Ground Texture Problem

Dermmy

Too many projects...
lines.jpg


See those lines of lighter-coloured texture?

No matter how often I retexture over them, those lighter coloured lines plague my new Clovis Sub route. They show up mostly on steeply sloped ground and follow the 'joins' between baseboards.

The route was built in 04 but I run it in 06. The 'lines' show up in 06 Driver, but not so much in Surveyor. After re-texturing them out they disappear for a while, then get progressively worse with each save.

Anybody know a fix, cause they are driving me nuts...

Andy :'(

PS sorry about the quality of the screenie, but they show up worst in Driver and the session starts at 7.00 am...
 
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Could be the texture itself. The edges of the grid squares to not blend into each other. Try another texture or, if possible, repaint the existing texture for smoother blend.
 
I think it is a built-in bug in Trainz and from my own experience there is not much you can do about it. Some ground textures seem to disguise the lines more than others, but you can't get rid of them.
 
I've never seen it before Andy, but I do see many dirt road splines in your future. (those darn 4 wheelers, always scarring the countryside like that!
Ed
 
Thanks George, I thought that might be he case. Just wait for SP2 I guess...

Andy

Edit - lol @ Ed - as always :)
 
I saw this on HOG generated terrains a couple of years ago.
Try to lower/raise the terrain a little bit somewhere on that line.
Use the "Adjust height" button.

If that doesn't help, then -> ???:confused:
 
Dermmy, do you encounter this effect at the edges of baseboards? It looks like a grid to me. Grid width is 720 m?
 
Just chiming in with agreement about what cfl1604 said. I see this a lot on HOG-generated terrain at the edges of the baseboards. In my case, I model the Appalachians, so the terrain gets absolutely smothered in trees anyway. (Which isn't so good for framerates, but at least that covers up this particular problem. :o )

- Madeline
 
Same thing happens with displacement maps in 04. Did you use the baseboard fill tool? That is where I see it. Try covering it with the area fill tool under the advanced tab of the texture panel.

William
 
Thanks folks :)

I haven't seen this effect so pronounced previously.

FYI...

- only along baseboard joins
- Terrain is HOG
- Background terrain is copy/pasted
- route was built in TRS04

The interesting thing is that the effect becomes more pronounced with each exit from driver mode. I probably haven't seen it so much before because I have never had much time for driving, I just plonk consists down for screenshots. On this route however I am preparing a session for the route and am driving a lot and swapping backwards and forwards between Driver and Surveyor.

Interesting phenomenon....

Andy :)
 
I've had this problem in Trainz since...well, for as long as I can remember (TRS2004 SP2 at the earliest!). Adjusting the ground or textures in the area, not even on the lines, will fix it, but they come back anyways.

It also happens on completely untextured layouts, so I don't believe that it's a texture-related issue. But it does seem to happen more often on steeper ground, which makes me wonder if it's not a glitch related to the way the ground is shaded according to the time of day. Perhaps we could try it at different times of day on the layout to see if that has any effect?

It genuinely seems that there is no way to avoid these annoying lines, so I just ignore them altogether.
 
THis seems to get worse the larger the route. It's worse towards the ends of the the route. I've been making a route of about 110km 70km mainline plus 45km on 2 branchlines. Thought I was the only one with the dirty line problem on some joint lines. Raising or lowering terrain won't fix or fiddling with textures. Always reappears.
Chers Will
 
Dermmy

Have you checked closely? I found quite often that along the merge lines the ground was a regular pattern of points and hollows which did show up as texture variances from a distance. Looking at your screenshot and focusing on the horizon it is possible to see a difference in the line of the hill where your light line crosses. Look closer at the nearest slope on the right, there is definitely some ground disturbance.

Cheers

Peter
 
Hi Peter

Yes, this route suffers more than most from terrain 'disturbances' along join lines. Problem is fixing them is such a fiddle and this route is pretty big - 62 route miles on Stage 1 and near 100 more on Stage 2. The route is also wide - 4 to 5 boards to allow longer than usual draw distances, so fixing the terrain along the joins just isn't going to happen...

Odd I haven't noticed this before, but sits well with the 'larger routes' comment above..

Andy :)
 
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Since we as toolmakers rely either on our own .gnd file structure analysis here or on documents kindly provided by Auran we can't be absolutely sure about our full understanding of the process. This applies to HOG as well.

What we do know is that at baseboard edges we have an overlap of two vertices in each direction. Hence, each baseboard consists of 76 x 76 vertices, not 72 x 72. What we do not know is what purpose this overlap was originally designed for and how Surveyor and Driver deal with it. Are the textures at the overlap simply added and then levelled to an average or is there some other specific behaviour?

Have people experienced similar effects with conventionally built modules or with modules created by MapMaker and TransDEM?

The well known chasms usually appear where modules are merged and not at baseboard edges within a module.
 
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