Railworks America

I have using my own road lofts for a little while now, but what I notice is that they are quite generic compared to the ones that are part of 3dTrains Scaleroad.

Essentially, I want to know what Marc does to produce the effect that is visible in the image attached. You can see it in the outer perimeter, but it makes the road loft blend in very well with the terrain, and looks decent in my opinion. There is a slight contrast between the terrain and the loft edge, but it's not that distinguishable.

Here's an image that demonstrates it.



I would like to be able to create this effect with my own road lofts. Has anyone else here managed to create a loft with this feature?

And on another loft related note, this embankment loft is unusually dark on one side. It just looks rubbish in my opinion. Is there any way to correct this through a shader or something else? It's modeled in Train Sim Modeler, and exported through 3d Crafter 8.28.

As far as the road goes, the texture used on the perimeter (outer edges) of the road are similar to the terrain texture. I'm not sure how Marc does it but I have used a gradient blend towards the outer edges of the texture in the alpha channel to allow the texture to fade a bit as it goes further from the centerline to allow more of the terrain texture to show as it combines with the road edge texture. A shallow slope is needed that extends past the edge of where the actual road pavement ends which would have the similar terrain texture.

I also used a bit of scattered alpha to accomplish the same effect as shown in these images, the first is the normal texture and the second is the alpha channel for it.





I hope that helps in some way.

I know this topic is well over a month old now.

But, Railwanderer - Do you have any screenshots of these roads in the actual sim? Wouldn't mind seeing them for comparison purposes.

I notice that Marc used LoftTexDiffAlpha.fx for some road lofts. How does this differ to other shaders?