Rocky Displacments - How to fix them?

Hello, So I recently got TRS19 and I am enjoying it very much. The only thing I enjoy more than driving trains is building routes. And on my custom route it is rather huge at over 100 miles long on the high speed line (track wise, the high speed portion is now complete), and I am now working on the standard portion of the line as well as terrain for the high speed section. Well I have always used displacements in TS12 to make custom terrain over large areas. But now, I have noticed to my confusion and slight disappointment, it is very rocky and looks rather bugged. See screenshot below:

TRS19:



And here is the same map (Mountain 3 I think) in TS12:




Both displacements were made on a 5 x 5 baseboard sized area, and as we can see, in TRS19 it is very rocky and not at all good looking. Where as on TS12, it is much less rocky. So my 2 part question is: Is there a way to fix this with out having to manually fix the displacement, and 2: is there a way to download custom displacements on the DLS/other sites? Since this is a fictional route, I don't mind if the displacements are not 100% realistic, I just don't want them to be rocky like in the first screenshot.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

No idea what's gone wrong in TRS19 other than there was a thread on here a long while back and long before TRS19 on how to stop that happening, however you could just save the TS12 version to cdp and import it to TRS19 and see if that fixes the problem.

Or there was a supply of ready made free to use dem generated terrains by fishlipsatwork, site closed however the downloads are archived on the wayback machine, just checked a couple and they are still live links in the folders, here https://web.archive.org/web/20130527133430/http://www.fishlips.net/Trainz/


Hmm just checked and there are a load on the DLS, showing as location unknown however they will download.

Just do a custom search on fishlipsatwork, he only ever did terrains, most have routes marked out but you can do your own thing with them.

Interesting. Hopefully that can get fixed soon. I was not able to figure out the archive. But As for the DLS routes, I'll be sure to check them out as they look interesting. Thank you.

Do you have the 5m setting for the tiles?

Yes. Is that what is causing the problem?

SAUBER_KH7 said:

Yes. Is that what is causing the problem?

Click to expand...

Don't know, but you might try changing to 10 m and see if it fixes it.

I tried to reproduce this in TRS19 105175 which is the Steam version of SP1. I created a displacement map in TS12 by capturing a area in a map as a new displacement map and saved it as a .cdp. I then imported it into TRS19 and used it on a new blank route. It worked as expected. Does the image you are using have clear bands of grey or is the transition from one grey to the next blended nicely?

William

Edit: I just tried Mountain 3 over an area of 9 baseboards (3 x 3) and it worked as expected. Now when I zoom in really close I do see some stair step areas but no where near what you show. Are you trying to cover a very large area? The built-in displacement maps are not very large images. Maybe trying to cover a large number of baseboards just runs out of data changes per baseboard squares leaving many as flat tiers?

As a test, I created a new displacement map and copied the 128 x128 image from mountain3 to it and then used software to scale it to be 1024 x 1024. I have uploaded it to my onedrive account if you want to try it out.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkMIc8G3YArLgok3WEtm0OAxb3e7RQ?e=VFdIS5

It works best to apply it to a 10m grid and then change the grid to 5m afterwards. I applied it to a 2 x 2 baseboard area and it looks fine.

William

Thinking it may work better by smoothing the image used?

wreeder said:

As a test, I created a new displacement map and copied the 128 x128 image from mountain3 to it and then used software to scale it to be 1024 x 1024. I have uploaded it to my onedrive account if you want to try it out.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkMIc8G3YArLgok3WEtm0OAxb3e7RQ?e=VFdIS5

It works best to apply it to a 10m grid and then change the grid to 5m afterwards. I applied it to a 2 x 2 baseboard area and it looks fine.

William

Click to expand...

Strange. I tried doing a small area (2 x2 then 3 x 3) on 10m square baseboards and it looks the way it should. But once I convert it to 5m square baseboards I get the infamous stairs back.

It's a shame because on the one hand, 10m squares allow for better displacements, but at the same time it takes away the ability to manually manipulate the terrain in small details like along lakes and rivers, or town streets. Not to mention switching them to 5m squares afterwards breaks the displacements already place. I guess it would be more practical to manually smooth out the areas affected.

Also the areas I was trying to cover were 7 x 7 areas (since my route goes North-South and is 7 baseboards wide). But when I use DLS displacements such as "as-struktur03", it works just fine over a very large area. In addition, I have also found that creating a displacement from a large area of custom terrain (in my case I manually created hills and valleys over a large area), it works perfectly. So I guess simple 2 part solution is to manually smooth out the areas affected by the "stairs" and 2: use my own custom displacement maps, or from the DLS.

I would check the size of the images being used by the displacement maps. My experience is the larger the image then the larger the area you can cover. The largest I have done is 16 baseboards in a 2 x8 layout which is the limit my PC can handle for applying displacement maps. Remember you can also make a displacement map from terrain that you have already shaped. Just draw the area box around it and use the Get Displacement button. Click the check mark to save it for reuse.

William

Yes, I usually blur the image several times before adding it to the displacement map asset folder.

William

Try this Displacement map.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkMIc8G3YArLgoJ4ARzmwhtXuvw3CA?e=fVK64h

I made it from a greyscale image produced by a mapping program. It is of the Durango area. The scale seems right for a layout of 4 x 4 baseboards.

William