Baseboards ... How much is too much ?

How many baseboards wide (on each side of the track) is too wide ?

How far away do you see terrain ?

I have seen some desert route screenshots that look like they have a 7 baseboard terrain, on each side, distant the tracks (making them 14 baseboards total width) ?

I am ready to cut down my many millions of baseboards ... It as mostly mountains and rolling hills

I would imagine that if you get down to view point @ 25' above the tracks, and you look out into the distance, and there is a mountain ... that all terrain beyond that mountain top is unnecessary, and baseboards beyond that can be deleted

I don't want to see any "edge of the world", jagged terrain voids, were I deleted baseboards

I think I presently have 4 baseboards wide, on each side of the tracks (making it 8 baseboards total width)

Is that too narrow ... Or too wide ?

Your landscape will generally determine how many baseboards you want to keep or cut, however, today your Trainz version does as well. If you are using a Trainz version less than T:ANE and plan on never, ever upgrading, you can cut back to the maximum of your draw distance, which I think is 3 baseboards or 2100 meters, because T:ANE and above can handle up to 15 km draw distance, which is substantially longer.

There are other draw distance factors not related to Trainz versions including mountains, valleys, and flat plains. If your route is in a mountainous region, you definitely don't want to chop a mountain in half, and end up with gaps, while with a long valley type route you can get away with a baseboard on either side of the track, or better a single baseboard with track meandering along in the middle or on one side.

The thing is you need to do a track walk in Surveyor and look at what you can see on either side of the tracks and cut back what you'll never, ever, see. This is all done of course with a backup of the route either in a CDP, or by opening for edit and copying the route-folder to another location prior to performing this operation. As you know a glitch or someone else such as slip of a cursor can lead to holes where they don't belong.

Most of my creations are 2 boards wide, hills on either side up to the sky line and the track meandering somewhere down the middle. Towns and heavy industry I expand out to 3-4 boards as required, coast lines, ports etc. I include 2-3 boards of water to the horizon. I am basing my efforts on typical UK scenery much of which is neither flat or particularly mountainous. Peter

I would think that 3 baseboards on each side of the tracks (total 6 baseboards wide) would be more than adequate (or even overkill) for even the most picky Trainzer with an expansive desert route ?

And that even 2 baseboards wide on each side of the tracks (a total of 4 baseboards wide) would be enough for the most fanatical Trainzer ?

I did the calculations for a thread in the Suggestion forum.

From your passenger seat about 3m above ground level, the horizon is just over 6 kms away on both sides of the track. At 720m per baseboard this equates to building a layout strip 33 baseboards wide (one baseboard for the track and 16 more on each side) to cover the ground from horizon to horizon.

Click to expand...

The 6km distance to the horizon is far less than the maximum 15km draw distance used by TANE so the extra 9km would only really be useful for the tops of mountain ranges which have their bases beyond the horizon.

There are very few places in the world where the ground surface is completely flat from horizon to horizon and probably even fewer that are traversed by a rail line. So my recommendation would be that you only need to build out as far as the nearest hills, usually 1, 2 or 3 baseboards on either side of the track.

In Transdem I normally set hilly routes to export 7 baseboards around 6km either side of the track. For flat country or urban routes I reduce that to 4 or 5 which is about 3km. You can get away with backdrops easier on such routes. The main thing is to avoid visible edges particularly on routes which run in a diagonal direction. Anything over 2km from trackside gets painted a neutral colour to represent distant hills etc.

Well fairly recently I was intimating that my rather giant Irish project for both NI Railways and IrishRail is taking ages due to the amount of scenery. So decided if I am ever to finish the dashed thing now trying to reduce the scenery around the last and long line betwixt Belfast and Dublin. To discipline myself I have been putting in a distance back a repeat of a hills. Unfortunately not stretchable so a constant footer. My latest thing has been to bring them slightly closer to try and get out of the constant crawling delay in progress. This means I can limit all the items, roads and so on as the big thing is going to drive me mad. Having so many farms, villages, towns holding me back I have deviated into this mode and throwing in the towel a waste of a lot of off and on time.

My side to side usually gets dictated by how much fog I set.

maruffijd said:

My side to side usually gets dictated by how much fog I set.

Click to expand...

Yes! Fog is our friend. Middle America runs to humidity, which means many sins are covered on a slightly misty day.

:B~)

Subway/tube routes don't require you to worry too much about distant scenery, too!

Even with our abilities to build the complete world around us, we should really keep our sanity about us and work with what we see and not worry about those details off around the other side of a mountain down in the deepest hollow. In theory this is great, but in practice we want to put those details in because we can.

