How to make hills (slopes)

[trainm0nster]

Quick question,

How do I make hills / slopes?

My problem is - I'm building a route with DEM data. When I smooth the terrain to the track, it creates some pretty substantial (and steep) valleys. For the life of me, I can't transform them into controlled, smooth hillsides.

Any ideas?

 

[grazlash]

Using more spline points on your track will help to control the terrain. eg. cuttings etc. I generally check DEM data against Google Earth to see the difference between the DEM height and the real world. It's also helpful in setting a reference point for gradients if working from a chart.
cheers
Graeme

 

[MP242]

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[frogpipe]

One trick I've used to lessen the steepness of a cut or fill is to take a piece of road and stretch it from the track to somewhere that the slope looks reasonable. Do this over and over, aligned with the world grid and placing the road side by side, then hit smooth on each piece of road.

Go back and delete the roads, and you'll have a reasonable slope. Bumpy and needing to be tweaked but its a good way for me to rough out a slope.

 

[stagecoach]

Make sure you are using the 5m grid as this reduces the smoothing to a smaller area. The smoothing tool always makes the change over a wider area so you could use the flatten tool to smooth out the area next to the track.

 

[MP242]

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[schweitzerdude]

5m vs 10m grids - what I do. If I start a new route, of course all baseboards are 10. I lay track and roads and terraform while at 10. But once I start doing detail work and just before I do any texturing, any baseboard on which track will run is converted to 5, and usually the ones adjacent. But background will remain at 10. This way you keep the 5m boards to a minimum. If I have a change in ideas, changing a textured 10 to a 5 will require you to retexture.

 

[lewisner]

For embankments and cutting sides I always use Samplaire's SAM VS embankment splines. The 12m Bank is good for double track and 6m for single track, then I mask the ground underneath with the matching SAM VS Grass texture. He also does a nice brick bridge described as a "culvert" but it looks great as a road bridge.

 

[RHKluckhohn]

I read that using the 5m grid can cause problems, and decrease Trainz performance, and increase the hit on your CPU and video card

I haven't seen that, but then my route is only around 105 baseboards. Most of those are 5M resolution.

On the Fond du Lac Branch I laid out terrain by a "copy-the-squares" method from Topoquest, laying out 10-ft contours. Wound up with 30 miles of ziggurats. Then used red ribbon invisible track pegged to the edge of each layer run from summit to base and smoothed the spline. Warning: any spline so used will depress the terrain elevation at the spline joint by up to a meter. The track I used was only 1/2 M so before smoothing you pop each spline joint up to where you just barely see the arrow tip. No, that's not exact but then topo maps are "best guesses" anyway.

It only took three or four years to smooth the 30 miles. DEM is smarter.

I have reservations about Google elevations. If you run a line along the road over a crossing and another along the railway, very often there is a major difference of elevation between the two at the same point. In some cases it's obvious the elevation is the treetops, not the ground.

:B~)