does this distant tree technique look ok or not ?

[dangavel]

I'm starting to put distant foliage into my Uintah Rwy route and have been trying to make the distant mountains look reasonable from a distance. I have never been able to find a texture that makes forested hills look realistic, especially when there are many many miles of them .
due to the terrain on this route deleting the boards that are a fair distance away destroys the overall feel. obviously I don't want to overload the graphic card, but I also dont want to make the hills look flat.
After experimenting a lot I've plumped on using one of jvc's rocky mountain low tree assets , its not juniper ./pinyon forest, but its so far away it hard to tell when its about 3000 ft away from the track, its not going to look all that good close up, but i think it looks ok from a distance .
i have to fine tune the asset as its just been done very quickly , but so far my 2gb gtx 680 runs it fairly well at 15,000 feet draw distance .this shot is low detail for trees and scenery so that's why its a bit fuzzy..

the trees in the foreground are pinyon /junipers which are mostly c071's which are great trees but not adapted for TANE . if possible i'd like to get them updated so they are more efficient but I realize co71 may not want them to be distributed in a TANE version. Down the track users of this route might be able to change them for other less prototypical trees in order to run the route as its going to be graphic heavy .

Anyway, I'd like constructive comments or suggestions as to how I could do this better , I do not want to use spines as there are already a lot being used and they do tend to slow things down more than individual assets in my experience. They also look repetitive than the individual asset repeated and staggered .
if anyone has a better low poly tree asset to use in the distance I'd much appreciate it if you could let me know.

 

[nfitzsimmons]

My personal opinion, but it looks good to me.

 

[JCitron]

Clam1952 (Malc) also makes some nice trees which will work with T:ANE right off the DLS.

Your effect looks good and it works well just keep in mind how trees follow the ravines and hollows where the moisture collects in a large enough quantity for them to grow. They will be in smaller stripes and patches, and also look less planted.

 

[pware]

The most difficult part of planting trees, shrubs and grasses is that they do not scatter themselves randomly around the countryside, even in totally natural areas. As John pointed out, they will tend to follow the water courses and here ground textures can play a bigger part than you think. They also tend to concentrate more, depending on the latitude, on one side of a hill compared to the other. They will be more stunted in exposed windy areas. Etc, etc.

Cultivated areas, such as farmland, can be even more complicated despite the removal of most of the natural vegetation.

All of this means that realistically modelling vegetation in a scene is a lot harder than you think. Of course the big advantage of Trainz is that for most of the time you will be steaming past all of this at a fair rate of knots so most of the finer details will not be not be noticeable so you can get away with taking shortcuts.

 

[cascaderailroad]

How many baseboards wide is your route, on each side of the tracks, (or the total width) ?

I would think that from the start of 2nd baseboard wide, (from each side of the tracks), could be textured, instead of millions of individual twees ?

 

[dangavel]

How many baseboards wide is your route, on each side of the tracks, (or the total width) ?

I would think that from the start of 2nd baseboard wide, (from each side of the tracks), could be textured, instead of millions of individual twees ?

Nah mate as i said in my original post , textures look utterly crap- unless you have a suggestion as to a rocky mountain forest texture that actually looks like trees from afar, I've never seen on ) . the graphics card will just have to take the hit .

 

[dangavel]

The most difficult part of planting trees, shrubs and grasses is that they do not scatter themselves randomly around the countryside, even in totally natural areas. As John pointed out, they will tend to follow the water courses and here ground textures can play a bigger part than you think. They also tend to concentrate more, depending on the latitude, on one side of a hill compared to the other. They will be more stunted in exposed windy areas. Etc, etc.

Cultivated areas, such as farmland, can be even more complicated despite the removal of most of the natural vegetation.

All of this means that realistically modelling vegetation in a scene is a lot harder than you think. Of course the big advantage of Trainz is that for most of the time you will be steaming past all of this at a fair rate of knots so most of the finer details will not be not be noticeable so you can get away with taking shortcuts.

The whole vegetation is being modeled from old images and google earth satellite so i'm doing that already, in this valley the trees are more thicker on the north end, this is just a quick tryout on the far distant hills to see if it looks ok and to also see if anyone has any suggestions as to a better asset to use.
i'll make adjustments as to angle and height later on, but this is a quick and dirty way to vegetate very large areas relatively quickly so i can get this out for people to drive late on this year or early 2019, not in 2025.

anyway, looks like nobodies got a better solution , so i'll use this technique for the far hills unless i can think of something better,