Is there a good tree spline out there?

fourteen

Active member
Is there a good tree spline out there, all i can find is older ones that don't look that great by todays standard. Thanks.
 
no good ones that I know of. I use a long strip of the random place scenery tool instead of splines.
 
Unfortunately as Dave says. We really could do with the authors of the great assets which worked very well in pre TS12 versions to consider updating and at least remove the alpha/transparency effect that renders them useless in the latest versions.
 
I've just spent the last 4 hours experimenting with making tree splines.
I could not do it with speedtree assets, no matter how I tweaked the config.
I did make splines from bushes but they just look too formal, just the same as most hedge splines.
I tried interlacing the splines which showed a good result but in a short distance you would have too many of those annoying rotating spline ends and it took a lot of pushing and shoving to get it right.

Conclusion.. use the random rotate facility and plant them by hand, or use davesnow's method.

Interlaced looks OK.....

Tree-test-1.jpg



Still look OK?
This is in a small 7x5 area.
Imagine what mile after mile of this would do to your frame rate!

Tree-test-2.jpg
 
As a neophyte could someone (Dave?) explain what you mean by: "...random place scenery tool ..."?

I also have been sad to find new tree splines for TRS19. The many new trees I've been usuing to replace old Pofigs have allowed me to enjoy routes from waaaay back but the lack of splines has prevented me from updating several very fine routes (espc Cass Mountain) as they use splines and I don't want to hand plant thousands of trees to replace the old splined assets.

thank you

KevinB

 
Tree Splines were actually very bad for performance as stated by N3V when SpeedTrees first appeared. IMO Copy and paste is just as quick as using splines once you get used to it.
 
the above did not know that about bad for frame rate. as fort what dave said i think he means the place random scenary buttom in trainz 2019, which i have been using instead of spline trees, though that button is not avavible in trainz 2012 not sure about tane though.
 
As a neophyte could someone (Dave?) explain what you mean by: "...random place scenery tool ..."?

I also have been sad to find new tree splines for TRS19. The many new trees I've been usuing to replace old Pofigs have allowed me to enjoy routes from waaaay back but the lack of splines has prevented me from updating several very fine routes (espc Cass Mountain) as they use splines and I don't want to hand plant thousands of trees to replace the old splined assets.

thank you

KevinB












Hope this helps!

Dave
 
What Dave has shown you there is the method I use to cover almost an entire baseboard as most of my scenery/route is in rural areas. I then move trees off roads, railway lines rivers etc. should they have landed there. Then add a few individual trees where appropriate. You can even add random grass or rocks this way as well which saves a lot of work.
 
What Dave has shown you there is the method I use to cover almost an entire baseboard as most of my scenery/route is in rural areas. I then move trees off roads, railway lines rivers etc. should they have landed there. Then add a few individual trees where appropriate. You can even add random grass or rocks this way as well which saves a lot of work.
I add the use of the bulk/replace box for trimming blocks and lines. Cuts down on time. Not so good for curves and diagonals though.
 
Thanks for that post re the Random Scenery. In all the time spent in TRS2019 Surveyor, I didn't know it existed but just tried and the results are excellent. More random than copy and paste of the same block. Of course you still need to texture but, hey ho, not bad!

It would also be useful if you could draw a freehand selection particularly for wooded areas etc., as these are rarely symmetrical - hopefully that will come in future versions.
 
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There are many reasons why these spline trees and some grass is bad due to how they are constructed and how they are rendered. Unlike singly placed trees that are loaded once and drawn multiple times as needed, each spline segment is the same object drawn over and over as the segments are dragged along. For some assets such as telegraph poles this isn't too much of an issue, but assets such as trees and bushes this can become a problem due to the number of faces and textures involved. Each tree surface is made up of polygons with double-sided texturing. By double-sided texturing, this means that there are images rendered on both sides. This alone can cause a performance hit as the textures are drawn twice and repeating this process over and over causes a bigger hit on the system. To add insult to injury, splines need to be handled first by the CPU rather than directly by the GPU on the graphics card. The CPU by its very nature is much slower compared to the GPU, and unlike the GPU is performing multiple tasks such as moving data to and from disk, to and from memory, tracking network connections, and all the other goings on in the computer as well as running the programs fed to it including the operating system and of course Trainz (any flavor).

This extra processing needed by the CPU eats into the processing time, and to add insult to injury the data doesn't run directly to the screen and needs to be processed first. The data is first read by Trainz from disk, and then the data is moved on to the CPU for processing from the hard disk, the slowest component in the system compared to everything else (this includes SSDs too), to RAM via the DMA channel, then back on the buss to the CPU for processing. Once processed, the data is put back on the buss to the RAM to be read by Trainz and then the data is sent out to the graphics card. Our CPUs are fast by olden day's standards, but still this extra processing eats into the time needed for other tasks being done. Depending upon how the data is queued, and what kind of priority is given to it, this can cause big stutters and lags in the program, and this causes the poor performance.

This is why Speed Trees and similar technology is better because Speed Trees as single objects accomplish a few things here. First they are objects so they get loaded once into memory and then instanced multiple times. This is also why it's good to use a lot of the same trees in large areas, but that's another topic. Second Speed Trees are rendered in the GPU and processed on the graphics card using special program code to do so. This essentially short-circuits that long Disk, RAM, CPU then CPU, RAM, program, video-card path, and it's program to RAM then out to the video card.

With proper settings to match the hardware, Speed Trees can render quite quickly with little stutter even in large numbers, within reason of course so in the end avoid tree splines as much as possible.
 
Thanks for that post re the Random Scenery. In all the time spent in TRS2019 Surveyor, I didn't know it existed but just tried and the results are excellent. More random than copy and paste of the same block. Of course you still need to texture but, hey ho, not bad!

It would also be useful if you could draw a freehand selection particularly for wooded areas etc., as these are rarely symmetrical - hopefully that will come in future versions.

I just over fill the area and then delete the trees outside of it, if you follow, easier and quicker to delete rather than place individually.
 
It would also be useful if you could draw a freehand selection particularly for wooded areas etc., as these are rarely symmetrical - hopefully that will come in future versions.


A "Lasso" tool would really be neat. Seems like I read somewhere that N3V is working on that.
 
I just over fill the area and then delete the trees outside of it, if you follow, easier and quicker to delete rather than place individually.

That's actually what I did afterwards, Malc. you can also use smaller boxes to shape around the uneven borders of the wooded area. It's also actually probably a better way of setting up a larger forest area for copy and paste in the normal way, as the individual tree types are more randomised than trying to mix with one at a time placements in a small area.

Incidentally there is at least one set of splines which still seem to display reasonably in TRS19 - these are the ones titled "Forest Summer Bushes Spline 01" through to 05, author is bbf11 with KUID starting 173000. (Can't specify further as both TANE and TRS19 have gone into database rebuild mode... :( ).
 
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