Questions about TurfFX Usage

jordon412

33 Year Old Railfan
I've got several questions regarding TurfFX. Those questions are:
1. Do they have matching ground textures?
2. If there are matching ground textures, should they be used together?
3. Are there situations that are better suited for the use of TurfFX than others? I.e. A freshly mown lawn vs a clearing in a forest.
Those are the only ones that I can think of right now, but I'm sure I'll think of some more.
 
Well...

There is no real match to the ground textures because these are actual procedural grass assets. This means they stick up above like grass and move around like Speed trees do. Where I have used the Turf-FX grass, I put down a dirt base where I thought it was needed, otherwise, it's not really necessary because this is as I said objects and not a texture.

Use this in areas where you would have used a grass spline. I wouldn't bother going in deeper than 50 meters away from the tracks, or put it in places where I can see it. Where you can't see it very well why bother because the extra polygons impact performance. On Scratchy's Eagle River route, I replaced the grass splines with the grass and it looks good and works well. I did keep the taller plants and let them poke through the grass so plan on mixing both.

Since we're limited to a handful of layers, you need to plan carefully. I setup 4 different grass types: Long green, short green, long yellow, short yellow. The long yellow looks good mixed in with the long green, and the shorter varieties are good around tracks and places.

One of the more frustrating things, be warned, is the lack of precision. This will make the process a slow go as you go back and clean up what you've placed. I use a small square of copied blank area and paste that down over the tracks to trim back the taller grass that was a bit too much on the mainline. Here's the rusty track with some grass on it to show you what it looks like.

2019-02-09 014202.jpg 2019-02-09 181014.jpg
 
Actually if you tweak the grass height you can get it right up to the track see example, same grass as in field but shorter as in shorter than the ballast height.

 
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