each side being 720m long (a total of 2880m for all 4 sides of the box).

Use the MS Snipping Tool (in your PC Accessories) to capture a jpg of the box on your monitor. (it will be unaccurate, but close enough for the Gipper').

Maps usually are in 1Km grids, so you will have to do the math.

I was going to do a route that was 280 miles long, using basemaps. If each basemap was off by 25m, the multiplication of errors, would be many miles on the end product route

@spiderwheels65

Good to see you back. Hope you are feeling better!

I think the reason for the indistinct imagery/wrong scaling, is due to one or more of the following:
.

• Don’t expect the basemap to be as clear as close up views of Google Earth. It never will be.

​.

• Draw the lines to form a box exactly 1km square (not 720m square) to prepare it for the 1km basemap asset. This part is critical. Nothing else will ever come right if the square is not drawn correctly.

.

• To make sure that GE does not distort the four lines making up your square you need to change a setting of one of the GE default values. From the top toolbar select Tools>Options. In the Terrain box set the Elevation Exaggeration to the minimum value (0.01).

.

• Build up the initial GE image by copying, pasting and stitching the imagery together from a fixed height in GE which must not be changed when snipping off the bits within your square to paste into your preliminary image. I set my GE height (eye alt) to 600m which can be a bit tricky to do using the hand controls and if there is any changes to the height in between copying the several segments of your square, the assembled pieces will never line up to form a perfect square.

.​.

• Build up and save your finished and trimmed perfect square (as described in my last post) and resize it down to 2048x2048 (I would suggest not using 1024x1024, which will be fuzzier). Use that image to apply to your basemap.

​.
Edit: I've just looked at Toowoomba yard on GE. I have to say it's not the best satellite image I've seen. Going into View>Historical Imagery and moving the little slider to 6/6/2009 gives a better image, but it's only a minor improvement.
.

Here's an image of one of my 2048x2048 1km basemaps in Surveyor which is as good as I can get it. Don't expect to get an image which is any sharper than this.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

You are right Mezzoprezzo, I too used 1km x 1km Basemaps (although I believe there also is a 720m x 720m version).

I gave up on basemaps long ago and my skills and memory is rather rusty

Also with 1km x 1km Basemaps, you will need many extra baseboards to slide the basemaps around on (as they are larger than a Trainz 720m x 720m baseboard).

Also (temporarily) setting your Trainzoptions file: surveyorfov=185 (or anywhere between =100, up to =185) this gives you a wide angle view, enabling easier manipulation of basemaps.

There is a 720x720 basemap available kuid2:97008:7201:1,..7202:1,..7203:1,..7204:1,..7205:1.I made these originally for 2004. Cheers, Bill.

@Willem2

Hello Bill.

Yes, I've used those too.

It's nice to have the opportunity to say thank you to another creator who helps to keep this sim alive!

The 720mx720m are perfect for fitting to single baseboards.

I used the 1km square size to suit my scans of UK Ordnance Survey maps which are marked with convenient kilometre square grids.

Cheers
Casper

Hello
Thank you for your input in regards to this, I appreciate this very much.
I have given some of what has been posted here a go with mixed results.
I did manage to get a base map, but it was not very clear, but I am going to push on with it and see what the final result are and if I like it or not.

I did some websurfing looking for other map sites and I found the following I though some of you may be interested in.
The web page is : openstreetmap.org.
The map have heaps of details, especially railway tracks. There are map from all over the world with different layers.
Unfortunately this site does not have a ruler etc. to mark out an area for coping or snipping, but I guess if you have the know how you can measure out and the size you want.

spiderwheels65 said:

I did some websurfing looking for other map sites and I found the following I though some of you may be interested in.
The web page is : openstreetmap.org.

Click to expand...

The presentation of Open Street Map is a Mercator projection (onto a sphere), consisting of a quad tree of pre-rendered tiles, each 256 by 256 pixels. Scale is not constant. At zoom level 12, a 256 pixel tile covers about 10 km in Nairobi, Kenya, but only 7 km in Tromsø, North-Norway. For each tile scale for the eastings will vary and you have to zoom it close enough for this to become negligible.

Google Maps would be the same, but Google Earth is different. GE uses a local vertical perspective projection (onto an ellipsoid). You have to zoom in quite close for scale to become constant, but at the same "eye altitude" it will be identical all over the world.