using paint versus objects

Forester1

Well-known member
Hi! I am working on a yard and shop layout and will be including parking lots, grass areas and other types of ground cover. I tried using concrete slab in the objects menu for the parking area, because the paint tends to spray round areas, and I wanted mine square, but then when I went to put vehicles in the parking area, I found they were some 3-4" deep in concrete! Can someone tell me what the trick is? Do I need to sink the ground prior to putting in the slabs? Can I make sharp edges doing this? Or if I "paint" concrete, is there some way to get square corners out of a round spray pattern? Thanks for helping out the new guy!
 
Use objects slabs. You should be able to adjust the height of that slab, and you should be able to adjust the height of each vehicle. Use the tool on the objects menu that has an arrow. To get fine adjustments, use the shift key with the adjust tool, moving one digit at the click, and if you use control key, it will move on 5 digits each time. If the slab is a spline, do the same with adjusting heights. Help is that if you want to maintain perfect level of the spline, all you have to do is set one end, use the "get height" tool and apply that setting to the other end. Another alternative is to paint asphalt color, and add object slab or curbs to border the painted area so you don't see the color spills.
 
It will always be round like a can of spray paint, and jagged sawtooth edges ... you can tap lightly to merge different textures, and smudge textures together holding down on the [ ] KB keys
 
I use a combination of the two.

You can make some simple custom objects if you want out of existing assets.

I also modified some of the older YARN roads by replacing textures, cloned first, of course to fill in and over places that needed covering. JR Ballast, whatever, is common. I also disabled the traffic so there's no traffic on the railroad tracks.

I did the same with retaining walls too because they all had big grassy areas and I wanted dirt or ballast.

There are also tracks on retaining walls or embankments, which I replaced the track on to the current track I'm using.

All of this works well to cover areas and fill in gaps.
 
Thanks JCitron! Sounds like a lot of possibilities. But I don't have anything yet to work with .texture files. I tried to download TGATool2 from a link I found on Trainz forums, but I could not get it to download ("Could not download"). Which probably means GIMP? Tried it once and found it sort of mind-boggling. Still climbin' up the ol' learnin' curve!
 
To convert .texture files to .tga and .txt files use Images2TGA available HERE.
All the tools, available at that site, are very useful for Trainz objects.

Peter
 
Go to an unused section of your map...paint an area...select an area you want.
The select tool is square, copy, and paste to the area you want. You will get square with fairly sharp edges
 
Thanks to everyone responding! You all had some great tips and I will be trying them all. I also have the Images2GA downloaded and will give it a try. Thanks again!
 
If you are looking for parking areas with marked bays, I made some a long time ago for TRS2004 which should work in later versions. These are height adjustable - but will disappear if lowered too much - and vehicles will prbably need to be raise slightly anyway (Shift plus adjust height tool). There are six in all named "car park module" and can be assembled in various ways.

Ray
 
Here's some WIP shots note the use of modified retaining walls to "hold" up the ROW. The area near the terminus still needs some extra details, but hopefully you can see how the splines are used to fill in the ballast near the end of the tracks.






This image here show the use of a custom spline with some ballast texture with a sidewalk spline placed on top. (I forgot who good this came out! I haven't visited this area of the route in about a year. Pats self on back.)
 
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