Advice on contours

[prdarby]

Advice please. Having spent many hours creating beautifully hilly baseboards and then struggling to find the best route to lay a track across them, I've often wondered if it is possible to put contour lines on the base. It would help with so many things. Do any of you have a trick for doing that?

Thanks folks.

 

[pware]

.. and then struggling to find the best route to lay a track across them ..

Exactly the same problems faced by real railroad surveyors. Ideally, the surveyors want to keep the track right of way perfectly straight and level. But failing that, gentle slopes (no more than 1 in 40) and generous curve radii, would be the 2nd best options.

There are no tricks that work in every situation. For fictional track layouts you can bend the track to suit the terrain. For prototypical layouts you are forced into following the actual path of the track - which would have been matched to the terrain by the original surveyors anyway.

Once the terrain had been established in a fictional world, I generally lay a long straight section of track (between two floating spline points) directly on top of the terrain. I then add additional spline points to force the track to curve around as many hills and valleys as possible while maintaining a realistic radius. Once the final path has been established, then I set the spline heights to give the track grades of no more than 1:40. It then it becomes a matter of creating cuttings and embankments where the gap between the track and the land surface is not too great, or tunnels and bridges where the gap is too great.

Peter Ware

 

[sniper297]

40 days and 40 nights of rain!

Noah and the ark is the answer to this one, flood the world with water.

Use the Adjust water height to raise it to the mountain tops, spray paint a line along the water line. Lower the water 10 or 20 meters, however far apart you want your contour lines, spray paint another line at the new water edge. When finished painting contours hit the F9 key for wireframe and delete all the water.

 

[HiBaller]

Sniper's method is exactly the way we did it on the DHR. Since the DHR runs from 500 feet up to over 7500 feet we needed a lot of contour lines.

His method of simply raising the water level works well on relatively long stretches of hillside with gentle slopes. What we ended up having to do was just place a small "crust" of water at a value we typed into the little height window. Our problem was that when we raised the water level, it pulled away from the mountain and we had to extend it closer. Conversely, if we lowered the water, it slipped inside the mountain.

As he says, when you eventually erase the water, it is best to use the F9 key (to go into wireframe mode) so that you don't miss any water underground.

Bill

 

[mjolnir]

Advice please. Having spent many hours creating beautifully hilly baseboards and then struggling to find the best route to lay a track across them, I've often wondered if it is possible to put contour lines on the base. It would help with so many things. Do any of you have a trick for doing that?

Thanks folks.

I do. I pick non-track spline objects, to mark things like contour lines on the map. I use power lines to mark the baseboard divisions, and various types of fences to mark other contour lines. I'll generally use at least four types of spline fence, one to mark major contours below grade, one to mark major contours above grade, and then two more fences for minor contours, one above and one below grade. I'll usually just use track or roads to designate those types of features. After the fences and power lines are laid out, I adjust the contours and remove the fences / power lines as the scenery is roughed in. If I want a specific slope, I'll sometimes use track laid across the contours, adjusting the height of the track at the points it crosses contour lines to the elevation of those contours, and raising the earth to the spline.

But having written all of that, you might consider a trip to the library, and look for a book on basic geology to read, perhaps even from the "young adults" section. When I did that (and I'll confess, the best one for me at the time, WAS in the young adult's section), my understanding of hills, how they came to be, and how they looked best improved, and my baseboards showed the improvement, too.

ns