Thick Forests? High performance/low quality foliage?

[Chris004]

Hi, all. I'm working on my 1st real TransDEM route and there are bits of forest so thick they show up in the dem and on google earth as terrain 70+ feet higher than the real ground.

Does anyone know of a low-poly/low-load generic foliage (spline or group)?

I don't care too much how it looks, just just need something green that fills space and won't drag my system into the herky-jerkies.

I know they call the new stuff (12 and up) speed trees, but mostly that seems to mean the detail's been cranked up to the point that they're the same speed as the old simpler ones. Don't get me wrong: they look great, but for the sheer volume of foliage I'm going to need (and hanging over tracks in places) the simpler the better.

[I have a fairly decent machine but Tidewater never ran smooth until the bark-beetle infestation wiped out 2/3 of the trees ;-> ].

Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Chris

 

[iannz]

Try Forest Spine largeX <kuid2:97212:231:1>. Looks ok from a distance (if you squint lol). I have used it, but throw a few random trees in it and around the edges if necessary.
Cheers
Ian

 

[dnevans8]

I would suggest the series of trees by Clam1952 they all start with CL. They look very good even close up and are low poly and do not affect performance.

To make a large forest you can always make a small forest then copy and paste that, rotating before pasting to make a large one.

 

[justinroth]

UST (ultra speed trees) by mcguirrel (spelling?) Also. Make a smallish square, texture the ground and copy rotate paste like crazy!

 

[JCitron]

Chris,

Individual trees work much better than splines, and also look a lot better even in the distance. Speed Trees are ideal, but look at those by Clam1952 (Malc), and some called Forrest nnn which also look good. The nnn=some number in the list.

Now copying and pasting trees and textures is all well and good to fill in the areas, but don't go overboard. You can go quite overboard pasting trees and filling in baseboards. I've done it myself in the past. More recently, I've been only covering areas I can see plus a baseboard more in places where I need to fill out a scene such as some distant hills. This means I'm not filling in stuff that's miles away unless I really need too. This is not only faster and less boring with the drudgery of filling in yet another bunch of baseboards, it's also less taxing on the system. I find my frame rates are much better not wasting the pixels on areas where we'll never see anything in the first place.

Once I'm done filling in what I want to see and use, I then go back and trim out the extra baseboards. This has to be done carefully because as you know a simple click of the mouse in the wrong place means you lose a baseboard and there's no undo.

Hope this helps.

John

 

[cascaderailroad]

Look at Mezzoprezzo's screenshots, using TRS2004 ... Almost all of his scenery are textures ... I use Forest1 & Forest 1 textures, for any hill a hundred feet distant the tracks ... they look best when painted on at a particular rotation (holding down the [, or ], KB key, to get a smear effect, using a particular scale, and a particular radius, so the trees don't look upside down, or sideways.

 

[John514]

Best thing to do is use the detailed 3D trees close to the track and 2D ones to the distance:

 

[MeowRailroad]

the largeX forest spline works pretty well, even with just a few Pofig trees thrown in at the front.

 

[Falcus]

Also, just to clarify.

-Speed trees are 3D trees made by using the program known as "Speed Trees". They're usually animated as well. Hence they tend to eat a fair whack of resources. Spamming the same tree repeatedly in different orientations helps keep resource usage down, particularly if you're less concerned about specific appearances. It should also be noted that these trees have gone through their own evolution, some of the newer ones look spectacular, McGuriel's are a good example of this, as are alot of Pofig's Works. But alot of the older ones suffer from being a new technology to their creators. Poorly finished (By todays standards), seasonal changes on the models, unnatural Branchs (Many were known as "Chicken's feet" etc etc). So yo have to realize that not all that are available are going to meet your needs, whatever they might be.

-Pretty much all other foliage (Non-speed trees), fall into whats known as the "Billboard" category. They're generally some take on a 2D picture. Notable examples of these include Clam1952 & JVC. There is a WIDE variety of billboard foliage available done every way imaginable. The "Perfect" series for instance used a particular Helix design that looked incredible in the iteration of Trainz it was meant for, but TS12 butchers and makes them look silly. Alot of older billboard foliage suffers from this effect as well. It really comes down to experimentation and trial & Error to find what you like. Billboards are generally much easier on the Resource usage however.

