Towns and scenery

Hi all,

I'm currently building a town for my route, and had a question for all you fellow route builders out there. In the first screenshot below, you can see I've built the gardens for ech house - being against the railway it makes sense from a scenery point of view as no one wants to view plain grass etc... But what do you all do for gardens/areas of the town that aren't visible from the railway? In the second screenhot below you can see where my houses are - in real life they have long gardens, but should I include them (there'll be about 8,000 houses to do in this town alone) or should I just texture it?


Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!
Cheers,

PLP

I would do full gardens close up because you'll see them from the driver view or carriage as you ride by. For those houses up on the hills behind, I would put in hints of gardens for those that are more visible and just houses where they are most obvious then texture the stuff out of view. There's no sense in kill yourself and your frame rates as you fill up the baseboard with buildings - been there and done that more than once.

What I mean by hints of the gardens is using trees and shrubs that are not local. A spruce tree, or some flowering shrub, if you use them in your gardens can be all you have in the more distant houses. Up close you can have flowers and other clutter if you wish.

I think of this as a model railroad and how we would model the scenery. We're not hundreds of citizens planting gardens nor are we construction companies building houses and buildings. We have to place everything down one at a time, which becomes tedious and really discouraging as we go along the route.

Think about machine impact as well.

Cheerio John

I take the approach of detailing backyards and gardens that can be readily seen from the railway to a much better level of detail and then as I move away towards the background areas reduce the detail right down to just ground textures and fences. On distant buildings in rural areas I always place hedges and fences around them because I think plonked down buildings in open fields or in towns and villages bordering open fields just look plain silly and unlikely and is a personal dislike of mine. The occasional tree near these buildings is always good too to take away that bare look.

Your first screenshot looks really good by the way, but taking that level of detailing into the back streets of an average sized town would make your video card scream, fold up and die unless you're running dual Incrediblatum GTX 1099-SC's. And if you actually did hundreds of house gardens to that level of detail you might want to scream, fold up and die too.

KotangaGirl said:

I take the approach of detailing backyards and gardens that can be readily seen from the railway to a much better level of detail and then as I move away towards the background areas reduce the detail right down to just ground textures and fences. On distant buildings in rural areas I always place hedges and fences around them because I think plonked down buildings in open fields or in towns and villages bordering open fields just look plain silly and unlikely and is a personal dislike of mine. The occasional tree near these buildings is always good too to take away that bare look.

Click to expand...

Pretty much what I do and buildings plonked in the middle of nowhere is a pet hate of mine. ;o)

I think the main criterion is how you intend the layout to be viewed. Will it be experienced from a realistic height eg that of people on trains or beside the track? Or is it intended to be viewed from a height, much as a model railway is? This decision then also dictates whether lineside cameras are at realistic eye level or up in the sky. Personally I much prefer layouts views from track level and this then allows for the kind of receding detail described above. Incidentally, for close-up gardens a few greenhouses, sheds and washing lines scattered about can work wonders in adding variety.

clam1952 said:

Pretty much what I do and buildings plonked in the middle of nowhere is a pet hate of mine. ;o)

Click to expand...

That's one of mine as well and it ups the ante more when the house isn't even pressed into the terrain and parts of the foundation are floating above the ground.

Add to that floating splines, track included, and I'll delete the route if I downloaded it.

neville_hill said:

I think the main criterion is how you intend the layout to be viewed. Will it be experienced from a realistic height eg that of people on trains or beside the track? Or is it intended to be viewed from a height, much as a model railway is? This decision then also dictates whether lineside cameras are at realistic eye level or up in the sky. Personally I much prefer layouts views from track level and this then allows for the kind of receding detail described above. Incidentally, for close-up gardens a few greenhouses, sheds and washing lines scattered about can work wonders in adding variety.

Click to expand...

Hi all,

The scenery is intended to be viewed from the train, but some, like myself like to explore the surrounding area too so I want to give them a bit of eye candy, even if it's not the entire town. There are some houses in the far distance that yes, do have some foundations sticking up through the ground but that can't be helped due to the either the model or the limits on the terrain that Trainz permits one to model. These won't be visible from the train, and as Neville_hill said, those near the track will be suitably detailed to provide as much realism as possible along the route.

All of the cameras are/will be placed at eye level - that is, from the perspective of someone on the ground. You may have seen some of my recent ones; they were taken from the 'viewing area' at Swanage and show Swanage from a visitor's perspective.

My only worry now is getting quality assets for the detailing - being up close to them all, you don't want objects that look like solid blocks of shaped colour, I'm looking for detailed objects while being mindful of the framerates.
Cheers,

PLP

Years ago (Trainz 2009) I got sucked into high levels of detail for everything I created. Unfortunately it hammered my system performance trying to display things that nobody was ever going to see. These days my system is that the farther from the tracks something is, the lower level of detail I use. And I still find myself backsliding.

But I'm no longer spending hours planting multiple rosebushes in the back yards of houses six blocks from the nearest track.

nfitzsimmons said:

Years ago (Trainz 2009) I got sucked into high levels of detail for everything I created. Unfortunately it hammered my system performance trying to display things that nobody was ever going to see. These days my system is that the farther from the tracks something is, the lower level of detail I use. And I still find myself backsliding.

But I'm no longer spending hours planting multiple rosebushes in the back yards of houses six blocks from the nearest track.

