Neat! Something You Can Do With Google Earth.

[cascaderailroad]

If you had DEM created terrain ... All you have to do is place the
track, which isn't very tough.

Oh is that so easy ?

Actually laying straights, curves and gradients is really a tough job !

Perfect curves, with easements into the curves, and making proper gradients, where as just plopping track down on a DEM gives you a rollercoaster of +6.75%, and the next trackage -7.50%

 

[steamboateng]

I'm with Cascaderailroad on that point. Admittedly A DEM can save you countless hours building terrain, and a DEM is a 'must' on 'historical' routes. But just plopping down track and "toot-tooting" away is an outright fallacy. I once again refer to a Blog I made 3 years ago, regarding this very subject.........
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/entry.php?296-NE-Mass-Route-page-12

 

[Zeldaboy14]

But here's the REAL question. Is TransDEM easy to learn?

 

[IlfaGoods]

Slightly more technical than Surveyor, but not actually hard to learn. I got to grips with it after a couple of afternoons. The gotchas for me were first of all spending ages working out how to specify UK National grid, which I finally found under the view menu after a quick RTFM, and then having to re-install the terrain textures with hardware compression turned off, again after a bit of RTFM. In TRS2004 and 6 the map on the terrain is a bit crude, but once you go up to TS2010 and specify the 5m grid it is an excellent aid to laying out rough tracks, roads and rivers.

Since I am modelling historical routes from the 1910-1930 period Google earth images are less useful to me than the ability to lay on old OS map down on the terrain. What is more useful is knowledge of how to clean up and sharpen scanned images of the maps, but even without that, I would still say Transdem shouldn't be too hard to learn for anybody willing to research the national mapping system for the area they want to model.

I tried to use the built-in route editor in Transdem to lay out tracks, but in fact I found I got much better results by bringing up the mini-map in surveyor, then using it to position the start and end of track, road or river splines by right-clicking on the mini-map to get close to the ideal point, then crossing over into Surveyor to make any position adjustments before the final left-click.

As has already been said, the hard part is working the gradients to get cuttings and embankments in the right places.

 

[cascaderailroad]

But here's the REAL question. Is TransDEM easy to learn?

I learned @ 50% of it, inside of a couple weeks, but my disc space ran low, and I put it on the backburner.

If I can do it ... anybody can :hehe:

 

[Paulsw2]

Not a bad debate for a thread that's eight and a half years old!

Paul

 

[steamboateng]

Indeed,.........But such topics are timeless and always subject to review!

 

[JCitron]

But here's the REAL question. Is TransDEM easy to learn?

It's not that difficult to use or learn.

I have a quick and easy route creation guide setup for anyone that wants it. Send me either an email or PM and I'll give you a link. It covers everything you need to do in a few pages of step-by-step methods for importing a DEM, textures or PDFs, and setting it up for import into TS12 and/or T:ANE.

This guide covers the stuff that 99.99% of us want to do with the program. Once you get the hang of this, you can then learn the finer point.

John