"Cheese slice"r terrain scuplting.

2. What are we aiming for when we build a route? Is it a model, or a simulation? There are advantages to the "cheese slicer" approach in terms of being able to for-shorten distances, the result I believe can be a more realistic looking model. It is possible using for-shortening to model mountains that are visible in the real world, but which cannot be modeled to scale using rocket science on a practical number of base boards.
Semi-fictitious routes are not uncommon with TransDEM users. Shortening distances, for instance, is rather simple. You do not create the entire route with TransDEM, but only those sections you wish to appear in your final model, usually the station areas and interesting stretches in between. You let TransDEM create several modules for this, one for each section, and then you merge them in Surveyor. After that, and here is the manual part, you will have to shape the transitions, as the modules will not merge seamlessly. But that is a minor effort, compared to creating every single baseboard by hand.
 
I used the "cheese slicer" method for my only major route and initially just eyeballed in contours from a topo map in one window to Trainz in another window, using the Use Elevation tool. Constant referral to an Excel feet/meters worksheet occupying a third window. That resulted in a mapful of ziggurats, or layer cakes, of course. Eventually it occurred to me to use my laptop for the topo map. Better. Smoothing the ziggurats involved using invisible track pinned at the edges of the layers spaced about 25 M apart. Extremely tiresome and it took me from ~Christmas 2009 until 2014 to get enough done I wasn't too embarrassed to upload it.

Since then I've added several baseboards to fill visual gaps, using the ruler grid and invisible track contour lines. Still have to smooth the ziggurats but it's more accurate and goes quicker. An addition can be completed in about a week per board, with scenery etc.

Working in 2009 and 12 the invisible track spline points had to be elevated 0.3 or 0.4 meters to avoid depressing the contours. That doesn't seem to be an issue in T:ANE.

If I ever embark on a real route again I'll get Transdem for sure.

Doing a quickie "test" route that has kind of growed, I've found that the installed displacement maps have too much negative elevation to look real so I create, say, a ridge system with the terrain tools, then copy that as a displacement and reuse it with stretching or compressing the area or altering the proportions. Then the Plateau tool does a nice job of blending the terrain.

:B~)
 
I forgot to say the cheese slicer method reminds me of the Woodland Scenic's foam sub-terrain system.

https://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics.com/show/category/SubTerrainSystem

I used this about 20 years ago when I worked on an N-scale layout. It worked well but was very expensive! I switched to commercial foam boards and had a release-agent problem with the boards not sticking to plywood or each other. That was around 2003 and I discovered TRS2004 by then and everything else was retired.

Back in my early Trainzing days, I built my own big route this way. I would spend weeks putting down terrain then smoothing out the blocks using splines, which I learned from George Fisher. I still have a portion of that layout inserted in my current iteration. It's not bad looking, but it needs a lot of work to bring it up to date. How our methods improve over the years not just in terrain building but track laying and texturing as well.
 
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That is the only thing I use, with the exception of my two "Multi Layer" routes; for those I used Blender to create the (main) "terrain" assets.<snip>

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Out of curiosity how do you use Blender in this way (very briefly). I know Barry used Blender game engine for a canal/shipping route.

Ken
 
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