In some ways virtual railroading really isn't different than model railroading even with our nearly unlimited virtual world. In the real world modeling we have to deal with physical limitations while in the virtual world it's resources, which if we think about it are the physical limitations of our virtual environment because we're taxing the computers really hard that we are working with. To paraphrase the late Frank Ellison, the movie set designer and early model railroad pioneer: A model railroad is like a series of small scenes, also known as vignettes, that are connected by a series of in between sections. These small scenes are the ones which contain all the magnificent details while those in between sections are not quite as detailed.

This can be done quite easily in our virtual train world by concentrating the details close to the tracks and using less details assets in the back, and by using non-specific assets and textures farther into the background. A good example of this is in the newly revised Tidewater Rail route by Jointed Rail. The track areas are busy with some really beautiful close up stuff while the background is just forest and hills with fewer trees farthest out. There are other routes of course, but this one came to my mind as I was typing this.

We should also employ backdrops more rather than worrying about actually building physical mountains and hills unless it is absolutely necessary. Again using Coal Country as an example, this small compact route has a lot of dusty, feeling about it with the backdrops fill in around it making the world seem bigger than it really is.

Excellent points, John. I've gained a lot from articles on scenery in MR and MRC regarding just these things.

Since the original question here was about deserts, note that deserts typically have lots of blowing dust, which emulates fog (or vice-versa) from thin to blinding. In Albuquerque when the wind is from the east they say "Here comes Texas" and from the west, "Here comes Arizona!"

:B~)

RHKluckhohn said:

Excellent points, John. I've gained a lot from articles on scenery in MR and MRC regarding just these things.

Since the original question here was about deserts, note that deserts typically have lots of blowing dust, which emulates fog (or vice-versa) from thin to blinding. In Albuquerque when the wind is from the east they say "Here comes Texas" and from the west, "Here comes Arizona!"

:B~)

Click to expand...

Yup we have the added feature of fog which is unavailable in real models.

I know exactly what your talking about though. I've traveled extensively in eastern New Mexico and up and down through the Texas Panhandle and western Texas in the spring time. That air is dusty!

John: Now that you talk about fog, do this: Set fog level to about 1/4 of the slider. Then set the time to about 6 or 7 in the morning when the Sun is just above the horizon. Run the train from the cab view looking at the Sun. Note that objects, such as poles and trees, project a realistic shadow on the Sun rays when in front of it. This effect is short of spectacular, and not many realize how well made the effect is. Just a comment..

pware said:

I did the calculations for a thread in the Suggestion forum.

The 6km distance to the horizon is far less than the maximum 15km draw distance used by TANE so the extra 9km would only really be useful for the tops of mountain ranges which have their bases beyond the horizon.

There are very few places in the world where the ground surface is completely flat from horizon to horizon and probably even fewer that are traversed by a rail line. So my recommendation would be that you only need to build out as far as the nearest hills, usually 1, 2 or 3 baseboards on either side of the track.

Click to expand...

Say you had a DEM from Harrisburg/Enola Pa to Pittsburgh/Conway Pa and it was 8-12 baseboards wide (4-6 baseboards) on each side of the tracks ... At what point do you draw the line, and say the distance/width is much too great ? At what point would you start to see jagged baseboard edges where you trimmed way to many excess baseboards off ? I have seen some desert routes where the scenery goes on forever. And some desert routes that show jagged baseboard edges where it is trimmed off. In the real world just how great a distance can one see on the average day ? At what point does distance become way too much baseboards on each side of the tracks ? If in Denver Co, how far is the visual distance to the mountains at eye level ?

Surely trimming my route down to 3-4 baseboards wide on each side of the tracks would eliminate several hundred thousand excess baseboards, possibly more than 1 million. If drastically trimmed down, would that improve performance greatly ?

My prediction is that if trimmed down to 2-3 baseboards wide on each side of the tracks, some jagged baseboard edges would be seen all over the route

I don't think you can ever avoid jagged baseboards appearing in some places in a route - even if you use hills on the edge baseboards they can still be visible.

It is often a trade-off between practicality and performance.

In your Harrisburg example, how many of those 4-6 baseboards on either side of the track would be hidden by hills in the 1-4 (or thereabouts) baseboards from the track? It is easy to get carried away (as I have done on the odd occasion) and place scenery items in positions that will never be seen from the track. Sure, some users will expand the POV camera 2 height tool to many, many kms from the track and expect to see scenery items and (obviously baseboards) extending out to infinity, but they will also be the first to complain about the fps rate dropping to a stutter.

Like many things in Trainz, we have to make a trade-off between performance and realism.

Personally, I don't mind seeing some jaggy baseboards in a layout - they quickly disappear into the distance as your train moves along.

Peter Ware

And too, even on an average day, I would guess the viewable scenery draw distance would be much less than 1 mile, due to haze and smog, possibly 1/4 mile (which would be 3 baseboards max) ?

I just measured in GE the usual human fov viewed distance is usually 20,000 feet or greater, which is 45 baseboards :hehe: Almost 4 miles