Adding textures automatically??

I am thunderstruck by the quality of texturing used in many layouts, for example, Rosworth Vale in TRS2006. It takes me hours to add textures to a single baseboard (in full scale, 720 yard mode), and a layout will have many baseboards.

Is there any script, template or whatever that can add multiple textures (Something like the fill command, but more sophisticated)?

Of course, I wouldn't expect it do do everything - manual tweaking would be required for the best effect, especially close to the track; but it would save a lot of time on distant scenery.

Cheers
Holo
 
You can use the copy-paste method.

Texture a small area with a generic texture that matches your route's ambience/atmosphere, than copy that and paste around it. Copy the increased area, and paste around again. Keep doing this and you'll have texture in no time. Used to take me days to texture a single baseboard until I found out about this method. And to think we ever wonder how them people with 500-BB routes managed to do it!

Try it ;)
 
A technique that I have used it right at the start to use the HOG programme and assigned certain textures to certain RGB values, you need not use the inbuilt textures, it's easy to alter the texture.txt file

I then draw my map in Painshop using those colours, then use hog to generate my map and baseboards. You get a rough estimation of how it's going to appear and spend time afterwards just making it a look less patchwork like.

Ian
 
The fill area works at more than 1 baseboard, you can fill in as many as youwant. Its the way to fill in HUGE areas

Go to the SURVEYOR Paint pull out, then to the ADVANCED sub meny pull down. In there you have Area Selection & Area Fill
 
Last edited:
The tiled look is the enemy of all good texturing and you will always get that when using the "Fill" method. Can't comment on the HOG method, I don't know how to do it and I've not seen any results, but it does sound rather clever.

The copy-and-paste method that nicky9499 referred to is the one I use for laying down base textures. It combines complexity and variation which you can control, plus mindless convenience for doing large areas. Some things to keep in mind;

- Do detailed manual texturing on one or two boards only until you get something that looks typical of what you want. Swirl/rotate textures and vary the scale to impart greater randomness as you go (some say this results in a frame rate hit, but I think it's minor).

- Copy/paste sections (and maybe even different sections) of those boards to the rest of the layout. You can copy quite large areas likes this, even bigger than 1 board, but pasting with smaller areas allows manual variation on a finer scale.

- Having the mini-map open and zoomed out is a good way of seeing where you're at while you're doing this.

- Vary the direction of pasting (using the little copy/paste tool compass) to get even more randomness.

Having laid down your base texturing, you might want to add second-level detail by highlighting hilltops and ridges with lighter textures and valley bottoms, gullies, rivers etc. with darker textures. Unfortunately this is manual, but I guess you could just choose to do it in areas that will be visible from the train.

Third-level detail would be features like road and track beds, rockfaces, cuttings, shadows under bridges etc. Again, it's manual but the visual payoff is large and it's fun if you're artistic!

[another suggestion: To keep track of all the (custom) textures used and to locate them quickly in Surveyor, analyse the layout with Trainzobjectz then use it to re-assign them to a common "region" (something starting with A, such as "Active"). They will then be displayed as a group at the top of the list on the Surveyor pallet.]

Dean
 
Last edited:
One tip when it comes to copying and pasting groundtextures: try to avoid copying textures that were applied while holding down the "texture rotation" key. I know I hold down the [ or ] keys while applying textures sometimes, but make sure not to do this when making the area you'll be copying from.

Why? It's been shown that, for some reason, when you paste from an area in which you used this technique, it can cause Trainz to slow to a crawl. I myself have experienced it, as have many others. So unless this issue was fixed in TC1/2 try to avoid using it.
 
Tutorial

I have a tutorial on my site, HERE which was designed around my textures but which would work as a general tutorial for textures. Give it a try.;)

Dave
 
One tip when it comes to copying and pasting groundtextures: try to avoid copying textures that were applied while holding down the "texture rotation" key. I know I hold down the [ or ] keys while applying textures sometimes, but make sure not to do this when making the area you'll be copying from.

Why? It's been shown that, for some reason, when you paste from an area in which you used this technique, it can cause Trainz to slow to a crawl. I myself have experienced it, as have many others. So unless this issue was fixed in TC1/2 try to avoid using it.

Odd. I don't find this to be true at all.

I rotated my initial, multi-layered textures like crazy and used copies of those sections to do an entire 1260-board layout. No problem at all with smoothness/frame rate. The only slow-down I get happens in areas densely populated with scenery objects.

For the record I'm only using an nvidia Geforce 7900 GS video card, which is OK but not exactly the latest and greatest.

Perhaps the best advice we can give is for the user to try it out and see how it goes on their individual system?
 
One tip when it comes to copying and pasting groundtextures: try to avoid copying textures that were applied while holding down the "texture rotation" key. I know I hold down the [ or ] keys while applying textures sometimes, but make sure not to do this when making the area you'll be copying from.

Why? It's been shown that, for some reason, when you paste from an area in which you used this technique, it can cause Trainz to slow to a crawl. I myself have experienced it, as have many others. So unless this issue was fixed in TC1/2 try to avoid using it.


Hi Chris

The twisted base grid texture and the associated problems with copy/paste does have a solution but requires modification of the code . Don't see this happening for seveal reasons :) .
Perhaps a rethink on user ground texture design is a better idea at present , so that rotational smoothing is kept to an minimum or better not used at all.
 
Hi Chris

The twisted base grid texture and the associated problems with copy/paste does have a solution but requires modification of the code . [...]

What's the underlying problem and what would they need to fix in the code to solve it?

- Curious Madeline
 
If the internal format of the relevant file(s) is documented anywhere, then in theory it should be possible to write a program to automatically apply both topology and textures. Obviously the sophistication of such a program could vary enormously.

However, I suspect that the internal file formats are Auran proprietary commercial secrets/intellectual property, which is of course entirely reasonable. Unless anyone knows different of course....

BTW you can automate topology by using displacement maps, which can be produced by a computer program from satellite data for prototypical layouts, or by using random fractal techniques for fictional layouts.

John
 
Back
Top