Dark borders on non-PBR textures

Yep, trouble ahead!

Luckily this came to light in this thread for me (and I hope for others too).
As a serial route builder I have lots and lots of routes to bring into TRS19.
I can just swap my development over to my 'big rig' and carry on, others won't be that lucky.

John, it's not an aunusual dev reply that you had, I had similar with baseboard edge problems in TANE.

As for Turf FX, if I can't use it accurately near a track/road then it won't be used because it is too 'scatter-gun'.
I mastered the interface but it is still a pain that you have to do settings for each route because they are not savable (unless you know of a mehod).
Why can't they just do a simple interface with selectable options?

Ah well, keep calm and carry on

euromodeller said:

As for Turf FX, if I can't use it accurately near a track/road then it won't be used because it is too 'scatter-gun'.
I mastered the interface but it is still a pain that you have to do settings for each route because they are not savable (unless you know of a mehod).
Why can't they just do a simple interface with selectable options?

Click to expand...

Exactly the same problem with TurfFx, I now have worked out what does what but it's impossible to align to the edge of track or for that matter roads. The one area on my WIP it does align with track is only because that section of track aligns with the edge of the grid. Also I have noticed that unless you kill the distance it's visible in some directions it goes dark / black and looks horrible. Can be cured by only having width scale near on 1 in the first box and the other boxes plus the width scale far all 0, presume this is related to lod? whatever not noticeable that it's gone if the underlying ground texture is a similar colour.

Oh and other oddity, paint PBR ground texture over turfFx and the grass is floating above the ground, my brain is beginning to ache.....

Clutter has the same issue with alignment, however....... For those who haven't noticed the clutter meshes are also available as individual assets so can be used that way in between tracks and so on.

So we are back to the grass spline issue, many of which now look terrible because of the crossed shadows, there are actually a few of Janvis's that work without the awful shadow effect though.
Water is behaving very strangely now if you try to adjust for gradient and it appears to vanish when in shadow under bridges and you get the river bed showing as if it was ground, sure it didn't do that in the beta? so looks like I'm stuck with my river splines.

And not really related however anyone noticed the twitching shadows from railings and telegraph wires when not moving?

Here's what I found after reading the recent posts and experimenting with different settings:

With Shaders set to Ultra, non-PBR textures do not blend with PBR textures. See my original post for an example.

With Shaders set to Standard, non-PBR texture DO blend with PBR textures, BUT the PBR textures lose their 3D effect. They will render flat just like non-PBR textures.

My response from N3V was -

Good Afternoon Hank
Due to the height mapping of the new PBR ground textures, including the default grid texture, these will change the visual height of the terrain slightly.

Mixing PBR textures with non PBR textures will cause the height of the terrain to change, which may cause shadows to appear, depending on the location and the angle of the sun.

Kind Regards

N3V Games Support Team


Looks like the TRS19 options are to go PBR only with Shaders at Ultra, or sacrifice the 3D effect, set Shader Quality to Standard and use any texture you like.

these will change the visual height of the terrain slightly.

Click to expand...

Trouble is it's not slightly, with many PBR textures it's excessive, IMO.

Malc, yes I had noticed the moving shadows but put it down to my old processor.
I thought the Turf FX looked worse the further you got from it, another reason why I ditched it. I didn't bother trying Clutter.

As for PBR textures, there's not enough good ones yet to replace decent non-PBR ones.

Hank, thanks for starting this thread, I think you have disturbed a sleeping dragon (inadvertently).

The problem is not so big at the moment, I think that most initial purchasers of TRS19 are drivers and not route builders, but when the route builders start building in TRS19, that's when the dirty stuff will hit the fan.

Another thought, the reverse situation.. what happens if you download a route that was made with Ultra settings to a machine with Standard settings?

Yes I'm have misgivings about using any PBR stuff leastwise not for ground textures, I know for a fact most of those likely to be downloading my Current WIP will not be using i7's with GTX1080TI's or better.

Ultra settings..

I have made my mind up, PBR is out of favour with me.

Scenario..

Lay 2 pieces of PBR track in parallel .

Lay your PBR ballast between the tracks.

Now try putting PBR Grass or any texture alongside the track.

Do you see the track disappear under the texture?

I'll just use non PBR textures for now and in the future if/when PBR/Clutter/Turf FX becomes stable and usable then I will do the conversion.

I will buy plenty of popcorn because I can foresee some 'interesting' forum posts ahead.

If only I could foresee the winning Lotto numbers.

I might have to withdraw that statement.

After a couple of days away from PBR I decided to give it another trial.

Using Ultra Shader setting.

I have spent a lot of time today experimenting with PBR Environment Textures near track, roads and water.

The penny dropped eventually when I tried painting textures near a track but keeping each scale setting the same.

I didn't know this.. adjusting scale in PBR ,changes the level of 3d in the texture!




So by keeping the same setting I stopped the difference in levels betwen textures, not so noticable in big fields, but near a solid spline you would see thee difference.

I then started to do a test for real in one of my WIP routes, resulting in this scene, these are PBR textutres only, no rocks were involved.




Just to add that the level of 3d seems to vary between textures made by different creators.

I'll keep at it and report any other tips.

Edited to add, this was done on my i3 machine

That works nearly.... Only one problem is the PBR textures are giving repetitive patterns when viewing from a distance.

I find that with most textures these days, it's a pain the a.....
I have learned to ignore it as long as it's OK when viewed from the train or 'eye level'

I just wish that texture makers would try their textures on a layout, I tried a PBR brick pavement/road one and the bricks were as big as a car on minimum setting.!
Some are so blurred that they look like 1.3 textures.
There's too many that are way overscale to be able to use.
Things might improve when TRS19 matures.

You need to get on the case Malc, your textures are some of the best out there!

Just thought I'd point you to this thread about a built-in feature...

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?150699-TRS19-PBR-Baseboards-causing-visual-problems

Already joined in........

As a new user of Trainz 2019, I jumped in to Surveyor thinking I could get up-to-speed rather quickly, since I've had some experience with 3D programs like Terragen and Vue. I realized I couldn't approach the detail those programs did because of the frame rate needed for a near real time view. I do have enough GPU horsepower (Ti 1080) to run in ultra, but have become very frustrated.

The video tutorials seem to clash with what I'm seeing -- the first one I tried was laying procedural track and painting in PBR gravel. Ah, that's easy. But then I noticed the problems mentions in this thread when I started to paint in PBR material next to the track. I would see something "jump" and finally realized the "ground" was moving and saw the track was getting "covered" in places. So I started down the adding splines, deleting tract sections, and "smooth spline height", etc. Found in topology the get and use height helped, then saw some PBR textures shows up a .39m and others .20m when I painted over level ground (that's when I realized PBR had real displacement.)

Then I found some nice eucalyptus trees, but then during a drive session, I saw the leaves were "flashing" at certain angles to the camera.

Lumping everything together in DLC leaves a big "hit and miss" experience. Very frustrating!