How do I edit TIGERs?

[Tokkyu40]

I'm trying to do a DEM/HOG of a line rich in abandoned roadbeds. The two top methods would be to open the HOG filter all the way and hope all the abandoned track is within 4 miles of a line that's on the TIGER map or to draw the line in on the .bmp or .tga image.
My first attempt at the latter resulted in the loss of everything outside of the main town. Is it possible to successfully add new track to the TIGER image? Has anyone actually done it?
Any help is gratefully accepted.

Claude

 

[Jerker]

G'day Tokkyu40,

The ability to do that which you seek will depend upon the program you are using to create the *.tga file for HOG to work with. As far as I know, most of the programs being used by our brethren here at Trainz for the purpose of doing this, allow for the ability to add 'polylines' (as user defined 'Vector data') of a specific colour (I would recommend 'Teal') as an overlay on the geo-referenced 'map' applied to the DEM base. This overlay may then be incorporated into the export of the final image that HOG uses as the file for the 'minimap'.

Jerker {}

 

[Tokkyu40]

Actually, I'm just using the color match tool in Photofiltre to get the color, drawing in the lines, then saving as an uncompressed .tga in Irfanview. That halfway works. The half I don't draw on generates terrain and the half I draw on doesn't. (My lines should be as good as MicroDem's lines, shouldn't they?)

Claude

 

[geophil]

HOG does not have any colour range matching algorithm. So it's either hit or miss. You have to use the precise RGB values as given in the HOG textures for TIGER data for a hit.

 

[RPearson]

GeoPhil is correct you have to use specific colors for HOG to work right and they have to be exact rgb values - as close is not good enough. Grabbing the color off a thin line might get you rgb (1,255,255) which HOG won't see as a railroad which is rgb (0,255,255).

I've done exactly what you're trying to do it and it does works fine. I've also erased rail lines that I didn't want to be included in the route using pure white, rgb(255,255,255), which HOG sees as transparent but be careful to remove all trace as you can get "islands" like I describe below. I use CorelDraw/PhotoPaint but any good paint program that can save as uncompressed tga files should work fine.

The colors are set by MicroDem as the Tiger format doesn't support color data. HOG is set up to use the MD defaults. You can get the colors used by following the vector plots options on the MD options menu.

For example:
major roads - red rgb(255,0,0)
water 1 - blue rgb(0,0 255)
water 2 - dark blue rgb(0,0 128)
railroads - cyan rgb(0,255,255)

To draw rail lines set the pen color to rgb(0,255,255) and draw in the route. It helps to use seperate layers for the new work and merge with the backgound when done. You can also use this to add in additional baseboards that HOG would normally filter out since just drawing a small dot of cyan in any part of a baseboard is enough for HOG to include that baseboard in the map plus any surrounding baseboards based on the filter size. You have to be careful or you can get islands in space - baseboards seperated from the main map by open space of the Trainz universe - so make sure you don't leave any extra pixels colored cyan on the image where you don't want baseboards.

Bob Pearson

 

[Tokkyu40]

Mr. Pearson, I salute you!
That tidy little tutorial looks like it has enough info that even an illiterate computer dabbler could get good results.
I'll try again tonight and see how it looks.
A big thank you to everyone who contributed the bits and pieces that made it all come together.

Claude

Edit: I just got out of Trainz again. The color was right, but the track looked two pixels wide instead of one, so I drew a two pixel line and tried again. This time the new track was drawn in, filtered and rendered into HOG.
Apparently a one pixel line isn't strong enough, and HOG can't quite read it. The attempt results in the loss of all the track in that area. I don't know why.
So now I can reconstruct the abandoned lines wherever I can locate the old roadbed. Thanks for all the help.

Claude