Tranzdem

This may seem like a dumb question, but does anybody know away to either flatten a DEM or export a route without DEM? I want to start off with a flat route and create my own terrain.

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here but all baseboards in Trainz are completely flat at the outset, as I'm sure you know. Or are you asking about taking a route built by someone else with TransDEM and flattening it out to suit your own tastes? If so, I'm not sure you can without a whole world of hard work. I'd imagine it involves deleting the UTM layers to begin with and I really don't know what you'd end up being left with after that. I doubt that there are many people that've actually tried it. Why would they? Perhaps a bit of experimenting might be a good idea.

Cheers

Dave

A DEM has accurate terrain, by flattening it with the topography/plateau tool set at maximum radius, at 0.00m height would complete ruin the DEM terrain ... You could never make accurate terrain by hand ... you can make a cut or fill on a gradient by pressing the track/smooth button. You can also fine tune, tug up and down on the wireframe mode grid corners, by setting the radius at minimum, and tugging with the mouse

Since you don't want to use actual DEM height data, you can simply place images of the landscape you want to model. There are two different ways to do this, which don't involve using TransDEM, though TransDEM can probably do this as well, but at the cost of some extra work as well to generate the individual UTM tiles.

This in the end is the traditional method using images that placed on individual image-assets. Each tile is 1024 x 1024 and your image is scaled accordingly. You then place these just below the surface and then build your route on top of them.

This process used to be done manually, and the problem, however, is each image needs to be chopped up out of the larger image using your favorite image editing program, and then added to each and every base map asset manually, which really creates a lot of extra prep work before building the route. Then once placed on a route, they have to be locked in place on a separate layer each one individually.

With the introduction of Trainz Model Railroad 2017, user ModelerMJ introduced a utility called BaseMapz, which generates the individual tiles from an image. This will scale the image to fit a specific area and then trim the overall image into multiple images that are placed on BaseMapz-assets automatically. These then automatically export and a route is created with these assets in place all ready for building on. The other advantage too is all the images are placed on a single layer automatically which can be deleted later once the route building is completed.

Read this here as it has more details and includes a link to the program, which is included free with TMR2017, but is available for download by all Trainz users at the author's website.

http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/Basemapz

What im doing is starting from scatch by making a route in Transdem, just so I can quickly layout the branch line. Thats really all I want, the DEM isn't always accurate and is a pain to me to go through and have to try and get buildings, roads and track to either sit right or have a "flowing" look and not suddenly drop off.

Chadd04 said:

What im doing is starting from scatch by making a route in Transdem, just so I can quickly layout the branch line. Thats really all I want, the DEM isn't always accurate and is a pain to me to go through and have to try and get buildings, roads and track to either sit right or have a "flowing" look and not suddenly drop off.

Click to expand...

What I do is use the DEM data and the topographic images, but don't lay a track spline or use the UTM grid lines on export. This gives me more or less a blank map, and then I lay my own track.

When laying track, use an over head view and follow the image carefully. You'll notice the tracks curve realistically when you place spline points at the beginning, middle and end of the curves and the track will follow them nicely.

With heights and grades, I average them out. It may not be perfect, but it takes care of the anomalies in the digital image data. Remember the land in real life is a lot smoother than the DEM and the related Trainz terrain generated from it - Mother Nature doesn't have a 10 meter grid! Using Google Earth (the application not Google Maps), I get the height at various points, especially at those places where the terrain is weirdly bumpy. I find a point and use that as a reference for the grade and then add spline points and adjust the track. As I go along, the track fits rather nicely and there's none of those roller coaster-effect grades and bumps.

Placing buildings can be cumbersome, but I've overcome that by smoothing the landscape under where the buildings will be and using the plateau tool to smooth out the hump to avoid the mushrooms in a field look which sometimes happens.

The method you are talking about with just the images and fiddling with the ground underneath works, but in the end all the work is not satisfying. You'll find that you can't get those hills exactly right and the terrain will have an artificial look about it.

I figured out what I wanted.

Chadd04 said:

This may seem like a dumb question, but does anybody know away to either flatten a DEM or export a route without DEM? I want to start off with a flat route and create my own terrain.

Click to expand...

Using TransDEM, you only load georeferenced raster data (maps/images) and vectors but no DEM. Before exporting to Trainz, you let TransDEM create a "New DEM" for you, which will be as flat as the Great Salt Lake and extend as far as your bitmaps reach. With the flat DEM all formal preconditions for exporting from TransDEM to Trainz are fulfilled.

You have figured this out as well by now I guess?

Chadd04 said:

I figured out what I wanted.

Click to expand...