Best Texture(s) For Forest Floor

[Vern]

A couple of routes I'm working on at the moment have a lot of forest areas, both in the immediate vicinity of the track and extending out to the distant hills. Now believe it or not, despite the myriad of textures to choose from in Trainz (maybe there are too many!) I am having a devil of a job finding something that meets my needs. It needs to be dark enough that up close it looks as if the trees are actually on a forest floor rather than standing out of a lawn, but at the same time blend well with the lighter grass and field textures away from the woods. Gras 19 and 43 kind of come close but, like many of that set, are a bit too "stipply" if you get my meaning, even on a fine setting. Then it needs to look good on the distant hills though this is not quite such a challenge as there are some reasonable textures available.

Ideally built in or off the DLS for ease of others to obtain, should the routes eventually make it to the public domain. Many thanks.

Edit: Forgot to mention, working in TS12.

 

[sniper297]

I use a mix;

Mossy Grass 01 texture,<kuid:46219:21005>
Mossy Grass 02 texture,<kuid:46219:21007>
oz forest floor darker,<kuid:-1:100243>
Mossy Grass 03 texture,<kuid:46219:21009>
Mossy Grass 04 texture,<kuid:46219:21011>
mud darkovergrown,<kuid:-1:1005>

The last is the main texture, it actually resembles a forest floor with dead leaves more closely than any kind of mud.

 

[schweitzerdude]

I agree that a mix is the way to go

There is no one best texture, there are many good ones and any you choose will not look realistic if used in any sizeable area by itself.

Look at the built-in route Avery-Drexel (or any other built-in route with forest) and you will see multiple textures on the forest floor. On my route, as sniper297 suggested, I played around with for or five different ones and plopped them in small amounts, overlapping, etc until I got the look I wanted. Then it's just a matter of using copy, paste textures (only) and with rotating and overlapping, no pattern can be detected.

But go a step further before doing what I said before. To make it really efficient, place a small variety of forest trees (I use about 6 different speedtree conifers since my route is in the NW USA) onto your forest texture mix. Now copy and paste objects + textures, but not elevation. Again use overlap and rotation. I have forested hundreds of km2 using this approach.

 

[Vern]

Thanks Jim, I'll give those a try later on, obviously with a bit of swirling and mixing too. The key is to find a nice pastel shade which doesn't look too garish or speckly and blends relatively easy with the others. It doesn't always help that the appearance in the thumbnail doesn't always = how it looks on the ground.

I might have looked at Avery to Drexel before to see how it was done but came away with the impression that that the textures used still made it look a bit on the green side.

What a boon it would be though if we could have external copy and paste between routes, so once you spot that perfect mix/blend it could be easily transposed across to your own route!

 

[sniper297]

For this section I just did a grid floodfill with the mud darkovergrown, then oversprayed with the same texture while holding down the ] key to break the pattern up a little. After that splish splash splosh slop and dab here and there with the mossy grass textures.

Maybe it's my mouse, which is actually a Microsoft optical trackball ( I got used to the thumb operated trackball 20 years ago, these days can't use a regular mouse), but to me the ground paint doesn't blend as well as Railworks ground paint. Altho some textures do overspray better than others, it's not like an airbrush where you can set the strength of the spray. Click on and off as fast as I can, I just can't get the kind of semi transparent overlay I got easily with the Railworks spray set to 50% strength.

 

[sniper297]

Simo posting here, just saw yours - one trick I've done is pick a route (preferably a small one!), delete everything on it except the parts I'm interested in, then delete baseboards until only the area I'm interested is left. Merge that with the main route, copy and paste, delete the baseboards I merged in. That's where the three terminal freight yards on Chicago Metro came from, an old test route I made called "Yardwork", I just copied and pasted the yards after merging that one in.

 

[Vern]

I have toyed with the idea of making a small route, called something like "Palette" where I could play around with and store successful texture mixes then, as suggested, temporarily merge into a main project to copy the textures over.

