WOODS.....all welcome to post yours too

[JimDep]

Update on something I want to correct. I said earlier that the "Ultra" trees were frame killers for me. The actual name is " URST" . Anyway, they are good looking trees and I used to use them, but something was putting a hurt on my frame rates so I opened these trees under the "Preview Asset" in Content Manager and saw that the triangle numbers per tree for the URST's was quite a bit higher than others, such as the Sr_mm trees and Roys trees. Once I replaced the URST trees, it made the ride much smoother.
Here below is a pic that includes some old billboard trees by JVC and CL ( Clam)......a couple of long time Trainz hall of famer's that made the Trainz series enjoyable for scenery. They made a ton of stuff and I can't imagine what it would be like without their assets. I know this snapshot isn't exactly " woods" but it does have a cragely, spooky lookin'

old tree that JVC made, which is one I also use in thick woods to fill out the branches.

 

[Forester1]

You definitely have a talent for this!

 

[JimDep]

You definitely have a talent for this!

Thank you . The people who made these assets, St_rmm, Roys Trees , Jan ( JVC) and many others have the real talent and kindness to share their vegetation creations, and I appreciate your comment. ...so. now if I only had Jimi' Hendrix's talent for guitar playing.

 

[JimDep]

In a lightly wooded area, this pic has one of JVC's "billboard" type of trees in the background. When placed behind other trees, it's hard to tell it's just a billboard unless you stopped the train and looked at it closely. It fills out the branches of the other trees nicely , allows you to see through the branches, and is very frame friendly.
This one is a JVC oak #2 .

 

[JimDep]

 

[JimDep]

I keep forgetting to mention older vegetation from FMA. I used a lot of his stuff over the years and there's a few I still do.
So another trip over to Asset Island to get a pic of some shrubs.

These are FMA Shrubs 371-137's and different sizes of the same splines, which I also edited to be darker for filling in some wooded areas. I'll add the 2nd pic here shortly of them being used in the actual route.

On this next pic, there's the FMA shubs spline runs along the back of the this wooded area to thicken it up and there's some on the right in the front. The smaller sizes I use toward the front for ground cover and the larger ones in the very back. For the purpose of this screenshot, I cleaned up some of the other ground vegetation clutter to try and make the FMA shrubs more visible. The idea is to blend them with the other trees, shrubs and general ground cover. Again, I edited these FMA shrubs to be a darker color and less color saturation. Also, sorry these pics are coming out so dark. It isn't this dark in the route and not sure why it's transferring darker.

 

[JimDep]

 

[jankvis]

@ Jim: Very nice screenshots you have posted and THX for sharing them with us. Just want to let you know that I'm working to re-invent some of my old stuff with new mesh/textures and I have been working on it for a while but have not posted anything as I want to wait until I have something ready and don't want to hype it up...

I made some new prototypes for TANE with corrected normals (the issue where you get ugly 'black' backside). When the mesh is fixed with normals pointing straight up this issue is gone. But this is old news, the project I'm working on right now is using AI to generate new textures and what a fantastic tool... I just can't emphasize enough how great potential this have when it comes to generating random textures. I'll post some shots of the textures I have generated in AI:

These are down-scaled versions and the nice thing is that when up-scaling in AI, it actually ADD pixel-info rather than just make the up-scaled image "pixelated".

As I don't want to hijack your thread I won't go into more details about this but will make my own thread later when I have something ready. Nice to see that you have screenshots from both trs 2012 and TANE. The billboards are not dead, they just need a facelift...

cheers, Jan

 

[JimDep]

Hi Jan, and great to hear from you ! You can hijack this thread all you want. I wouldn't be posting this if it weren't for all your contributions. Great news about your vegetation assets and very much look forward to them. All these screenshots are from T:ANE, so I need to get rid of the Trainz 2012 from my signature.

 

[jankvis]

I thought some of it was from TS 2012 but they all look fine and for me it's the TANE and trs 22 but I really like TANE myself and play alot with it. There is nothing more relaxing than playing with trains moving fourth and back after a stressing day From early summer on 23 I have been testing out new ways to create vegetation and there are so many new tools and possibilities coming to us and will share my ideas and workflows in the thread I will start when the time come. I'm still in the testing phase and have so much to test out.

I guess you all are familiar with chat GPT and similar AI services as they have revolutionized the world of computing, it's even hard to keep up to all the new things from week to week. I have used it to re-write code for Trainz (config files and texture.txt) to speed up the creation process and I must say it's a must have tool. You even can feed it with pdf files to learn it to understand Trainz scripting (making your own GPT's custom instructions) and write some code for you. I haven't dived deep into this but for the ones that are more experts on this than me it's a nice tool.

Now back to the topic of vegetation related to this thread. I've made some blueprints a few years ago present on download station and Harold made several series of tree/shrub collections out of them. These can be used to swap the texture image for billboard related stuff (there is a 'limit' of 500 polygons) where you don't need the lod-tree and can use the mesh-size parameter to get the correct size span. I will make more of theese blueprints as I can't take requests so that you can swap images and create your own set of vegetation that relates to the actual biothope the layout represent. In US where you live there are so many climate-zones and different biothopes so then it's nice to make vegetation that fits to the correct environment. My idea is to provide the blueprints and make it easy to swap the texture images. And HERE is where the AI generated images comes in handy. I've used and recommend MIdjourney as it has given me more or less what I have been asking for (I will get more in to this in my upcoming thread) but here are some examples of the versatility:

Created with Midjourney AI. The last 4 may fit into US dry/desert areas. I mainly create UK/Scandinavian related stuff but the possibilities are endless, AI spits out what you ask for...


I'll stop here as I've hijacked your thread enough for today...

cheers, Jan

 

[JimDep]

Not really a woods shot, but a reskin of one of JVC's vegetations to simulate reeds from the Utica Marsh.

 

[JimDep]

Right now I'm experimenting with textures to simulate the sides of a cut bank with downed trees and roots.

 

[JimDep]

Fallen tree textures

going down into a ravine ..

 

[blueodessey]

Fallen tree textures

going down into a ravine ..

Very interesting Concept, looks realistic.

 

[JimDep]

Very interesting Concept, looks realistic.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Forester1]

Well, as a forester I would love to take a walk in those woods!

 

[JimDep]

Well, as a forester I would love to take a walk in those woods!

Same here. It's hard to do that area justice.
Here's more of an over head shot with some sun peaking through . Trying to get the fallen branches, leaves and root

textures looking 3D as possible and with different hours of lighting.

 

[JimDep]

blending in branches and textures

 

[blueodessey]

blending in branches and textures

Very nice aesthetic work Jim,


I really like wooded scenes like yours. You can tell it takes more than Country minute to make this area.

 

[JimDep]

Same spot where the dirt road is, but from the tracks..