Funky ground textures

rwk

Active member
The newer textures have this funky movement that bothers me. Especially at hills where a road or track meets the ground, the ground shifts when you move around. Is that a flaw with the newer textures and can't be fixed? Is the only solution to use older textures?
 
Turn, um... Shaders? down from ultra to high. I think.

It's PBR textures, which are insanely over the top in their effect resulting in what I call "acid trip" (others "jellyfish guts") geometry.
 
Is that a flaw with the newer textures and can't be fixed? Is the only solution to use older textures?

The flaw is with the PBR textures themselves and is common to all games/simulations that use them, not just Trainz. The solution, as frogpipe suggests, is to set the Shader Quality to no higher than Standard and to not mix both PBR and non-PBR textures in the same layout.
 
I've accidentally used PBR textures from time to time through not noticing the "PBR in the name, and ended up with some necessary but irritating editing. This is where it would be useful if such assets were optional and not built in, which would allow deletion from the asset list. Is there any reason they have to be built in?
 
I've accidentally used PBR textures from time to time through not noticing the "PBR in the name, and ended up with some necessary but irritating editing. This is where it would be useful if such assets were optional and not built in, which would allow deletion from the asset list. Is there any reason they have to be built in?

N3V updated a lot of built-in TS09-TS12 textures to PBR, this has now ruined a lot of older routes. A lot of them have no indication of being PBR.
 
N3V updated a lot of built-in TS09-TS12 textures to PBR, this has now ruined a lot of older routes. A lot of them have no indication of being PBR.

This ruined many of my older routes and I then had to spend hours fixing them. I reported this and was told that the textures would be fixed. When told that, I figured that it would be done someday soon(tm).
 
N3V updated a lot of built-in TS09-TS12 textures to PBR, this has now ruined a lot of older routes. A lot of them have no indication of being PBR.

This ruined many of my older routes and I then had to spend hours fixing them.

Ditto here. However, the silver lining on that dark cloud was that I decided to use the opportunity to remove all the textures from my current route and replace them all with PBR textures. I had never used PBR textures before so it has been a learning experience with a lot of trial and error (lots of error) but I am very happy with the final result.
 
Parallax textures are pretty much the future. Get used to them. They provide an amazing upgrade over normal textures when used properly and with only other parallax textures. If you really hate the depth in your scenes, turn down your settings
 
Turning down the settings is only relevant when the route is not going to be distributed, as the mixture of textures will be apparent to most who download the route and run ultra shaders. Judicious use of vegetation and covering splines can help to hide the worst effects. Cliff splines in cuttings, track bed splines to lower the track bed and use boulders and vegetation where suitable. The problem is usually not the texture themselves, but the grid they are applied upon, so manipulating the grid and smoothing sharp edges also helps avoid unwanted texture movement.
Elder Scrolls Online is a very good example of how to use PBR, TurfFX and clutter together, but obviously Bethesda has far more resources to throw at their game than N3V.
 
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The problem with PBR is using too big a scale for the textures, ballast is in some cases 5 times larger than is realistic even on the smallest setting however you can, if more thought is given to creating the ground textures reduce the height difference / gap between PBR and non PBR and reduce the twitching and fluidity effect, rather than as appears many are doing just using the same settings for normal and parameters.
I've just spent a couple of days repairing the damage done to my Ffestiniog route by N3V updating TS12 textures to PBR with new kuids but they obsoleted the originals, which was not necessary IMO. Leave as the new kuid and forget obsoleting the originals and the problem would not exist, original textures remain undamaged and the new PBR versions are available for those who desire them.

I'm also in the process of creating PBR versions of my ground textures that reduce these effects to a minimum that are barely noticeable and also using new kuids so as not to break render the old versions as useless for routes that use them.

IMO PBR is pointless when you get a few hundred metres away from the track, where it's used over a whole route it has a quilted effect which looks dreadful as the PBR textures have in many cases an obvious repeat pattern reminiscent of the old textures patchwork quilt effect where the swirling method hadn't been used.
 
Turning down the settings is only relevant when the route is not going to be distributed, as the mixture of textures will be apparent to most who download the route and run ultra shaders. Judicious use of vegetation and covering splines can help to hide the worst effects. Cliff splines in cuttings, track bed splines to lower the track bed and use boulders and vegetation where suitable. The problem is usually not the texture themselves, but the grid they are applied upon, so manipulating the grid and smoothing sharp edges also helps avoid unwanted texture movement.
Elder Scrolls Online is a very good example of how to use PBR, TurfFX and clutter together, but obviously Bethesda has far more resources to throw at their game than N3V.

I have no intention of uploading anything any longer. It's not worth my time and energy to do so.

As usual, there was little thought on how this was to be implemented and now it's up to us to figure out how to fix the broken mess that's been created by breaking the working textures. I agree with Malc, and I've said this before as well, the old textures should've been left unaltered, and any new versions should have a new KUID. This goes for other content creators as well. It's because of this mess that many older routes are now trashed, and we have to go through hoops and a lot of extra work to fix things.

I agree this is the future as far as PBR textures go, and I still firmly feel they're great for new works, but not for the old ones unless we want to undo and redo the mess that they'll cause. It's more than having a bigger budget here to work out bugs and has a lot to do with how they are implemented in the program. Unlike other 3d worlds, we have a lot of steep slopes and sharp angles. There is not a lot we can do with this because we're still stuck with a 10- or 5-meter grid resolution and that's not fine enough to overcome the clear jelly-effect that occurs with these textures. Again, this is typical of the Hell be damned approach we've had with a lot of things lately with this program.

You know I rarely rant but this is one of those things that got my goat and truly soured my feelings towards the program. There's nothing like opening an old route, one that worked and looked perfectly fine for close to 16 years only to find that it's now trashed and requires hours to undo a mess that wasn't self-inflicted.
 
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