Railworks America

Hi all,

So, I was wondering what thoughts on underbrush in wooded areas is? I have a lot of woods that line my route, and I was wondering if it's worth adding underbrush under the trees if at all. If so, how much do you recommend? As far as woods go, I'm using AP trees and then trying to use other trees further away from the tracks. The AP trees look good but can be a little frame heavy. For brush it's a mix of AP and standard DTG brush. Any other suggestions?

Ken

If you use the assets irregular tool (found in the vegetation list (middle flyout)) you can add two kinds of vegetation to the same area at the same time. In wooded areas I always use this tool with trees and ither grass or scrub as the two tpyes. If you want more than two then use the tool to create 2 irregular areas slightl apart (but mostly on top of each othe. Keeping then slightly apart enbables you to click on them easier to alter the default objects (often Pipes!). It is a very useful tool once you get used to it.

That's what I usually do, but I wanted to know who uses underbrush on their routes and how far out if you use it at all. I don't want to go too crazy with details and make my route an FPS killer.

xxuntitledxx wrote:That's what I usually do, but I wanted to know who uses underbrush on their routes and how far out if you use it at all. I don't want to go too crazy with details and make my route an FPS killer.

In the little that I have done over the years (detailing DLC mainly) I just spend time considering lines of sight and using some blocking assets to add apparent depth to a scene.

You need to think about your intended viewpoint - is it solely from the cab or is it helicopter (or drone) view. Either way more sparse asset placement with careful positioning can give the impression of dense undergrowth. Don't go mad, just carefully place either individual assets or blocks. Sometimes rotation can help with assets that are truly 3D and not just in themselves viewpoint rotating assets.

You also need to consider whether or not winter will make a material difference to the appearance. It is worthwhile doing a test forest area and looking at it across the seasons.

Rod

...It also depends on how close the rail track is to the woodland and what type of woodland it is.

Reasonably detailed ground cover...good use of ground texture as well.



...but also a decent distance away from the track.



Closer is adequately covered by foreground scrub plus a good ground texture.





Of course conifers will have virtually no ground cover. again good ground texture gives a hint of the surface under the trees.



All photos from Golden Age Developments West of England route (as provided)

https://www.golden-age-developments.co. ... gland.html

Rod

xxuntitledxx wrote:Hi all,

So, I was wondering what thoughts on underbrush in wooded areas is? I have a lot of woods that line my route, and I was wondering if it's worth adding underbrush under the trees if at all. If so, how much do you recommend? As far as woods go, I'm using AP trees and then trying to use other trees further away from the tracks. The AP trees look good but can be a little frame heavy. For brush it's a mix of AP and standard DTG brush. Any other suggestions?

Ken

After many years of building routes I recently had a rethink about how I should build my forests, weeds, undergrowth, track and roads. For years I have been populating my tracks with dense weeds and undergrowth which is time consuming to say the least and I have honestly grown sick of. This part of route building is my least favorite which can require several thousand such assets per tile at a time to achieve the result I have been looking for. The more assets you drop into a tile the lower your performance with this dated sim, something that I have been trying to find creative ways to circumvent and I had run out of options on some tiles having to settle for a significant drop in frame rate.

Over the holidays I watched my nephews and my son play Fortnite off and on for several hours. The procedural scenery within the game grabbed my attention and got me thinking could Train Simulator Classic be made to use procedural scenery effectively and what criteria would be required to do so. Long story short, after some in depth experimentation I have created a quicker way of building a detailed route which enhanced the performance of my most dense tiles by allowing me to delete unneeded undergrowth and weeds. I gained up to 35 FPS on some tiles by changing my method which I honestly think looks better than my old method which I will explain further.

Procedural scenery within Train Simulator by default looks awful. Part of the reason is that it pokes through track, roads and the majority of the textures do not mesh with a route. But what if you created procedural flora textures that blend with scenery assets and fit under track and roads. Let’s face it, grass and undergrowth are pretty much everywhere in the real world, why not do the same for the virtual world. Grass and undergrowth now exist everywhere by default in my route and only where I tell it not to. In order to do this, I had to do the following:

1. Create a new procedural Flora texture file which blends with my scenery assets. I kept one of the 16 textures blank (with alpha) which will be used by terrain textures that have no grass, such as asphalt and concrete. This allows for better blending around the edges of each tile in the sim from what I have found rather than opting for no procedural within the Terrain Texturing file for a individual texture.
2. Edit my Terrain Texturing file to define what procedural Flora to use for each terrain texture which I edited a 113 entries for in my file.
3. Swap out all my roads to use only road assets which are above grade with shoulders. Repaint the roads and add shoulder neutral colored texturing (dirt color) to those who have none.
4. Delete all track side and roadside weed lines along with undergrowth. As I noted above, this is thousands of objects on some tiles. Replace with selective assets weeds around perimeter of trees, bush and embankments where needed. All other will now be done by procedural.
5. Edit procedural weeds along right away with a variety of textures to make blend with scenery assets used.

Below are some pics and notes with my own route "rebuilding" over the past few days.

One last shot to show areas around my new roads. You will note that the weeds for the most part fit under the shoulder of the road.

Very interesting. The route is coming along nicely and looks amazing!

This is an excellent technique. Nice results!

Thanks for your good work.

Harry

I'm stunned. This looks awesome.

That looks really good, but I'm struggling to find the right foliage to really match what I'm trying to do. I mean the AP trees are detailed, but all the DTG trees look fuzzy or weird in comparison.

xxuntitledxx wrote:That looks really good, but I'm struggling to find the right foliage to really match what I'm trying to do. I mean the AP trees are detailed, but all the DTG trees look fuzzy or weird in comparison.

There are unfortunately limits to what is available for 3D foliage assets which come with DTG and third party routes. Quality wise there is no comparison with the AP ones which look really nice but you will have challenges to convert an existing route on a 1 for 1 basis with some of the assets. The AP ones are best used on a route you are building from scratch and I would have used myself should they have been available when I first started years ago. There are however a couple of options with the old DTG ones, you can can improve the existing assets by changing the textures of trees to match the the region you are trying to represent. Several of the trees and bush in my route use older DTG assets which have been upgraded with newer higher resolution textures. There are are lots of free (PNG / Alpha) textures available to help with these repaints if you look around. You only really need a handful of good assets to represent any area. There are about a dozen other trees I would like to use in my own route but there is just no real way of representing them without doing my own shapes so I have taken a close enough approach with scenery with existing assets which do match up to real world scenery in my area in some way. Best of luck.

Out of curiosity, what assets are you using for the roads? Thanks!

cnwfan wrote:Out of curiosity, what assets are you using for the roads? Thanks!

I am using the Hanover route roads for the paved ones and the BLE route ones for the gravel roads. All have been repainted with new textures. I have also been experimenting with some DTG ones from various European route offerings which have much longer shoulders than I am currently using but so far I have not been able to make them work the way I want them.