Probably the best course is to use a variety of Speed trees and Billboards, depending on what you're going for. Even with all the foliage we have available for download for TS, we still have many many gaps as far as real world reconstruction goes. There just aren't alot of Different types of Evergreen's available for instance. So part of this is putting up with stuff that's an "Approximate" representation of what you're looking for.

Good Luck,
Falcus

 

[Chris004]

Awesome People. Many thanks.

What a great bunch of ideas. Thank you all for taking the time to share your expertise.

In particular i'm grateful to have been waived off the spline idea, I forgot all about the copy-paste option.

I think a combination of overhanging trees and using a forest texture to cover the false "hills" will serve me quite well. These trees are so dense they appear on the DEM as terrain elevation; clearly dense enough to fool the satellite radar.

So I think I'll just flatten the area adjacent to the track and fill in with the fastest two or three trees and cover the rest in the forest texture.

I agree, John, the number of types of trees is at least as important as the number of instances of trees. Don't really need much variety: what i'm trying to replicate is too dense to make out the type of the trees - just sort of a wall of generic greenery. My Tidewater deforestation project yielded the best results when I replaced a lot of the trees with a type that was already on the map. And practically clear cutting everything over a kilometer from the track.

Shame, though; that route was so pretty. Reminded me of rural NY state. Adirondacks maybe. Or Hudson River valley 40 or 50 miles north of NY City. But I can't drive a train with the herky-jerkys going on - creeping past one telegraph pole and then flying to the next one. Totally destroys the illusion of reality.

I think I'll avoid the billboards (even though they should be resource friendly) as they seem to have some transparency issues in TS10 (makes a nice effect when there's snow - looks like an ice-storm - and matches the "ice" all all the overhead wires).

Hopefully I can find something without the animation (it was SOO cool the first time I saw it - 45 minutes later I was over it - half hour after that and they were so distracting I was thinking about ripping them out [and annoyed thinking about the processor cycles they were gobbling up]).



Wow! Am I ever griping about Trainz... Well, if it wasn't mostly awesome I wouldn't care about the nit-picky lapses in quality.

 

[justinroth]

Rolling hill backdrops work well also..in fact they look better than distant trees.

 

[JCitron]

What a great bunch of ideas. Thank you all for taking the time to share your expertise.

In particular i'm grateful to have been waived off the spline idea, I forgot all about the copy-paste option.

I think a combination of overhanging trees and using a forest texture to cover the false "hills" will serve me quite well. These trees are so dense they appear on the DEM as terrain elevation; clearly dense enough to fool the satellite radar.

So I think I'll just flatten the area adjacent to the track and fill in with the fastest two or three trees and cover the rest in the forest texture.

I agree, John, the number of types of trees is at least as important as the number of instances of trees. Don't really need much variety: what i'm trying to replicate is too dense to make out the type of the trees - just sort of a wall of generic greenery. My Tidewater deforestation project yielded the best results when I replaced a lot of the trees with a type that was already on the map. And practically clear cutting everything over a kilometer from the track.

Shame, though; that route was so pretty. Reminded me of rural NY state. Adirondacks maybe. Or Hudson River valley 40 or 50 miles north of NY City. But I can't drive a train with the herky-jerkys going on - creeping past one telegraph pole and then flying to the next one. Totally destroys the illusion of reality.

I think I'll avoid the billboards (even though they should be resource friendly) as they seem to have some transparency issues in TS10 (makes a nice effect when there's snow - looks like an ice-storm - and matches the "ice" all all the overhead wires).

Hopefully I can find something without the animation (it was SOO cool the first time I saw it - 45 minutes later I was over it - half hour after that and they were so distracting I was thinking about ripping them out [and annoyed thinking about the processor cycles they were gobbling up]).



Wow! Am I ever griping about Trainz... Well, if it wasn't mostly awesome I wouldn't care about the nit-picky lapses in quality.

