trees, shrubs, etc.

Can someone pls. tell me which ones to use for a route I am building, I want to keep performance as high as possible and still having good looking trees and other foliage...
When my route is finished ( will still take at least a few months), I plan to make it available on the DLS so performance is important. Oh, I am only using DLS assets so it has to be on the DLS... thanks in advance.

Ron.

Ron, only you can decide which trees and shrubs will be suitable for the route you are building. Presumably, you will not be planting cacti and tropical palms in an alpine environment so that part is usually easy. I suspect that what you are really asking is "Speed Trees vs non Speed Trees" or "high resolution trees vs low resolution".

In my opinion only, the low resolution trees and shrubs, i.e the "billboard" ones that look like two cardboard cut outs stuck together, look terrible and can ruin the whole appearance of a route. In my routes I use Speed Trees almost exclusively. Grasses and a few shrubs are the only non Speed Tree assets that I use. I no longer use splines for plants of any kind (grasses, shrubs, trees).

Your performance concerns are important and there are a number of points that need to be considered.

• The rendering of Speed Trees is done by the GPU which is much better at it than the CPU.
• The rendering of splines is done by the CPU.
• Speed Trees contain LOD data which most older plant assets lack.

There is a persistent claim that Speed Trees come with a performance penalty, I have never found this to be the case. Having said that if you throw a significant number of assets into a scene, particularly where those assets have not been "optimised' (i.e. they were made in SketchUp and/or lack LOD) there will come a point where performance will suffer.

I recently created a layout in a semi desert region that had a high density of low grasses and shrubs with fewer trees. The grasses and most of the shrubs were higher resolution assets but mostly of the older types that lacked any LOD. The final result looked fantastic and superbly matched the photographs I had of the region but the fps dropped to a "stutter". I had to "prune" it right back. My main desktop system has an Nvidia 960 GTX. That is the one thing that you will have no control over - the system configuration of the users who will download your route. I normally place a "high definition assets" warning in the description of my routes.

I agree with the comment above about frame rates and SpeedTrees. I've never seen a performance hit.

But, Ron, if you want good /excellent frame rates you must follow the 12th Commandment -- "Thou shalt use a few objects many times rather then many objects a few times".

This page might also help in your selection process:

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/sho...mm-English-translations&p=1440565#post1440565

Phil

It doesn't take that many trees to populate a route.

Used about twelve different trees to repopulate this old route.





Probably about the same for Coal Country.



Rmm "dubs" work well on Appalachian coal routes and mcquirels are really nice. Rmm conifers look great.





Have re-treed TS12 routes with "pofigs" that seemed to have about forty different trees.

Make a baseboard route with just trees and pick ones that you like.

Harold

I agree with what's been said as well. The old billboard trees will cause the stutters as they work the much slower CPU really hard and the fact that the data has to go from the program to the CPU, via the DMA-controlled buss and memory, and then finally out to the video card. These extra steps take time on top of the slower CPU and that increases the chances of stuttering.

When you use a lot of the same trees, they get worked on once and the rest are done as instance objects meaning all the work is done on the original mesh and the rest is rendered at once in the video card. This makes for far better performance.

Here's some tree-filled shots from my routes. All perform quite well, and, N3V devs are looking at improving the performance even more.

etc.

Guys, guys, guys...

I still had so many questions about the use of speed trees vs. non speedtrees and the way hardware processes the information and renders it, but all of them have been answered in your incedibly useful replies. So no more splines and will use speed trees

@pware: Your knowledge as shown in your reaction is of great value to me and I am pretty sure to a lot of fellow route builders. Thank you!

@Phil: Thank you for the link, I will certainly use it for selecting trees

@Harold: I can see that a realistic environment can be achieved with careful positioning and without using too many different trees.

@ John:Your hardware info is also what I wanted to know and this: 'When you use a lot of the same trees, they get worked on once and the rest are done as instance objects meaning all the work is done on the original mesh and the rest is rendered at once in the video card.' is vey important information, thanks.

Ron