HD Terrain Discussion Thread

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

... is the ground going to be stretched vertically (textures projected vertically down) or will the textures be projected to the normal of the formed tesselation?

Important question, buried in the avalanche.

I haven't seen any answers so far.

[johnarran]

Will there be some method for importing DEMs - either natively or by using a 3rd-party program?

Another +1 here too. This is a such an important requirement for terrain creation. Needs to support Lidar data as well.

[wreeder]

If I had to guess I would say that since Tony said that overhangs still will not be possible that textures will still be stretched but given that the resolution is so high I think the stretching will be much less noticeable. Now in Vue, the tessellated terrains have a built in LOD system whereby terrain close to the camera is very high resolution but further away the number of triangles drop off sharply. Of course, in Vue you are using procedural textures rather than textures based on images. I have never seen any stretching of textures in Vue. Of course, Vue is a highly sophisticated program meant to do one thing, create highly realistic scenery for 3D animations and is no way near real time. Images can take hours to render per frame.

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

I don’t think you can assume a high resolution grid will reduce texture stretching. Hi-res ground would allow gradients to get even closer to true vertical, so if the texture is still projected vertically down, it would be even more stretched, not less. Let us hear the official response, not guesses.

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

This issue came up in another thread, but I will add it here, so it's not ignored.

There has been a bug in the way seasonal groundtextures respond to the snowline setting, going back as far as T:ANE (2015?) I think. Will it finally be fixed with the advent of the high-definition terrain grid?

By that I mean, will groundtextures once again obey the season-selector code in the same way that objects have always done and no longer treat the snowline height as if it is always zero, regardless of the value set in the Environment panel?

[wreeder]

I don’t think you can assume a high resolution grid will reduce texture stretching. Hi-res ground would allow gradients to get even closer to true vertical, so if the texture is still projected vertically down, it would be even more stretched, not less. Let us hear the official response, not guesses.

If HD terrain is still using planar projection then I will be very disappointed. But the sample images don't seem to support your guessing that it does.

Edit: Found this on the official HD Terrain page.

• Good-bye Artifacts
  Smooth Diagonal Texturing means you can avoid those square looking ground textures.
  High Resolution Blends avoids blurry transparent ground texture blends.
  Cliffs / Cuttings / Embankments benefit from increased polygons to avoid unrealistic terrain and no more parallax artifacts on acute camera angles!
  
  
  

[sister]

I already decided to renew my plus (plus standard as it's now called) for another year and HD terrain will be my renew present! LOL
I put this feature in my Santa's wish list since TRS2006.

[martinvk]

Will anything have to be changed when creating a route via TransDEM? Is the extra height data interpolated between known points or is there actually extra data that is being used? If so where do I get that data? I was about to start a new mountain based route and this HD terrain will be a game changer that will postpone that route. As long as I don't have to manually adjust any height values, this will be just wow.

[capdiamont]

Will anything have to be changed when creating a route via TransDEM? Is the extra height data interpolated between known points or is there actually extra data that is being used? If so where do I get that data? I was about to start a new mountain based route and this HD terrain will be a game changer that will postpone that route. As long as I don't have to manually adjust any height values, this will be just wow.

TransDEM will have to be updated to create more height points in ground files. The DEMs that TransDEM uses, already has enough resolution.

[Paween]

Is this feature (HD Terrain with 0.12M brush) available already? I see that's announced on Trainz Plus site and I have 119450 build of TP but nonetheless I can't see any changes on texture / terrain brush, there are still only two options: 5M and 10M...

[fjbicrf]

Greetings,

Will the HD Textures only work in Surveyor 2.0 or will they also work in Surveyor 1.0

Fred Bray

[JCitron]

Greetings,

Will the HD Textures only work in Surveyor 2.0 or will they also work in Surveyor 1.0

Fred Bray

I would think it works in both, once a route has been converted on a Plus version. Converting a route to HD terrain, however, can only be done in Surveyor 2.0 Sending the route to a non-Plus version such as straight TRS22 won't allow editing in HD terrain routes but they can still be loaded but adding any new baseboards will result in them being either 5 or 10 m grids.

[Pencil42]

TransDEM will have to be updated to create more height points in ground files. The DEMs that TransDEM uses, already has enough resolution.

TransDEM would also need to be updated for the new route format - iirc, it doesn't support any route formats past TANE SP1.

[wreeder]

Per Tony's posts here and elsewhere, the conversion of existing baseboards to HD terrain is working but work on the tools to edit HD terrain in Surveyor 2.0 is still a WIP. No word when a update with this feature will be available.

[marv999]

I'm not interested in this feature , so i cancelled my yearly Trainz Plus Gold membership .

I don't think you understand this upgrade. This HD stuff is the most significant and the most needed for Trainz. Its a bitch to lay ballast under tracks at curves. Anyways, I just upgrade my gold membership from monthly to yearly. Sorry that you're going to miss out the best feature ever! I love the new Surveyor..... except the water.