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There are many tutorials available both on this forum and on the web. Here's a basic experiment:Open your route in the RE. Go to a unused flat area and select the terrain tool(up/down arrow box)in the Mode dialog. Draw a red box on the terrain with the mouse. Press the numberpad down arrow to make a depression. Use the "End" key and down arrow key to slow the process down. You can change the numbers in the Terrain dialogbox to change slope and cutting angles.Next, turn on the surface grid with knife button in the Mode dialog box. Mouse over the tile grid squares were the depression is and left click to highlight. in the highlighted square, right click to open the dilog box. You will see set water height. To set this you need to know what the surrounding ground level is. You do this by setting your view (Camera) on the ground. Look at the Y value on the Camera dialog. The water level needs to set near or slightly less than this value. Set the same value for all 4 compass corners. These values set the water height for the entire tile area outlined by blue lines.Right click again and click on the toggle water selection. Your water should appear.If you are new to the hobby, I would consider buying Micheal Vone's Tutorial. But there are plenty of free resources if you search. Here's a place to start on the web:http://www.railpage.org.au/steam4me/trainsim/Good Luck! Hank
Welcome to the Route Building sufferers club, Matt !If you are going to make a career out of building routes then I would suggest that you get MIKE VONE's GUIDE to ROUTE BUILDING from ABACUS Publications !Making lakes and rivers involves lowering the terrain with F9 and then fill it with water which needs to be made "visible" in the individual tiles using F7 and also set the water level for the river/lake.There is a bit more to it you can learn all about from Mike Vone's Guide. O t t o
As Hank and Otto said, the terrain tool can be used to lower the landscape prior to setting water levels.You can use a section of track, place it at the surface, move it down to the depth you want for the river or lake bed, and use the "Y" key to lower the terrain. Rotate and move the track piece to get the edges of where you want them. Then set your water height and turn on the water to see if it looks right. Don't forget to delete the track section when you've finished.Jagged points along the edges can be smoothed with the "F" key.You can get things quite accurate in that way.Craig
Another strategy I have used for lakes with some success is to simply set the water height to be one meter about the DEM height of the lake, and then deal with the terrain and track laying accordingly. This may also work with rivers through in a deep 'gorge'.Meandering streams and rivers in a flat basin are a mess, however.
Well, I'm kinda stumped as well. I've gone thru the Route Building Tutorial from Abacus. Now I'm on my own creating havoc in the RE. My terrain is basically flat and I need to create a few streams that the track crosses on short trestles. If I use F9 and the down arrow keys I get unweildly results and as I move the white circle around some places I just pushed down, come back up.I've also tried the "trenching" method by laying track at a down slope and using Y to force the terrain to the height of the track. Problem is, many times the terrain doesn't move and the piece of track stays buried.I'm frusted, tired, cranky, and a few other unprintables thanks to the RE. Any help is hugely and greatly appreciated.Mike
Welcome to RE. By the time you master it you'll probably have used every unprintable word combination you can think of, maybe in more than one language too.Sounds like you have an error bias issue. The bias value tells the sim how terrain polys it can ignore. Whenever the sim has polys it can ignore it has to figure out which ones and under what circumstances, which often leads to that jumpy terrain effect you sometimes see -- that's the sim changing it's mind about which polys to display and which to ignore.Anyway, in some situations the bias default isn't precise enough to ever show very narrow terrain features, esp if there is a sharp gradient present. To see if this is what's effecting your work, turn on the subtile grid with f7, mouse select one of the subtitles where you've been doing your "trenching" with unsatisfactory result, and right mouse click to bring up the subtile menu. Change the value of Error Bias to zero and click ok. Now every poly will display and you can see exactly the full extent of your work.Funny thing about error bias tho is that if you continue to edit the terrain it's likely to reset the bias back to one so just be aware that might happen and reset it back to zero if you need to.Bias of zero does have a modest negative effect on frame rates and with many tiles it can add up to quite a hit. One way to control that hit is to use bias in a checkboard grid. Gets you almost the same effect as applying it on every tile, but of course at half the price.Finally, to see if you've correctly set bias to zero over a range of tiles, zoom way up high in altitude, turn the camera to face down, and toggle on the wireframe view (press the letter W). Subtiles with a bias of zero with look a whole lot more white than the others. You'll see right away what's been done and what's left to do. Much easier than going one by one over the subtiles.Dave NelsonWP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 100% complete; SP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 20% complete; Aug 1950 <<new .sig under construction>>
Thanks Dave. I think that might be my problem. I'll give it a try when I have time to get back to the route. Hopefully one night this week. I'll post my results.Mike
