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PostPosted: 02 Jan 2014 17:19 
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Joined: 05 Jan 2011 16:45
Posts: 1463
Version 2.5 brings some new features again:

  • 3D UTM tiles. Terra-formed “basemaps”, created, textured and placed automatically.
  • 64bit variant (x64) of the TransDEM executable, easier handling of large DEMs.
  • New custom ground texture set, optimized for aerial images, to serve as backdrop texturing.


What is TransDEM about?

TransDEM Trainz Edition is a helper tool for building prototypical routes in Trainz. It processes geo-data, in particular DEMs (Digital Elevation Model = height data) and cartographic map images and creates Trainz terrain from it.

New Users: How much does it cost?

TransDEM Trainz Edition is Payware. The fee for a personal non-commercial license is €23.90 including applicable VAT and PayPal fees.

(This is about GBP 20.00, USD 30.00, CAD 35.00, AUD 37, NZD 39.00, PLN 105 or CZK 670, including VAT and PayPal fees. Currency conversion rates as of 31 December 2014.)

New Users: How can it be ordered?

You can order TransDEM or request more information with a simple email: info@rolandziegler.de. I will send you an info letter with further details of the purchasing and downloading process. When ordering please indicate your full name and address.

Current Users: Update Policy

There will be a free update for current TransDEM users who purchased their license within the last 12 months. These users should receive an email from me with further details within the next couple of days.

All other users can obtain an upgrade license for a fee of €8.90, including applicable VAT and PayPal charges. Please email me at info@rolandziegler.de if you are interested, including enough information to find you in my database: your full name and current address plus original order ID.


Resources

Updated TransDEM configuration samples for WMS and map tiles can be downloaded here (without any warranty!).


What kind of features does TransDEM offer?

Geo-Data: Digital Elevation Models (DEMs)

  • Direct support for SRTM, USGS NED and ASTER GDEM (GeoTIFF), Canadian CDED DEMs, various ESRI formats and ERDAS Imagine, many including projected coordinate systems, plus MicroDEM format for other DEM types. (SRTM support includes “Viewfinder-Panorama” 1 and 3 arc sec DEMs.)
  • DEM Editing capabilities: adjustment of elevations (Triangulated Irregular Network algorithm - TIN), hole filling, smoothing, clipping, re-sampling, horizontal and vertical shifting, plus contour tracing for DEM refinement.
  • DEM shading, DEM based contour lines to ease to enhance DEM visualisation.

Geo-Data: Raster Maps, Orthophotos

  • Georeferencing of topographic raster maps with coordinates, dedicated functions for easy-handling of this often error-prone task.
  • Easy-handling of maps from on-line geo-servers (conventional browser interface).
  • Automatic georeferencing of GeoTIFF and GeoPDF images (GDAL required for GeoPDF).
  • Function to create transparent margins to avoid occlusion with overlapping maps and plans.
  • WMS client (“Web Mapping Services”) for automating the cartographic map image acquisition. Compatible servers exist in several countries, e.g. USA, Canada, Norway.
  • Map Tile client, similar to WMS client, for raster maps in Mercator projection and organised as a quadtree structure, as offered by certain Web servers. Examples are the (road-)map and orthophoto services by Google, Microsoft or Open Street Map.
  • Semi-automatic georeferencing of Google Earth™ images, using “placemarks”.
  • Support for UTM, geographic coordinates (lat/long) and a number of national coordinate systems in use in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Geo-Data: Vector Data

  • Vector overlays and polyline editor, read and write support for various file formats, shp, dxf, kml/kmz and others.
  • Data exchange with GPS devices via .gpx data.
  • Import conversion for data in national coordinate systems.

