Railworks America

Another newbie question for the Track laying Gods. How do you keep the "Snap to track tool" grid locked to the direction of the track. As long as I am running straight with the World Grids the tool works nice and smooth,but as soon as the track starts a turn the spikes start showing up along the edges of either the cuts or raised area under the track! What am I doing wrong? My tool settings must be off or the RW Video must be with the grids to show off the tool! Any help would be greatly appreciated. KenC.

There's nothing you can do about it. You can smooth the points off by reducing the brush size down to 10 and pushing the points down a little. The larger the cutting the smoother effects you can achieve. On tighther cuttings, most people place rock outcrops beside the track to cover the jagged terrain. It can also be disguised with foliage. If there was a way to decrease the grid size you could get smoother terrain but it would rob frame rates. Have a play around with manually tweaking them... you'll be surpised how easy it is to create the illusion of smoothness just by reducing each peak a little.

RW3 could probably benefit from a reduced grid size, with an MSTS style approach to managing the impact that this would have on framerates. In MSTS, one simply adjusted a value by right clicking on the relevant sub tile that would adjust the number of terrain polygons loaded, with a broader value defined in the route's properties that would be the base setting for that route. Most sub tiles further away from the track would only have the minimum amount of polygons rendered.

I'm surprised this hasn't been implemented in RW3. Given that the framerates cap is much higher in this program, the decrease in performance would be virtually imperceptible for most.

I suggested years ago in the Trainz program,that it would be great if you could click on a grad square,and it would split into 4 squares. That way you could fine tune terrain near the track to get rid of the jagged cubes. Of course Trainz eventually made it an option to double the grid resolution,which did make finer terrain a reality. I understand that terrain grid/squares are a co-ordinate system. And this would be another code modification we would have to convince RSC to implement. I would also love to see track with taller embankments. That would help disguise the angles between track and terrain.

Wait until you started painting ballast, you will have the same problem, zig zag path. To help, paint ballast first, then with a small brush size paint the grass up to it slowly.

The best way i've found to paint ballast is to lay the rail, then paint your tile in it's base color - I use Dry Grass - and then paint the ballast liberally on each side of the tracks. Turn the brush down to a Radius of 15, and a strength of .15. Hit just the jagged points of the ballast, clicking on the mouse lightly, as if you were tagging a boxcar with a can of spray paint. Keep doing this until the jagged edge is fairly blended into a straight line. If you do to much and make a hole in the ballast, switch over to Gravel and repeat the steps.

Thanks Jerry, I will be testing that technique soon on my new route. I have 150 miles of track laid out so far.