Looking for a texture

jrfolco

Route Builder
I'm trying to find a texture that matches the desert area of Southwestern USA. (New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California.) I need something that is on the DLS.

Thanks
Joe
 
Remember back to about 2014/2015, there was a screenshot thread of the Northern Arizona route being made by GNdome55? It was absolutely stunning but he must have been using HostThePost because the thread is still there, but we have lost all the images.

For some reason, probably creative burn-out, he ceased posting in about 2016. However it might be possible to email him and try to learn what textures he was using.

~ Deane
 
Gorgeous isn’t it? I might have saved some of his screenshots to use as wallpaper. If I can find them, I’ll post them here.

Also, I’m thinking of desert layouts by trainzer SoCal something (can’t recall the exact user nickname). Is he still around to ask, or did he upload any of his work? Well worth checking out.
 
Thanks Deane and Malc. That screenshot of GNdome55's is absolutely stunning. Just what I'm looking for. While we're on the subject, I've found a lot of nice textures, but a lot of them have that bitmap pattern. Is there someway to get rid of the pattern? In the past, I've applied the texture and then used one of the bracket keys to mix it up, but this does not always work satisfactorily.

Joe
 
I’m not sure what you meant by “bitmap pattern” but if you were referring to the pixelation that was common in the old 128x128 pixel ground textures, then the answer is to look for higher resolution textures. Filesize in megabytes is not a reliable guide to resolution these days because some textures have extra images in the form of normal maps, seasonal variants etc. The only sure way to know is to download the texture, open it for edit and check its images in a graphics program.

Trainz ground texturing is based on applying images at the vertices of a regularly-spaced grid, so repetition and patterning is inherent to the system. Unless you’re prepared to use uniform colours as textures, some degree of patterning is going to be inevitable. Things you can do to minimise it are;

Use textures made from seamless images.

Textures with obvious structure (e.g. layered rock faces) may be useful in specific locations (e.g. cliff faces) but should be avoided for covering large areas of ground.

Choose textures which have fairly uniform luminosity across the image and structural features (e.g. gravel particles) that are small compared to the size of the image.

Rotate the texture brush while applying.

Blend multiple, similar textures over the area to break up obvious patterning.

Try different texture scales to see what looks best, maybe even mix different scales to disrupt patterns.


That’s about all I can think of at the moment, but the landscaping gurus out there might be able to suggest other tricks.
 
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Dinorius, that brings up a question I have. I have had textures show as faulty because the .tga file was 512x512 pixels. I have resized them to 256x256 and they come up fine, but if T:ANE SP3 doesn't handle the 512x512 textures is that because they were allowed in older systems but no longer? It amazes me that they woud shrink the allowable size... I think the "pattern he refers to is the one we all live with when covering large areas. No matter what scale or radiu or how many time we rotate it, it is very hard to avoid some areas of pattern. It takes a lot of tweaking, is my advice...
 
Hi Joe --

I searched high and low for desert textures for use with my desert themed model railroad layouts. Eventually I settled on the HP- series that are both built-in and on the Download Station. The Yuan Gulch, for example, uses HP-sand 02, 04, 05 and 07 and HP-gras 22.

The end result looks like this (watch full screen / 1080p):


None of the textures are rotated, Direction = North. This allows the three dimension stone structure to remain visible. All were painted on at the maximum Texture Scale setting, apart for some areas under the track where I used the minimum setting. If you want to examine it in more detail the layout is on the Download Station. All the dependencies are built-in apart from a few dozen or so from the Download Station.

Not sure if this helps but I hope it gives you a few ideas.

Phil
_____

Edit:

Maybe this one is better. It's slightly less extreme desert, particularly on the upper level and left lower level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TlmCkfV3A

The greenery is murva 17 at the maximum Texture Scale setting.
 
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Dinorius, that brings up a question I have. I have had textures show as faulty because the .tga file was 512x512 pixels. I have resized them to 256x256 and they come up fine, but if T:ANE SP3 doesn't handle the 512x512 textures is that because they were allowed in older systems but no longer?

That doesn't sound right. I routinely use the RRM series of hi-res textures which have 2048x2048 px images and they have never been faulty in TS2010 or any version of T:ANE. I recently created and uploaded one of my own textures using 1024x1024 px images and it too was error free.

Without knowing the kuids of the textures you cite, or the exact wording of the validation error, it's hard to say what the real problem is (and often, the wording of the error message is quite obtuse/misleading to normal humans). For example, a size mismatch between the diffuse and normal map images might simply be reported as an error in the diffuse map size (I just made that example up, but it's the sort of thing that happens when programmers are allowed to interact with the general public). So let's have some kuid numbers and we can check them in detail.
 
Dinorius, that brings up a question I have. I have had textures show as faulty because the .tga file was 512x512 pixels. I have resized them to 256x256 and they come up fine, but if T:ANE SP3 doesn't handle the 512x512 textures is that because they were allowed in older systems but no longer? It amazes me that they would shrink the allowable size... I think the "pattern he refers to is the one we all live with when covering large areas. No matter what scale or radiu or how many time we rotate it, it is very hard to avoid some areas of pattern. It takes a lot of tweaking, is my advice...

Faulty size? Sound more like there is a normal map with a different size to the diffuse tga, seen that on a few older textures that had been "updated" by adding a normal map of a smaller size, did apparently satisfy the validation in place at the time which didn't check sizes, that came later.

Most of my ground textures are 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 so size doesn't come into it, TANE will accept larger however the game engine will apparently shrink them.
 
I'll try to see if I can remember the last one I had, or maybe I'll find another. Just have to look for Faulty.... :O)
 
When using large images for groundtextures you can't reference the image directly in the config.txt like
Code:
  texture "mytexture.tga"
You have to create a mytexture.texture.txt file
Code:
Primary=mytexture.tga
Tile=st
and reference it like
Code:
  texture "mytexture.texture"
Peter
 
Joe --

I'd be interested to see which textures you decide to use. Such information is always useful.

Phil

Hi Phil
Right now, I'm leaning toward 3 textures that closely match the area I'm looking to model. I'm completely in the dark as to how textures are made, but the following three textures look like they were made from actual photographs, and , in my opinion, are very realistic.

TS09_41 kuid2:523:333012:1

HP-Sand04 kuid2:68787:21540:12

Desert_Sand_S5_10 kuid:361619:100161

Joe
 
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