Trainz Map Creation

  • Direct creation of all files making a Trainz route map.
  • Fully compatible with TRS2004, TRS2006 family (including TRS2007 and Trainz Classics), TS2009 (SP2), TS2010 (SP3) and TS12 (SP1).
  • Baseboard alignment with the UTM grid. Allows for a modular route building approach.
  • DEM shaped terrain.
  • Ground texture and minimap based on raster map (limited resolution). Optional 5m grid for TS2009 and above.
  • Support for custom ground texture set, including removal. Custom textures for ortho-imagery included.
  • Automatic placement of UTM tiles (2D or 3D texture carrier objects with higher raster map or orthophoto resolution), 1000m and 500m. 3D tiles require N3V Trainz Mesh Importer.
  • Direct creation of Trainz spline objects from 2D and 3D vector data, allows to “lay track” in TransDEM.
  • Usage of the Trainz World Origin object for maintaining an absolute coordinate reference which allows adding of UTM tiles or spline objects at a later stage.
  • Lowering or raising a conventionally built Trainz route to merge it it with a DEM based route.
  • Optional horizontal baseboard grid offset for TransDEM-generated terrain to achieve better matching with existing conventionally-built Trainz route modules.

Support for GPS devices

  • Import: Live track log option for GPS devices via NMEA1083 protocol to record GPS positions as vector data, COM or USB (USB needs 3rd party converter).
  • Export: Option to save georeferenced raster maps as a .kmz package with geographic coordinates and automatic tiling for Garmin® GPS devices (and Google Earth™).


Documentation

TransDEM comes with extensive English documentation in pdf format, about 280 pages in two manuals. Tutorials make up a major part. They cover various aspects of TransDEM's capabilities including the mainstream functions of generating terrain for Trainz quickly.


System Environment

  • TransDEM 32 bit variant: Windows XP SP3 and above, 32 bit or 64 bit (x64)
  • TransDEM 64 bit variant: Windows XP SP3 and above, 64 bit (x64)
Recommend hardware: Quad-core CPU. 8GB of main memory for 64bit, 4GB for 32bit.



Example: Muengsten Revisited

The new 3D UTM tiles offer a fresh perspective to geo-data based Trainz route building with TransDEM. In combination with the new ortho-imagery ground textures they allow a couple of variations.

All TransDEM users are familiar with the Muengsten tutorial. It is here where it all begins. We still have the same DEM but make a few alterations to ground and UTM tile textures.

3D UTM tiles with 1:5000 topo map in the foreground, aerial images used for ground texture (background):

Image


Same spot, UTM tile layer switched off, ortho-imagery ground textures alone. Probably not ideal for the foreground, but perhaps quite acceptable as quick backdrop texturing:

Image


3D UTM tile objects, terrain switched to wire-frame mode (wire-frame replacement texture):

Image


Hi-res ortho-photos for 3D UTM tiles:

Image



Example: South Tyrol, Brenner Pass

Eisack river valley, Franzensfeste railway station. 2.5 m DEM (re-sampled to 5m), 1:5000 topo map, 3D UTM tiles at 5m resolution. Wire-frame view.

Image

Image



Example: Bonneville Dam, Columbia River, Oregon/Washington

USGS 1/9 arc sec DEM (re-sampled to 5m), USGS 1 m ortho-imagery, 3D UTM tiles at 5m. Wire-frame view.

Image


Enjoy TransDEM 2.5

Roland Ziegler (geophil)


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PostPosted: 19 Jun 2014 18:41 
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Joined: 05 Jan 2011 16:45
Posts: 1463
A TransDEM update is available on my homepage. The new version is 2.5.1.

This update is free for all TransDEM 2.5 users. Registered users of previous TransDEM versions can upgrade for €8.90.

