Ballast

mistermoet

New member
I have been using Trainz on and off since 2012 - At present I am running TANE SP3 - the new water effects are very impressive - one of the things that has always got up my nose a little is after building a lengthy route over some time is adding ballast to the tracks which ends up looking like a dogs' breakfast as the painting of the ballast on the tracks has to follow the grid pattern - is it possible to be able to add a feature in future to allow painting of ballast to just follow the track layout and not rely on the grid - or is this beyond the scope of the current software? -
 
That problem has actually been solved by using a spline (there are several) that are ballast which you lay under the track to provide a neat clean edge. Look for EMT Blended Textures Flat Plane Spline, by Euromodeller. There are at least 8 versions.
 
Yes. The bane of ballasting! I find that if I put down the grass and dirt textures first then ballast the tracks the ballast doesn't look so bad. One of the other things is to put down a darker ballast first under the tracks then put the stone ballast on top of that. In my area the railroad used to use cinders until the early 1940's when they switched to granite. Even today 70-plus years later, there is a strip of old cinders along the ROW in many places and still in the yards, and when tracks are lifted there's a cinder and dirt path left behind.
 
Track ballast in the real world frequently does look like a dogs breakfast littered with the debris of track maintenance and overgrown hedgerows. Clean edges make it look very clinical and nothing like the real thing. Peter
 
I have solved the alignment problem by just painting a new texture and aligning the grid to the path of the rails. I use the GRID PBR texture and use the direction compass to follow the track. It takes a little work to get the right alignment but it solves that "choppy" look.
 
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