Railworks America

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out how to make my forests look more realistic. I am trying to figure out what trees are more common in the area's I'm working in. I'm primarily in the Northeast (NJ/PA) and I don't want to overtax the sim, but I still want tree variety. This is mainly the case in autumn when the mountains are all different colors. Any suggestions?

Ken

The AP tree pack has some nice varieties, especially the birch. These should be Northern Hemisphere trees. Use a mix of 2D and 3D models.
In any case you would be using deciduous trees for their fall color. Oak, maple, basswood, beech, elm, birch, hickory, cherry, to name a few.

You might already know this but if you use the tool to make groups of trees the game sees that as one object so has a lot less tendency to choke on a lot of trees. Also only use three dimensional trees near the tracks and use the two D ones for distance stuff.

buzz456 wrote:You might already know this but if you use the tool to make groups of trees the game sees that as one object so has a lot less tendency to choke on a lot of trees. Also only use three dimensional trees near the tracks and use the two D ones for distance stuff.

Thanks Buzz. I didn't know it looks at the groups as one object. That's good info to keep in mind. And yes, I do know 3D up close, 2D in the distance.

AmericanSteam wrote:The AP tree pack has some nice varieties, especially the birch. These should be Northern Hemisphere trees. Use a mix of 2D and 3D models.
In any case you would be using deciduous trees for their fall color. Oak, maple, basswood, beech, elm, birch, hickory, cherry, to name a few.

Thanks for the AP pack suggestion, I really like how those trees look compared to the other ones. I've been using them a lot since I started re-doing sections yesterday. I haven't taken any screenshots lately, so I'll post something a little later.

Ken

If you have 3D trees you should have the irregular grouping for trees and can put more than on kind of trees in the group. If you don't have that let me know and I can share it with you.

Some additional tips:

Many 2D trees do not cast shadows, which is okay fps-wise, but the way to get around it is to retexture the forest floor in a darker color to simulate shadows. This is best accomplished after the forest is "planted" because it's easier to stay within the boundaries, as opposed to having to adjust the "forest-group" boundary waypoints to fit the texturing.

Also, don't get caught up in the tree-names conundrum; for example, if it's listed as an "alder tree" but looks nothing like an alder (to you), just use something else that better suits your concept, regardless of it's listed name.

Here are two more tree/vegetation packs with some nice 2D examples you might like to try:

https://rail-sim.de/forum/filebase/entr ... egetation/

https://rail-sim.de/forum/filebase/entr ... e-pack-01/

Have fun with your route

RudiJaeger wrote:Some additional tips:

Many 2D trees do not cast shadows, which is okay fps-wise, but the way to get around it is to retexture the forest floor in a darker color to simulate shadows. This is best accomplished after the forest is "planted" because it's easier to stay within the boundaries, as opposed to having to adjust the "forest-group" boundary waypoints to fit the texturing.

Also, don't get caught up in the tree-names conundrum; for example, if it's listed as an "alder tree" but looks nothing like an alder (to you), just use something else that better suits your concept, regardless of it's listed name.

Here are two more tree/vegetation packs with some nice 2D examples you might like to try:

https://rail-sim.de/forum/filebase/entr ... egetation/

https://rail-sim.de/forum/filebase/entr ... e-pack-01/

Have fun with your route

I try to stay with a very select group of optimized 2D and 3D trees when building as some can kill performance while others appear to have been tested and optimized for the sim especially with the 3D trees. I have found that some models differ slightly in the sim from one route package to another in the past. In the past I built miles of route using one of the 3D trees from I believe the Clinchfield route only to find that it's shadow was not displaying properly at all giving some weird lighting effects when trains passed through the completed scene. To correct the problem I quickly swapped it out with the same tree from another route package which had a working shadow using TSTools.

I really like the AP tree package and played around with it when it first came out. My route is actually built to use the default trees which can be swapped out with the AP Pack and back to the default ones whenever I wish. With the AP ones, I do not use them for route building as they were taxing my old system, especially my install on my laptop. I however did find a way to improve the performance of the trees which came down to LODs and I altered the distances using TSTools using the best functioning default 3D trees distances in the sim as reference. The performance was most noticeable on the laptop as it's fans no longer sounded like a hair dryer when running the sim. I have not had time to edit all the shape files in this way however I would consider my experiment successful with the few trees I modified and have left it as project for the future.