Mesh Painting in TRSE

[Scottb613]

Hi Goku,

Repost from TrainSim to bring it under your umbrella here. It seemed to have some interest...

Re: Spray Painting

Spent some time over the weekend with the mesh painting utilities in TSRE - WOW - it's just so much easier than Mosaic and actually fun to do - thanks Goku !

A couple thoughts:

When painting ROW - instead of having to click on each every track piece - could there be an option to just do the entire tile or perhaps the entire route in one fell swoop ? I use the same ROW settings throughout the routes I work on and that would save a massive amount of time spent with mind numbing mouse clicking... The same goes for roads...

One of the real reasons I’d like to see this implemented is that at some point ORTS should give us full seasonal Terrtex support - and this would make painting four seasons so much easier - I do seasons now with seasonal Terrtex via batch files - and even a small route is a vast amount of work...

We lack the ability to paint nice straight lines - or corners - in TSRE - and attempting to that by hand usually yields very poor results - at least for me... Would adding a utility be possible to assist with this task ??? If not - as a work around - would it be possible for me to make 3D Templates and have TSRE recognize them as a valid object to paint a footprint underneath - not sure how practical the concept would prove when in use...

If we had an ability to rotate the applied texture would be extremely helpful as well... I paint farm fields a bunch that have the furrows running in specific directions - so I have to make numerous textures of each image to accommodate how they fall on the route...

Occasionally - when painting - it seems the mesh flashes for a second on a nearby tile - and the resolution decreases from 1024x1024 to 512x512 on that tile... The entire route when I started had 1024x1024 basic terrain ACE applied to all tiles - there were no 512x512... I just pick and put an adjacent terrain tile to fix and it's fine again... All the textures I am painting with are 1024x1024 as well...

Question - when editing mesh painted tiles in various sessions - if I paint the same tile multiple times - am I making multiple copies of the ACE for the same tile orphaning the ACE's I created previously - or - does TSRE just overwrite the previous ACE with my new changes ?

This is about 10 to 15 minutes work that would have taken me hours in Mosaic - did over a mile in this test... Two texture ROW and no "transfers" used... I should have saved the "before" image to show how dramatic the improvements are...






One more thought - Mosaic could detect the edge of “water” where it intersected the terrain mesh - so you could paint a uniform shoreline without having to do it by hand - would it be possible for TSRE to do similar so we can automate the shoreline painting as well - similar to track - we could click on the water and paint a footprint - respective to brush settings ?


Thanks for listening...

Regards,
Scott

[ebnertra000]

There may be some unintended consequences to having the ROW painted in its entirety in one click. Places like bridges might have a streak of painted ground, and maybe tunnels would have this issue, as well. I think that maybe node-to-node might be useful in some areas (longer stretches of track, and whole tiles of track will work better in other places (busier arras like yards, junctions, stations, etc.). Probably piece-by-piece will also have its uses, too

[Scottb613]

Hi Folks,

Figured out the fantastic “auto paint” feature between track nodes - yep - works perfectly and does a large enough chunk at one time to make the task very manageable...

Goku - thanks for all your efforts and your generous sharing with the community...

Regards,
Scott

[OldVern]

I think the terrain painting could potentially be one of the top features of TSRE. Haven't tried it yet but I assume it is similar to Trainz or DTG TS. Is it possible to manipulate the brush, i.e. to apply a light dusting or amend the falloff (transition) between two textures?

The downside is going to be those terrtex sizes - not an issue on a small route or upscaled miniature railway, but even just one 2km square tile with 256 individual terrtex is going to be a horrendous size. One option might be to paint a number of individual squares to one's requirements, identify these then place as per normal terrtex, but I'm kind of shooting the breeze on that.

I've never had good results trying to create my own seamless textures outside of MSTS to bring in - always seem to end up with a visible edge on one side of the texture and trying to make corner or half sections is exceedingly difficult. Probably why to this day after nearly 18 years of MSTS we have never seen much in the way of replacement sets, other than those from Trundra which while brilliant, aren't much use if you're doing mountainous or rough moorland terrain.

[Scottb613]

Hi...

FYI - both PS and PSP have a utility to make seamless tiles a breeze - I’ve created dozens from satellite imagery... If you use PSP I can show you how - I’m not as familiar with PS...

Regards,
Scott

[OldVern]

I've used the Paintshop Pro (7) seamless feature a few times but always seem to find a distinct "edge" present along one side when the textures are placed in the RE which is also visible in the game (either MSTS or OR). At the moment my focus is on getting the roads and 3D objects placed and I'll revisit the textures in a week or two when that's done - it's crazy how much time you can spend in a graphics package tweaking and refining!