Since the release of 2.5 a number of users have provided in-depth feedback or asked for specific additional functionality. Version 2.5.1 is mainly a maintenance update but it also includes some of the requested new features:
  • Improved behaviour of parallel processing for slower machines when generating 3D UTM tiles. An intensive test series of bulk 3D tile creation revealed that in some cases a few tiles were incomplete. This appeared to happen particularly on slower multi-core machines. It has been solved - I hope - by moving some of the completion and cleanup functions from the parallel worker threads to the main worker thread.
  • During those tests it turned out that some of the UTM tiles could be left blank. Since this was reproducible every time, it could be tracked down to an inapt filter that checked for presence of raster data. The new filter now will look a bit closer.
  • When exporting large crescent-shaped routes to Trainz rows or columns of baseboards near the edges of the route could be omitted in the process, despite lying within the given export range. This had to do with the position of the origin baseboard with Trainz coordinates [0,0]. For such routes the geographic center may not be part of the exported baseboards and had to be relocated because it carries the essential World Origin object. TransDEM always handled this case, but unfortunately there was a bug in the implementation, now fixed.
  • Just the other week a user encountered a problem with an export area reaching into negative UTM coordinates. This could happen when a UTM zone was extended to the west beyond its nominal border. And the Trainz export dialogs in TransDEM rejected the negative values. You could solve the problem when converting to the adjacent UTM zone. But since there is no real technical reason for that - the coordinates are always processed as signed double values - I have lifted that restriction. Significantly extended UTM zones occur more now, as routes become bigger and bigger, especially with the 64 bit version of TransDEM.
  • For DEM files, the Canadian CDED .dem ASCII format received some enhancement.

    Firstly, TransDEM now recognizes floating point notation of the exponent as the letter "D" (usually "E"). A "D" seems to have been applied by a variant of the FORTRAN programming language which apparently produced some of the CDED files.

    Secondly, and much more interesting is the support of the rather new Norwegian 10m DEMs. The CDED file format is based on an older USGS format which also allowed for UTM coordinates. Canadian DEMs are always in geographic coordinates, but the Norwegian DEMs make use of UTM. TransDEM can now also read this variant.

    Here is an example, 10 m DEM for the Stavanger region:

    Image


    Compare this to the well known 3 arc sec SRTM DEM:

    Image


    Now, the 10 m DEM with the 1:50000 raster topo map, acquired via WMS:

    Image

  • I also added a new coordinate system, the Estonian national grid, a Lambert conic conformal projection. There is an Estonian WMS - several in fact - with one of them also offering historic maps. Only a subset is available in geographic coordinates, in a separate WMS. The latest "WMS Sample Settings" include three of the Estonian WMSs.

    This example shows three different maps from 1:10000 to 1:50000, from the 1940s to the 1990s:

    Image

  • Finally, I slightly enhanced the DEM merging functionality when changing the UTM zone and also found a bug there and fixed it.


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PostPosted: 31 Dec 2014 11:52 
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Joined: 05 Jan 2011 16:45
Posts: 1463
From January 1st, 2015, TransDEM Trainz Editions license prices will be slightly adjusted: The full personal non-commercial license now costs EUR 23.90, including applicable EU member state VAT and still also including PayPal fees. The upgrade license (personal, non-commercial) costs EUR 8.90, including applicable EU member state VAT and PayPal fees.

Please indicate your full name and now also your address when sending your email order. The address is needed to comply with new EU VAT regulations for digital downloads.

See here for further explanation.


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PostPosted: 24 Jan 2015 12:29 
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Joined: 05 Jan 2011 16:45
Posts: 1463
In conjunction with T:ANE, an update for the TransDEM ground textures is now available on my homepage.

This update brings new versions of the standard and the ortho-image texture sets for Trainz, KUID version 5 for the standard set and KUID version 2 for the ortho-image set. The update is compatible with TransDEM 2.5.0 and 2.5.1, but there are two different variants for 32bit and 64bit installations. The update will not remove any previous version of the textures.

This update is free for all TransDEM 2.5 users.

T:ANE introduces new rules for ground textures and now requires separate images for the thumbnail image and the texture proper, see here:
http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/inde ... t_for_TANE
The new texture sets comply with these T:ANE rules. They should also work in TS12 but I have not tested earlier versions of Trainz.


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