River/Lake/Ocean Banks

davesnow

Crabby Old Geezer
What's the best way to smooth out the banks of rivers, lakes, or oceans so the bank gradually slopes down into the water? I use the Flatten Tool with a low sensitivity setting and set my start point just below the water line, then move across the bank ridge. Just wondering if anyone else has a better method. In other map-making games, they have a "Smooth" tool that effectively provides this same function.

Thanks,

Dave
 
I use a section of rail track, fix the height at one end to give the desired gradient and then use the "match terrain to track" or track smooth tool. I then move one or both the ends 30m (as measured by the grid) and repeat.
 
I use a combination of both to produce my shorelines. It does a fairly good job given our round pegs in square holes way of doing things in Surveyor.
 
... but it would work better and faster if there was a 4 track version.

I find that while using a single track takes longer it does produce better results. The problem with the wider track splines (e.g. 2 or 4 track) is that they force the terrain height variations to match the track width plus 10 (or so) metres on each side - that means a much wider area of identical smoothness and gradient which is not found in nature.
 
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Here's my shoreline after some adjustments. This is a DEM, but the shore line becomes too flat at a too high a position after the ocean bottom was created by lowering the water area about 5 meters because on DEMs the water level is set to zero for sea level. The fir trees in the scene are to produce some shadows so we can see the lope down to the beach. This is still a WIP route with many years of work ahead of me.

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Thanks for the answers. Seems those methods might work for small rivers, lakes, or ocean beaches, but my river is somewhere around 70 miles long. I think I'll stick to using the flatten tool. I get pretty good results using it.

 
That looks awesome, Dave!

Yeah when there's lots and lots of shoreline you need to use easier, quicker methods to achieve what you want. My particular route has a lot of beach areas, but not one long continuous beach even if it seems that way when building the route.
 
We really need enhanced terrain sculpting tools in the next version - starting with the ability to define the angle of slope for a cutting or embankment. That would be of great use using splines as illustrated above.
 
We really need enhanced terrain sculpting tools in the next version - starting with the ability to define the angle of slope for a cutting or embankment. That would be of great use using splines as illustrated above.

Besides having smaller and other shaped tools, I wonder if it would be possible to generate a topology or landscape profile using splines meant for that purpose so we don't have to re-purpose roads

Using World Builder from Digital Element as an example, the landscape shape is generated using hand-placed splines. The splines are similar to the roads and do a similar thing, and remind me of the ones in TransDEM. The splines can be placed in any of the normal CAD views - Top, Left, Right, Bottom, or even Camera view (Bottom and Camera seem useless to me, but they're accessible there). Once the splines are placed, the terrain is generated similar to us using the smooth terrain under the splines, creating the terrain topology. The lines can be moved, spline points added or removed, smoothed, etc. There are also seed values available to add in randomness of the terrain, fineness, angles, etc.

What's cool with this profile tool is these specific landscape profiles are saved into libraries for future use. Having a library of shorelines, for example, we could grab one that meets our needs, adjust the shape as needed and generate the terrain. When removing the profile from the scene, in World Builder, there's the option to save the custom landscape profile or not. There are also a built-in library that includes some really, really complex profiles such as Yosemite National Park, some volcano I can't remember, and other generic ones such as an island, various valleys, and mountains. The program was not inexpensive and required a horse of a machine to run it in its day and even then it was really, really slow, but I got the money's worth out of it for some animation and advertising projects during its day.
 
What would be really useful would be an easier way of using the Terrain Displacement Map. For example you could create a baseboard with the land form terrain you wanted and then convert it into a Terrain Displacement Map which you could save for future use BUT I would add the ability to manually alter the minimum altitude when the Displacement map is applied to another baseboard.
 
You can do that now.

Thank you for that. I was not aware of that feature of the Displacement Map. However I would still like to be able to easily set the minimum displacement altitude when the grey-scale bitmap is reapplied to a new baseboard otherwise everything is set to the height of the original terrain.
 
Concerning Displacement mapping.... Since TRS2006, they have not worked all that well. I made several hilly terrain routes in TRS2006, using displacement maps I created in Photoshop, and the land always sloped really nicely. However, since that version of Trainz, the same displacements used in surveyor in these later versions, the slopes always come out in "stair-step" land declines.... not very realistic, but I still use them.
 
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