Need some advice

[eswearingen]

I am currently building a route in 2009, and I have run into a problem. It seems that I'm not artistic enough to make mountains that don't look like something my 6mo old granddaughter would draw if we let her have a crayon.

Are there any pre-built mountain ranges anywhere, or are there any good tutorials giving a step-by-step how to make them? Or does anybody have any advice for someone who has almost no artistic ability at all?

Thank you,

Eric

 

[bwfeldsee]

I am currently building a route in 2009, and I have run into a problem. It seems that I'm not artistic enough to make mountains that don't look like something my 6mo old granddaughter would draw if we let her have a crayon.

Are there any pre-built mountain ranges anywhere, or are there any good tutorials giving a step-by-step how to make them? Or does anybody have any advice for someone who has almost no artistic ability at all?

Thank you,

Eric

Hi Eric

Writing as someone who was habitually bottom of the class in art, I can promise you that, once you have had a bit of practice, it's considerably easier in Trainz than with a paintbrush!

I've only experienced Trainz 2006 which I see you also have but I imagine the technique is similar in 2009. Until you get the hang of it, set the "speed" of the mountain building tool almost as slow as it wil go. Then try your hand at creating a U-shaped valley like they have in areas which were once covered in glaciers e.g. Norway, Switzerland, Scotland. This has the advantage that you can have a broad flat valley which is easy to make. With the Relief tool set to maximum radius and the speed almost at slowest, move your "circle" along each side of the valley - backwards and forwards until your hills each side are the correct height. It is important to keep moving, otherwise ONE part of the valley side will be much higher than the rest and look silly.

Having done that, try laying a road half way up the valley side along the valley. Yes, it looks stupid right now but fix the height of the spline points with your height fixing tool and then use the smoothing tool to force the ground to meet up with the underside of your road - your road is now on a ledge on the valley side. You can do it with a railway line too of course.

Perhaps the road is now almost on a cliff and the land below is falling away too steeply. The next bit is a bit tedious but worth doing. Set the Relief tool to the smallest radius possible and athe slowest possible and you will find that that you can manipulate every single line on your grid exactly as you want.

You will gather that all this needs to be done before you texture the ground - you need to be able to see the grid lines unless you are a lot more experienced and artistic than I am!!!

Good luck.

Alan

 

[Dermmy]

Building good-looking terrain by hand is an art form, and a damned hard one to master.

You can however download completely bare routes which give you the terrain for actual places. These are made by using various third party utilities to overlay real-world elevation data onto a Trainz route.

Playing around with some of them might be easier - bear in mind that although all of these 'terrain' routes are actual models of real places there is nothing to stop you from using them as the basis for a freelance route almost anywhere.

Search the DLS for username 'fishlipsatwork', he has dozens or there are a few at checkrail.com via my sig, though most of mine are pretty big routes...

Andy

 

[Ricke82]

I agree with Dermmy. I'm sure there are probably many with mountains, but I know that Durango, <kuid2:59012:101539:1>, has some really impressive ones. There are only a few dependencies (HOG textures, sky, etc.) which are built-in, so it's a fairly quick, painless download. If it's not what you're looking for, just delete it and try some of his others. You can usually get a general idea of the terrain from the name/description of the map.

 

[AussiePaul]

Good tutorial

Hi Eric I dont know if the controls that are used in this tutorial are available in your version of Trainz, but if they are he shows a way of replicating contours using a less artistic, more mechanical approach.
I have not been able to get any contour maps for my area as yet and Im not particularly interested in replicating it in Trainz anyway.
However I have been playing with some test areas where I just draw some contour lines and then transfer them in to the program as per his instructions and I like the results I am getting. The tutorials covers a lot but this is the one relating to terrain.
http://homepage.mac.com/doug56/MBC Tutorials/page23.html
Its well worth a look.
Cheers,
Paul

 

[schweitzerdude]

Also check out terrain only routes by smooz

I have downloaded many terrain-only routes by fishlipsatwork and smooz and if you can find one that meets your needs, go for it.

