Trainz has a ground texture scale issue that needs to be addressed!

[Davie_UCF]

With TANE and more recently TRS19 a problem has become apparent. We have these really HD textures, but in my opinion they don't fit, they're too big in scale even with the scale dial on the lowest.

You have textures where a branch is the size of a trunk for example.

I have tried making my own textures but if you want high quality you have to have a have a high res image, at least 1024x1024. The thing is when it is that big usually the details are big too and once in surveyor even the smallest scale setting is still too big.


There has to be a way to make the scale even smaller or at least specify in the config file devs... please!?

 

[Therock]

. . . when it is that big usually the details are big too and once in surveyor even the smallest scale setting is still too big.

So scale down the image on the texture?

 

[clam1952]

Make your 1024 x 1024 seamless and paste 4 times into into a blank 2048x2048, you can either leave it like that or then reduce back to 1024 x 1024

My Ground textures are all done that way, some started life as 512 x 512 even.

Edit: Need to use textures that tile seamlessly well and not look like a patchwork quilt.

 

[Davie_UCF]

So scale down the image on the texture?

It then loses quality.

Make your 1024 x 1024 seamless and paste 4 times into into a blank 2048x2048, you can either leave it like that or then reduce back to 1024 x 1024

My Ground textures are all done that way, some started life as 512 x 512 even.

Edit: Need to use textures that tile seamlessly well and not look like a patchwork quilt.

You may be onto something... I thought i'd tried that and it made it worse..
I'll have to try again!

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

I agree with Davie_UCF. Most of the groundtextures I’ve seen have details that are still too large even with the smallest scale paint brush. I think it’s partly the fault of creators using images in which details (by that I mean structural details like rocks, grass strands, etc) are too big, and partly the scale of the paint brush being too large even at the smallest setting.

...and paste 4 times..

If the aim is to avoid a repetitious appearance, I would not recommend that technique at all. It is simply creating 4 identical sub-tiles within the main image. Even if they are seamless, pattern repetition is made worse.

Rather than creating a larger image from 4 copies of a smaller image, it can be done in a much less repetitive way if your graphics program has the tools to allow it. A combination of 2 techniques can be used;

- use the equivalent of what Photoshop calls a “clone stamp” tool to copy small, randomly chosen, areas of the original small image and paint them, again at random, into empty parts of a larger image space. The exact size of that larger image space is critical since it will determine the size of the details seen in the final ground texture. The larger that image is, the smaller the visible details will be.

- mark out and copy small, odd-shaped areas of the original image, rotate them at random angles or flip them horizontally or vertically, and paste them into random, empty parts of the larger image space.

After the larger image space has been completely filled with texture, make it seamless by applying horizontal and vertical offsets (followed by further clone stamping or smudging to eliminate resulting seams in the body of the image).

If you then decide to reduce the dimensions of the image, it won’t change the size of the structural details in the texture (for a given paintbrush scale setting), but it will reduce their sharpness.


.

 

[clam1952]

I agree with Davie_UCF. Most of the groundtextures I’ve seen have details that are still too large even with the smallest scale paint brush. I think it’s partly the fault of creators using images in which details (rocks, grass strands, etc) are too big, and partly the scale of the paint brush being too large even at the smallest setting.



If the aim is to avoid a repetitious appearance, I would not recommend that technique at all. It is simply creating 4 identical sub-tiles within the main image. Even if they are seamless, pattern repetition is made worse.

Rather than creating a larger image from 4 copies of a smaller image, it can be done in a much less repetitive way if your graphics program has the tools to allow it. A combination of 2 techniques can be used;

- use the equivalent of what Photoshop calls a “clone stamp” tool to copy small, randomly chosen, areas of the original small image and paint them, again at random, into empty parts of a larger image space.

- mark out and copy small, odd-shaped areas of the original image, rotate them at random angles or flip them horizontally or vertically, and paste them into random, empty parts of the larger image space.

After the larger image space has been completely filled with texture, make it seamless by applying horizontal and vertical offsets (followed by further clone stamping or smudging to eliminate resulting seams in the body of the image).

That's why I said

Edit: Need to use textures that tile seamlessly well and not look like a patchwork quilt.

Which if you look at most of my grass textures there is no seam and no repeats, for more complicated texture I use the cut, paste, blend, rotate mirror using layers, etc etc methods whatever looks ok. Gets a bit more complicated with cliffs and such.