TransDem Question

[Len12]

I just bought this a week ago and love it. I just created a route from Paris Gare du Nord to Arras. Now before Transdem I had started a laborious process before of laying down google images and doing the route, buildings, etc. but no DEMs of course and no proper latitutes. Just flat land. See pics.

I'm redoing this now that I have the proper land contours, latitudes, etc. but given those DEMs I'm now having to place these buildings on the contours. What method can be used to keep the buildings on a flat enough base not to mess up the building itself and the surrounding land contours?

 

[Johnk]

I think the manual explains how to do that pretty well. It's nothing to do with TransDem. just raising or lowering the land or buildings to suit the other.

Looking good!

 

[Dreadnought1]

There are a number of 'foundation'-type assets which might be useful.
Use them to provide a flat base on which you can put your buildings.

Try the DHR foundations on the DLS for starters.

Cheers,
Dreadnought1

 

[backyard]

But...things in order...

I think the whole intended purpose of TranzDEM is to start with the DEM you make, adding Google Earth screenies to the DEM, import to Trainz, then apply the buildings.

Unless the area you wish to mod is perfectly flat. Then you can overlay the maps to baseboards without TransDEM.

You can Bookmark those buildings for easy access, before you start over.

 

[Approach_Medium]

I just use the Plateau button in Surveyor. This creates a nice, flat ground that is the average of the surrounding terrain.


FW

 

[laika]

Keep it up. Its a long way to go from Paris to Arras. Just flatten out where you need to place buildings and sometimes use imagenation. But i,m a real Paris fan and i,m glad some1 is also use this city to build routes
:wave:greetz laika(Ronny)

 

[Vern]

Some of the German buildings in TRS2006/009 have foundation sections which can be sunk into the ground thus avoiding too many little plateaus.

When I briefly dabbled with starting a French route, I discovered you can access France topographic maps online. (Link at home, sorry). These can be copied via screen dumps and pasted together in PSP, then georeferenced for the map overlay in Transdem. Not sure whether there's a France web mapping service or if so what the protocols are as this would ensure the most accurate match of map image to terrain. Having recently used the US WMS facility with Transdem I can vouch for what a powerful tool it is, but that is because the Help tutorial includes how to get it working. I would have been lost otherwise!

 

[Len12]

Guys I want to thank you for all your responses. I'm going to try all the suggestions that have been indicated.

laika - I visited France a couple of years ago (from Canada) and love the use of trains in Europe. The train stations are great. So I'm going to try building routes from Gare du Nord to Arras (presently) and the next one to Caen from Gare St. Lazare. Most of my buildings are custom made including Gare du Nord as you see above with nightlighting. I've done some custom churches such Notre Dame as well which will be closer to Lazare when I get to it. Problem of course is that there are not that many quality pics online so I'm doing the best I can with existing internet pics. I love doing it. The actual trip with TGV from GN to Arras is approx. 50 minutes.

Vern - Through TransDEM I've accessed the 'Map Tile' function and loaded the actual route (in terms of the rail line itself) using MS Virtual Earth and the Orthophoto function. This resulted in some 600 or so tiles from Gare du Nord to Arras. It actually went pretty quick but still required me to find the route north without going off on some crazy tangent.

 

[Johnk]

What past experience have you had Len? You seem to be making incredible progress.

 

[Len12]

John

I had some prior with RailSim. I much prefer Trainz though.

 

[Johnk]

Thanks Len,

Please keep posting your progress. You're covering a lot of ground quickly.

 

[Len12]

Will do John. No doubt I'll need more help as this goes on.

 

[backyard]

No doubt...

Creating the map & adding textures is the "easy part."

Hang in there, it seams like a long route!

 

[laika]

Well, looks great. Also look for French content.
http://globuletrainz.free.fr/
There you can find alot of great assets like platforms, very detailed catenary and alot of other good stuff you can use.
http://www.carreweb.fr/
On this site you can find all the French signals. These are very well done.
There is alot more good french stuff but you need to look in the french forum part.
Btw, if you want to use animated junctions you need to be care of that. Ofcourse these are great but it will cost you alot of frames with all this dense trackwork around Paris. Try to use lowpoly track.
Greetz :wave: Ronny(Laika)

 

[Len12]

Hey Laika thanks for those links. Good sources!