As you know from my posts at UKTS and TS, i've always found texture mixing in RW a bit hit and missy. Sometimes it works quite well, such as blending Bare Grass into Dry Grass but attempts with other types end up looking splodgy. The pictures I've seen of the new NEC route seem to indicate it emanated from the splodge school of route building. Part of the problem is that most of the base textures are quite different in colour and shade so there's never going to be a seamless match. One advantage Trainz has over RW is that you can blend different sizes or directions of the same texture (swirled or unswirled) and get a nice subtle non-uniform effect.

 

[HiBaller]

(snip)
What a boon it would be though if we could have external copy and paste between routes, so once you spot that perfect mix/blend it could be easily transposed across to your own route!

What you might try, Vern, is what I do. I've created about 20 single-boards with differing kinds of textures on them (forests, deserts, flowers, plowed land, etc.) and tweak them until I'm happy with the results.

When I need a specific 'ambiance', I merge that board with my current route. Once copied/pasted from the merged board, I delete the new board and carry on.

Bill

 

[sniper297]

I always start with a two baseboard route named "palette" which I created by spraying as many splotches as I could in five minutes, then saving and getting out before it froze. Start the game again, repeat frantically for five minutes, save and get out again. Problem;

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=59346

Never did get resolved, the help desk had me swapping out parts and testing everything except my blood pressure, if even one texture is showing in the preview window it freezes after 8 1/2 minutes if I just leave it alone. So what I've been doing for the past year is starting with the "palette" route, select the paint tool and type "ZX" in the window real quick - since there are no textures starting with ZX, that blanks the preview window so it don't freeze up on me. After that I can use the pick tool to pick any texture from the palette or other area on the ground and paint with that.

 

[clam1952]

You can get an airbrush effect by only tapping the mouse button very lightly, takes a lot of practice though.

 

[cascaderailroad]

By: Lotharhake
Gras6 kuid:68787:21636
Gras11 kuid:68787:21641

They are very good for distant hillsides, without placing trees

His whole texture pack is wonderful !

 

[Euphod]

What you might try, Vern, is what I do. I've created about 20 single-boards with differing kinds of textures on them (forests, deserts, flowers, plowed land, etc.) and tweak them until I'm happy with the results.

When I need a specific 'ambiance', I merge that board with my current route. Once copied/pasted from the merged board, I delete the new board and carry on.

Bill

This is a great idea, along with a similar board for frequently used scenery items!

 

[cascaderailroad]

I agree ... an off to the side baseboard(s) makes a perfect painters palette, where you store all you favorite assets, textures, locos, cars ... for locating them instanty for re-use.

 

[HiBaller]

I also put a small, nameable, station sign on the board so I can get to it immediately using the 'find' (Control-F) feature no matter where I am on my route. A different name for each palette board.

This is especially good with TS2010 because of that horrible delay when changing tabs. On my system, changing from say, rolling stock to content, may take upwards of 30-45 seconds while the database is re-queried.

Bill

 

[Vern]

Thanks for the tip about Gras 6 and Gras 11 for the background.

Initial mixing with the mossy textures went quite well though further experimentation around the edges needed to blend into the grass textures beside the rivers (CAB ones, I think). Doesn't help I'm at the latter end of a week of nights which tends to blunt my fairly limited artistic edge. Sometimes I think we spend so much time to make things look natural and realistic, it's easy to lose sight that the ultimate aim is to actually build an operational railroad!!

The challenge now is finding some none Speedtree conifers etc. that look right for New England and display okay in Native mode. I knew trying to build this in TS12 would bite me in the bum sooner rather than later. I can't see any traditional style trees in the default content and bulk placement of speedtrees is going to drag performance down to a crawl. There were some pretty good generic conifers up to TS2010 which displayed okay in compat. mode. Will try and locate these on the DLS and see how the look, or maybe see how Dave Drake's trees appear.