This is the problem with trying to replicate the Northeast! I too come from the same region, albeit, a bit farther to the coast in eastern Mass. We just can't get enough foliage cover no matter how much we try, and then we run into the performance wall. I have found with the Speed Trees, you can actually use less of them and achieve the same effect. This is because so many of them are so large they use up a lot more space than the old flip boards. This openness doesn't look good up close, but from a distance they fill in nicely. So up close use more, but in the distance thin them out. There are also some nice bushes and shrub Speed Trees by Pofig and JVC. They can fill in the areas closest to the tracks to create the underbrush and undergrowth we need. The taller trees can make nice tree tunnels too, but don't go overboard with it as I've found out the hard way.

It's interesting that you noticed the elevation height caused by the trees. This is a substantial difference of maybe 20 meters or more in many places. I too noticed the same, and have also run into buildings causing this as well. I ended up scrapping a project, based on my hometown, because the elevation was thrown so far off by the buildings and trees in the area, I could never get the roads and tracks at the proper height.

Ab infrequent forum member and fellow Trainzer, WKWood has rebuilt Otto's Speed Tree animation killer. This really does help the frame rates as it stops the tree sway. You need to follow his directions exactly and never delete the backup folder, which you need to use if you update Trainz as you'll need to restore the tree animation files (DLLs) first before updating, otherwise, the update installer will fail and cause all kinds of weird unfixable problems that will have you pulling your hair out.

I seem to have lost the link to his blog site unfortunately. Perhaps someone else can post it.

John

 

[Falcus]

I think I'll avoid the billboards (even though they should be resource friendly) as they seem to have some transparency issues in TS10 (makes a nice effect when there's snow - looks like an ice-storm - and matches the "ice" all all the overhead wires).

Hopefully I can find something without the animation (it was SOO cool the first time I saw it - 45 minutes later I was over it - half hour after that and they were so distracting I was thinking about ripping them out [and annoyed thinking about the processor cycles they were gobbling up]).

.

I almost mentioned the transparent ones earlier, because I hate them so much, but didn't expect you to have run into it already. There was an iteration of Trainz where the quasi transparent billboards looked good. This however is no longer the case. IIRC alot of DMDrake's stuff had this effect as well as others. Try Clam1952's Foliage before you give up entirely on Billboards. Id suggest JVC as well since alot of his stuff is top of the line, but hes been around for so long tons of his stuff is outdated and meant for older iterations so you can still find transparent JVC stuff and Perfect JVC stuff, etc etc. I cannot even begin to describe how much foliage there is out there, and probably at least 40% of it is stuff that can't be used very well in TS12. Hence I can only say keep looking. Have a look at Deadpool55's Screenshot thread to see why it makes sense to not give up on billboards just yet. They have their place, and can be made to look good if you have the right ones in the right places depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

And yea, the speed tree's are huge resource hogs if you don't have a newer GPU. Hence finding decent Billboards sometimes is the best (Or only) way. Im not trying to discourage you from speed trees in general, but they have their limits, and sometimes depending on your situation those limits are very severe.

Good Luck,
Falcus

 

[Vern]

Some of the built in Russian trees are worth looking at, too - search for bereza or derevo. There are a few conifer and birch types in there. I don't believe they are Speedtrees but they avoid the transparency issue which (sadly) afflict probably 60% or more of the existing tree stock for the game. Searching the DLS should find more from the same authors. There's a few other foliage items lurking under the Hungary regional category.

Sadly they might not solve the performance issues caused by trying to reproduce thick forests. I just had to scrap a heavily forested route I was working on, because Surveyor slowed to a crawl often freezing for several seconds and dropping out terrain texture. Both the alternative sims feature systems for placing bulk objects as one unit which drastically reduces the performance hit of a forest consisting of many single items. Something like that ought to have been on the cards for TANE... I digress.

In places where you want a nice detailed tree, the Speedtrees by McGuirrel (prefixed Ultra if you search the DLS) are very nice, but at the cost of a huge file size for the download (probably bigger than your route gnd file). There's also the issue applicable to all third party Speedtrees, that the current versions aren't going to work in TANE unless the authors buy new Speedtree software to update them.

 

[JCitron]

To add to the awesome Russian Trees... look at those prefixed with RMM. His variety of various trees is just superb. Hopefully he's updating his set for TANE. He did enquire but I don't know the status. The authors are to contact N3V and the company will supply the updated dev pack for the creators to upgrade their content.

John