Problem with DEM conversion to Trainz

[Derekc75]

Hi Everyone:

I have created a map from several DEMs and successfully moved it into a new route in T12. The elevations are all there, however on the borders of where the Chrome depth colors were (using MicroDem) there are these ridiculously deep narrow canyons that are created. Can anyone suggest how to get rid of those anywhere in the conversion process from Microdem/photoshop/hog?

Cheers,

Derek

 

[clam1952]

Couple of years since I did this however if I remember correctly this worked for me.
Scrap your map, create a new route in surveyor save, replace the mapfile.gnd with the one created in HOG and commit. DO NOT Open in surveyor yet. In surveyor create another new route of one board and save, using the merge function merge your DEM to the single blank board, must be DEM to blank board otherwise this won't work. It does not have to touch the DEM, just leave say a 1 board gap. Then save, close and reopen, it should hopefully get rid of the trenches, you may find a few slight imperfections which are not obvious after texturing or a bit of manual sculpting and you can now delete that blank board.

 

[Derekc75]

Thanks but not there yet

Couple of years since I did this however if I remember correctly this worked for me.
Scrap your map, create a new route in surveyor save, replace the mapfile.gnd with the one created in HOG and commit. DO NOT Open in surveyor yet. In surveyor create another new route of one board and save, using the merge function merge your DEM to the single blank board, must be DEM to blank board otherwise this won't work. It does not have to touch the DEM, just leave say a 1 board gap. Then save, close and reopen, it should hopefully get rid of the trenches, you may find a few slight imperfections which are not obvious after texturing or a bit of manual sculpting and you can now delete that blank board.

Hi Malc:

Thank you for your suggestion. I almost made it happen. However, I ran into the known bug that T12 crashes if you try to merge a big route (which mine apparently is). Shane Turner mentions that in merging tutorial thread: http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?98568-TUTORIAL-How-to-merge-one-route-with-another

It crashed twice on me. :'( I'll have to go back to square one and perhaps cut this into 2 (or more) sections until I can get it to work. I'll get back to this thread once I have a solution.

Gotta love hacking away at Trainz.

Cheers,

Derek

 

[Derekc75]

Mergind didn't solve the problem

Hi Malc:

By using a subset I was able to merge that subset to a single baseboard but I still get the narrow, deep canyons along the Chroma depth elevation changes. By hovering over top I can actually see blue at the bottom of the canyons implying that each chroma depth color is separated from the next one. Any more help from anyone is welcome. I should point out that this route goes across the US/Canada border so I had to reinterpolate both sections in Microdem (1:24000 USG and 1:50000 NTS Canada DEMS) and then merge them. Worked great.

Now how do I get rid of these canyons in Trainz. There are also some shallow groves along some sections of the baseboard lines.

Looking forward to more help.

Cheers,

Derek

 

[clam1952]

I'm wondering here if the problems being made worse by Photoshop? The version of microdem I used saves to TGA, no need to do any conversions, for some reason it seems to have been removed from the latest version. Perhaps applying a slight bit of gaussian blur in Photoshop might solve the issue although I suspect it's Hog not being quite compatible with newer versions of Trainz causing the issue. Prior to TS2009 there didn't seem to be this problem, or so I'm told, haven't got an old version of 2004 or 2006 by any chance? Could set up the mapfile.gnd in that, set up the basic route and then just import it to TS12.

You can get rid of the trenches by using the smoothing tool in surveyor, easy if it's flat tedious if it's not, as you have to use a small radius. Alternatively you can use spline, a road will do, lay it to one side of the trench and put plenty of splines in and fix the height, move the spline points to the centre of the trench and use the spline smoothing tool, if it's mountainous going to need a lot of spline points. Not perfect but better than a great trench! Can use any of the above for those shallow grooves, think they nearly always appeared.
If you have a lot of time you can actually use the raise lower tool on it's smallest radius and raise each point up to the correct place accurate but extremely time consuming.

 

[Derekc75]

No luck yet

Hi Malc:


I tried what you suggest with the spline tool etc. However this route is mountainous and approximately 53 X 191 km so it would basically take forever. I even tried just one Dem (instead of merging them all) and it also produced those narrow, deep canyons. I will not give up yet but I'm wondering how all those other route developers do not get this problem? I only have T12 so I can't go back in time.

Cheers,

Derek