Click to expand...

Hi nfitzsimmons,

Absolutely, and that's the point that started this thread - how far should I go before low detailing is considered 'acceptable'? Obviously, gardens right next to the track need to be detailed, and gardens over a mile away can probably escape with being non-existent, but at what point in the middle can the detail start to decrease? It's an interesting question as so many of us have different views on the matter, either from a creator viewpoint or from a driver, but it's interesting discussion nonetheless. It also inspires me to crack on with it!
Cheers,

PLP

I am still back to trying to catch up on a long time and rather large railway based on a real one. Near the different lines I go to a lot of effort to have them looking fine and further back not the same detail as the end matter is running the trains and network with immediate scenery looking it's part. Because i am dealing with around 8 lines what i got round to doing was placing hill scenery a wee bit in to stop me being too delayed. I have been told by someone my immediate scenery is fine so I would not get too bogged down by the more distant parts. I put in the buildings and things that are there in real life but do now discipline myself to the hard truth that we essentially are driving trains and would want the near scenes to be good. After all it is railways we are on about not skulking around things away in the distance from the lines!"

Unfortunately this is one of the more time consuming elements of route building, producing convincing urbania to a reasonable viewing distance from the track. I'm afraid for mid distance and beyond I must confess to being one of the random house and tree cluster proponents simply because, if I'm building a 60 mile route I don't want to spend a week doing scenery along 2km of track.

Up close I do like a bit of detail and variety - even if I use house splines I'll try and put different trees or bushes etc. in the gardens. As noted much depends on the nature of the route - if you're driving at 90 MPH from cab view in a cutting, then the surroundings don't need the same detail as running at 30 MPH over a high embankment or arches.

Worth recapping that we need to approach our routes a bit like a movie set. For those of us who's primary interest is setting up an operational railway (or canal!) what is the minimum needed to give a reasonable impression of the surrounding area, without wasting time on fluff that will never be seen from the train. In over 16 years building routes in the various sims, I still don't have a definitive answer - though MSTS was somewhat self policing due to the relatively severe tile object count limit.

For me there is a Rule of Social Logic. That is people need things and do things. Just a bunch of house and a factory looks silly. No matter how you dress them up there is no social logic. That is why when you look at some routes there seems to be something missing. You just are not comfortable with what you see. There is a parking fare filled with nice hi-res well painted cars but your mind also wants a gas station. Lots of houses but some people may wonder where do they get their groceries, fast food, the bank, etc. So, unless a town/village or city is socially balanced there may be that "something is missing" trigger in the viewers mind.

If the town is not a stop then some familiar fast food or gas stations might be sufficient to give a "real town look". But if it is a stop those items essential to modern life need to be represented.

boleyd said:

For me there is a Rule of Social Logic. That is people need things and do things. Just a bunch of house and a factory looks silly. No matter how you dress them up there is no social logic. That is why when you look at some routes there seems to be something missing. You just are not comfortable with what you see. There is a parking fare filled with nice hi-res well painted cars but your mind also wants a gas station. Lots of houses but some people may wonder where do they get their groceries, fast food, the bank, etc. So, unless a town/village or city is socially balanced there may be that "something is missing" trigger in the viewers mind.

If the town is not a stop then some familiar fast food or gas stations might be sufficient to give a "real town look". But if it is a stop those items essential to modern life need to be represented.

Click to expand...

Yes. I agree with this approach. When I work on a route, I get myself to the trackside in Surveyor and have a look around as if to see the area from a resident's point of view. If I'm building a town, I'll go to my usual assets I use for that and start building. In my area we have the bigger, fancier houses on the outskirts with the less fancy houses towards the downtown. As we get close to the town center, we then have the usual bank, bar rooms, gas station, merchants, police, and fire station all laid out around a town square.

I will sometimes look at maps and street views to get a decent view of what these look like and even if the place I'm looking at isn't the area I'm modeling, it gives the general feeling for the area.

Here's a couple of cities and towns I have referred to in the past.

Andover, MA
https://goo.gl/maps/NXVRDwkd9Fx looking south on Main Street.

https://goo.gl/maps/A6v85c9cbTU2 a bit more downtown.

https://goo.gl/maps/zasU6R3ZND92 Corner of Chestnut and Main.

Hint: I used to live here so I know the layout pretty well too.

In this case, the railroad is nowhere to be found being some distance to the left down the hill, but that doesn't mean we can't put a Front Street or Railroad Avenue parallel to Main Street with a view of the tracks, or put the station on Main Street where some of the buildings are to change things up a bit.

And for an interesting town layout built to serve the local coal companies and parallel railroad (Reading and Northern), take a look at Mahanoy City, PA

https://goo.gl/maps/Q19s5MMzEZK2

The parallel layout is perfect. The town its self is very shallow compared to others and there's nothing but hills and trees behind it today. In the past, however, this area was covered with various anthracite coal mines and a lot more railroad tracks.

https://goo.gl/maps/5REypJSppCJ2 - A view of the downtown and the parallel railroad, where railroad street runs along the railroad. There were once small rail-served industries here. Model as you see fit.

Keep in mind too we mostly see only the backs of the buildings and gardens rather than the pretty fronts, and there's a lot more overgrowth and trash along the tracks than there is on the streets.