The fact is that the terrain building features in Trainz are nowhere as sophisticated as those in Simcity4, which also had an "erosion" tool. I have used the same techniques as discussed in the tutorial mentioned above with some success but have been unable to get as good looking results as the terrain generated by Transdem.

 

[eswearingen]

That tutorial looks like exactly what I need, thank you very much. And thanks to all for the advice.

Eric

 

[JCitron]

Eric,

You can also use displacement maps. These are gray scale images that will raise and lower the terrain based on the light and dark areas of the image.

They can create awesome mountain ranges as well as deep valleys, and save a lot of the hassle of squishing and pulling the baseboard to build your mountains and valleys.

John

 

[AussiePaul]

Hi John, can you tell me how do I find out more about the greyscale maps? It sounds like an interesting concept.
Cheers,
Paul

 

[JCitron]

Hi John, can you tell me how do I find out more about the greyscale maps? It sounds like an interesting concept.
Cheers,
Paul

Paul,

There are some gray scale maps built into Trainz already. They are called Displacement maps and are found under the topology tool in Surveyor.

Click on the Topology tool
Click on the Advanced Red dot to expand the window.

You'll see the displacement map area, which by default is a sloping high to low image. There are others there as well such as a very mountainous region, another with hills and valleys, etc.

Once you've chosen your displacement, you can then select your area on the baseboard, and literally fill the selection with your height-map.

What I do is select a whole baseboard, or baseboards and fill in the are with the applied map. This takes some getting the hang of, but it's worth it in the end because it saves a lot of hill and mountain raising over several baseboards.

I click on one corner of a baseboard, hold the mouse, and use the CTRL+the keyboard arrows to make sure I fill the complete board with the selection area.

I then fill the area with the selected gray scale image.

You can actually make your own images using anything that will make a black and white image from a photo. The image has to be a tga file, and you can copy one of the built-in ones to make one of your own.

Here are some screenshots of some of my route where I used the grayscale images to generate the terrain.

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg18...8&filename=jcitron200905240021.jpg&res=medium

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg38/scaled.php?server=38&filename=jcitron200905240006.jpg&res=medium

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg30/scaled.php?server=30&filename=jcitron200905240008.jpg&res=medium

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg17...6&filename=jcitron200906010003.jpg&res=medium

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg17...rabovethetraffic2frmbristolev1.jpg&res=medium

John

​

 

[AussiePaul]

There is so much more to this program (TRZ12) than meets the eye.

Thanks for that John. More stuff in this amazing program for me to learn about.
I think this is part of what makes it so interesting , there are just so many aspects to it. ....
Regards
Paul

 

[tolansherwood]

The hill building tips that have been given in a sticky can help.

The main thing to remember about mountains is that they are extremely large. The mountains outside my window have bases that can exceed 10 miles, and the peaks rise 5,000 feet over the valley floor or more. A route can look ok with mountains down to about 1/10 scale or so, but less than that and they approach the cartoonish, unartistic look that you describe.

I have found that building them slowly works best. Turn the dial on the right almost all the way down, and the dial on the left to as large a circle as possible. Then work on the mountain over at least a 4 board area, and try to keep the sides sloped less than around 60 degrees at most, and slopes of under 45 degrees work best.

To get the proper scale, the mountain should rise at least 400 feet above the base or "valley" level of the map. It may be that you need to expand the mountain base as you raise it in order to maintain a good slope within the range that looks natural.

If this scale seems excessive for your computer, build the mountain that way anyhow, and then cut the mountain off on one side by removing boards after it is built. before adding textures and trees.

Remember as you go that mountains are seldom symmetrical, and that their slope of ascent varies, with the slope gradually getting steeper as you near the peak. When you get very close to the peak, then exceeding 60 degrees will look ok.

I hope that gives you the steps you need to succeed.