Hello Miguel.
Good luck with the Route building.
You will have many hours of sheer enjoyment to come – guaranteed!
I read that you tend to get bogged down with detail. It’s a common pitfall in Route building, but I’ve now realised the importance of getting the basic overall track and topographical work done, if only roughly, at an early stage.
Adding baseboards to the terrain on already completed work is entirely possible, but lining up and matching the undulations on a new adjacent flat board can be hard work. Hills and mountains can be particularly difficult.
Hoewever, I still get the urge to put down loads of detail.
You can have the best of both worlds though.
What I did was to build areas which I wanted to have in great detail, but they are fairly spread out across the roughly built terrain and quite tiny. Have too many and the game will stutter and possibly crash.
I’ve learnt to use textures for distant scenery, not loads of objects. This helps enormously with the smooth running.
The tiny areas, which I have packed with detail, are quite useful for developing modelling and composition skills. Many are set up especially for the trackside cameras.
When assembling these areas you can Quickdrive, see the results of your efforts and make any changes if things don’t look right.
(Quick rant/plug: Auran/N3V why, oh why can’t we have a Surveyor viewport showing the camera view which will be seen in Driver so we don’t have to constantly jump back and forth with a forced save, thus losing the undo facility!) This request is already in the Suggestion Boxcar. Rant over.
Those “staged” camera scenes can also form the basis of some nice screenshots.
The other parts of the roughly assembled Route get attention when I get bored with the fiddly stuff. A break from any particular area of the route is usually very productive. Going back to earlier bits often inspires new ideas and a change for the better.
With regard to splines, I tend to not use them very often for vegetation. For fences, telegraph wires, hedges and anything else that runs long and straight-ish through the landscape – yes, splines are great.
With trees and grasses my preference is for objects. These can be placed exactly where required for good composition. Roads and tracks can also be made using an appropriate ground texture with grasses, shrubs and trees providing the edging. Adding several of just three or four types of selected foliage objects can work well and don’t seem to affect performance.
Interesting thread everyone. It’s great to see how others approach their work and nice to have the opportunity to learn more ideas and techniques.
Cheers
Casper
That really spanks the baboon for Georgians. General William T. Sherman raped the State of Georgia in 1865, burning everything that was not a home or church. Georgians are "
