Railworks America

When building a terrain (mountains, valleys, etc.) there is a grid that shows up, and is used to change the terrain. When I try to do finer work such as around tunnel openings, bridge abutments or steep slopes the terrain comes out very rough and jagged. Is there a way to reduce the size of the grid squares thus smoothing the terrain?
Thank you for any help.

No, we have been complaining about how big the facets are for 6 years or more. The best thing you can try to do is use the SMOOTH tool and brush the scenery smooth.

Hi

If you select the brush icon in the top left fly-out window (Top row fourth from left) and then the height icon (Same fly-out window, left icon of middle row under) and then set the brush size in the bottom left fly-our window to any value under 20 (Usually at 10), then you will find that using your cursor and clicking and holding at the grid intersections, you can raise or lower individual points on the terrain. This is a tedious but effective way to shape the terrain in local areas. A brush size of 20 or more will only allow you to select the line between two points rather than the individual points at an intersection.

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Size is 8x8 meters...... Not very good.

gtrtroger wrote:Size is 8x8 meters...... Not very good.

Come on horse poop. The scenery we can create is just great.

Thanks Acorn I need to go try that. I do get some smoothing by brushing the terrain with smooth though, it is not perfect either but it worked fairly good in most places.

Well that does not work everywhere unfortunately. So I improvised and made a wall.

Nice!

Increasing terrain resolution is expensive. Doubling the resolution increases the workload on the GPU four times. Going to a two meter resolution ups the workload sixteen times. So its a trade off - the 8 meter resolution gives decent frame rates and its not too hard to fill in the gaps.

Here I am using a loft representing rock fill to fill the gaps.


And here, just adding plenty of vegetation and flora does the job.

wacampbell wrote:Increasing terrain resolution is expensive. Doubling the resolution increases the workload on the GPU four times.

I respect you Wayne but you are trying to dumb people down instead of getting them to improve their system. It's not that expensive to run a system for this if you forgo a few downloads. I'm not rich but be real, we wouldn't be in this club if we didn't have a couple of extra dollars to spend.

The way you are talking you are going to throw this whole community into MSTS throwbacks when the Unreal Engine comes out. It's totally worth upgrading your system and it is NOT expensive by any means.

I think he means it is expensive on the processor not the pocket book Rich. Finer facets would mean more facets to be generated by CPU/GPU, higher end systems have a hard time with it now.

I wasn't clear - Bob explained it better.

I was just discussing the compromises and work arounds for what we have today. I too hope the new UE4 engine improves on this someday.

What would be great ,was if each grid square could support a "splitting function". With tool you could select an 8x8 block,and spit it into 4 squares. There would have to be a tool created for this,and of course all would have to be engineered into the core game. That way just the squares close to the track could have higher resolution. Not multipying all the elevation points by 4. Trainz added a similar function a few years back. Much of my prototype route is curvy and hilly,and I use the grass bank loft to blend the track into the surrounding terrain. The attached screenshot is of Gregg's Hill,near Waverly Ohio. The N&W,C&O,and DT&I all squeeze between the Scioto River and State Rote 220. I use the loft as there are 3 elevations of Railroads through here. I want to reskin the loft to blend with the Scalerail track,and other scenery textures. But I am not certain where it is in the program.