A big cloud hanging over the scene!

I am working on a now route for TRS19 but find that there is something strange happening to the lighting.



As this image shows the ground is dark close to the viewpoint and there is a sudden boundary beyond which the ground is quite bright. The 'dark cloud' moves as the view is rotated or moved.
It also appears T:ANE SP3 and SP4 but I don't know if it is present in earlier versions.

Is there a way to get rid of this effect?

I've seen something similar where the scale of an asset is wrong, usually by a factor of 100. Given the shape in the pic I'm not convinced that is the case here but you might try zooming right out and checking if there is a rogue asset hovering above the ground.

Ringarooma said:

As this image shows the ground is dark close to the viewpoint and there is a sudden boundary beyond which the ground is quite bright. The 'dark cloud' moves as the view is rotated or moved.

Click to expand...

There are a number of ground textures that have an incorrectly configured normal map. The result is that the texture is highly reflective for direct sunlight: it is similar to your description.

Try painting over the ground with different textures and see if the effect is related to the particular textures you have chosen for your route.

I'm running into that now with a TransDEM route I've started.

When moving along the route at a lower level to the ground, it appears as if the terrain has some big clouds overhead with the distant hills lit up in sunlight. When I get to the lighter parts, they become darkened as if the clouds are following me around the map.

Transdem textures probably want modifying for TRS19.

So maybe do TransDem in Trainz, and then move it over to TRS19. Although if the textures move over as they have been with on problems then I wouldn't think it would have to do with textures. I dont know. Just a though.

Jayco-man said:

So maybe do TransDem in Trainz, and then move it over to TRS19. Although if the textures move over as they have been with on problems then I wouldn't think it would have to do with textures. I dont know. Just a though.

Click to expand...

It won't matter because as soon as the route is moved into TRS19, then the problem will occur again. I've brought in older routes and had the same problem so it's texture related.

See it the other way round: The background lighting is far too bright. I deliberately decided to slightly darken the map ground textures so that their default brightness is at a level which is suitable for a building aid. The background, however, now appears over-exposed as you would say in photography. You can try to adjust with the lighting settings in Surveyor, but I did not find an ideal combination. It's different with the 128 texture set for aerial images, I think, which is explicitly designed to act as background textures.

Thanks everyone for your helpful comments and suggestions.

I had no idea that it could be related to textures. I thought that it might have been a matter associated with TANE SP3/4 and TRS19 and did not want to install the track etc. and then find after all that effort that there was an issue with the route which could not be fixed.

Following your comments I painted out some of the TransDEM textures, as I would do after using them to lay out all the track, roads, fences etc. and mark all the important features with flags,and found that the problem did not apply to the newly textured areas. So what seemed to be an issue is no problem at all. The TransDEM textures are perfectly fine for their intended purpose.

Here is an image that shows the result:


Thanks once again.