Railworks America

Hello everyone. A few months ago I posted some screens of a semi-fictional Ohio Hub route I was working on. Long story short, that project has gone defunct because I simply made too many mistakes to salvage it, but it was a huge learning experience for me.

Anyways, I have begun work on a similar route, closer to my home, and am at the stage where I need to get terrain into TS. I want to use the 1/9 arc second data that is available for the area, so I am using ReDem. As you know ReDem requires a .BIL file to make terrain, but .BIL files are no longer available from the USGS; only .IMG are. So I downloaded the 8 .IMG folders the USGS said I needed for that area and followed fecrails' tutorial referenced here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11473&p=132689&hilit=IMG+to+BIL#p132689 to merge the .IMG files into a single .BIL using QGIS.

I started the process and it seemed to be running (no CPU usage, but heavy RAM usage) so I let it go for 4.5 hours. Then my computer complained it was running out of disk space, so I checked the .BIL file size and it had grown to 225GB! I figured this can't possibly be right, so I stopped the process and deleted the .BIL file.

Did I do something wrong or is QGIS doing something wrong? My area is not big enough to need 225GB of terrain data, when the process was still running.

TL;DR QGIS bloated my 8 .IMG files into a 225GB .BIL before I stopped it. What is wrong?

Try this instead (2nd post, Quantum GIS (QGIS) + ReDem sections): http://www.3dtrains.com/forums/index.ph ... ap-viewer/

Thanks for the quick reply! I am going to show my inexperience here; do I need to use that method to create a .BIL for each .IMG file I have and then use ReDem on each .BIL file?

D68js wrote:Thanks for the quick reply! I am going to show my inexperience here; do I need to use that method to create a .BIL for each .IMG file I have and then use ReDem on each .BIL file?

Yes - IIRC, that's how I did it here.

I followed your tutorial and it worked! Thank you very much.

However, when I put the .bin files that ReDem created into Assets/D68js/Summit and Southern Railroad/Terrain, TS now crashes when I try and load the route? Did I make a mistake somewhere?

EDIT: I have confirmed it has to be something related to the terrain files because if I remove them then the route loads fine. I have also attempted to run the .BIL files through ReDem again but it did not help.

The generated files need to be placed into the Terrain folder of your route in the Content directory and not the Asset one.

Thanks Hack! I really appreciate it.