 

[sniper297]

All the trees I'm using are DMDrake's splines, most of them are okay in TS12 and TS2010 native mode. Not great, but okay. The one exception was the douglas fir splines, so I cloned those, opened the alpha texture and increased brightness/contrast until it was nearly black and white, then changed from greyscale to 2 color black and white to get a 1 bit alpha.

That's the difference in TS2010 native mode (same in TS12), the 8 bit (greyscale) alpha takes on the color of the sky, the 1 bit doesn't since it's either transparent or not transparent as opposed to the semi-transparent shades of the 8 bit alpha.

KUIDs;

PON Douglas_Fir_spline_60m,<kuid:522774:1157>
PON Douglas_Fir_mixed_30m_spline,<kuid:522774:1155>

Also, if you're looking to make it multiplayer capable;

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=78422

They're aware of the glitch and working on it, but as of now;

Maple-Beech-Birch 200m-wide Cover spline,<kuid2:33404:500902:3>

That's the one DMDrake tree spline I used that is affected, for some reason the;

Maple-Beech-Birch 100m-wide Cover spline,<kuid2:33404:500901:2>

Doesn't have the same problem. But if you're looking for multiplayer compatibility, any asset you download that has a green "locally modified" triangle and won't revert so the green triangle disappears shouldn't be used.

 

[Vern]

I doubt anyone will download it, let alone try MP in it.

How do DMDrakes' "Perfect" collection shape up in TS12? They were good lookers in earlier versions and frame rate friendly too, unlike the bloomin' (or rather non-bloomin' most seasons) Ents.

 

[sniper297]

Editorial Opinion, You Mileage May Vary, Void Where Prohibited

Who, ME?! You're asking MY opinion based on my PHD in Art History and Wine Tasting? :hehe:

Well, just now downloaded the perfect series arboretum route to check it out, they look okay to me altho I've never been much of an art critic. Just for giggles I'll run thru this with the Perfect White-Fir-5,<kuid2:33404:504174:2>

Most of these look fine to my eye, but again I'm not much of an art critic (or wine connoisseur either, it all tastes like MadDog 20/20 to me ) so it will come down to individual taste. White fir looks like the biggest sky color offender, so clone that and take a squint;

Little different because it uses a separate Windows 8 bit (256 color) bitmap (BMP) instead of an actual alpha channel in the main texture TGA. Same procedure tho;

Fiddle with the brightness/contrast until all shades of grey are either black or white, leaving only two colors. Black is completely transparent, white is completely opaque, various shades of gray define the semi-transparent or translucent, the darker the gray the more you'll be able to see thru it. So for conversion to plain black and white it's again a matter of taste, some may choose to make all shades of grey pure white leaving only the outline, others may prefer to make the darker shades of gray black. Also depends on the model, but with this one I change all the gray to white;

And get that. Again, TO MY EYE that looks better, but everyone will have different opinions - some people prefer the wispy look.

 

[Vern]

Only drawback to that is only I'll see the edited content. Anyone downloading the route and assets from the DLS will see the undoctored version and I don't really go with uploading hacked versions of other creators' content under my KUID.

This is probably all leading to me reinstalling TRS2006 and starting the route over in that...

 

[boleyd]

Ah, thanks for the Alpha hint/hack/adjustment. May try that to see if the forest splines will restore some color to the distant forests.

I bet some people could care less about the visual accuracy of assets. They are simply icons that represent the real thing. You could put up a set of different signs to indicate trees and that would be just fine.

After a liberal adjustment of my medication I have accepted the speedtrees (not Auran's) as a reasonable representation of vegetation. However, the "old stuff" may add color where the speedtrees (n3v and others) rely on a single color for most species. The other program is even worse despite its excellent individual trees in a mechanical sense offering different shapes and constant colors. You should see some long routes. They look as natural as a third grader's doodles.