TransDEM Forum

I have searched for other questions related to my problem, here and on the Trainz forums, but have not found anything in any of the obvious places...

I started my first route (over) a year ago, and used TransDEM to set it up with USGS DEM and DRG and UTM Tiles. Worked great. I loved it. Have had a great time working on it. And am now ready to start my second route, armed with loads of useful experience.

I could have sworn (but memory isn't what it used to be) that the DRG would show up as a (lower resolution) texture that I used to guide my work putting environment-relevant textures down over it. And, of course, I had the (higher resolution) UTM tiles underneath that I used for splines, building, and such. Recently I upgraded my Trainz to SP1 HF3 and noticed, on the first route, that the one industrial yard I had not yet finished showed dark grey, with some lines (water features), but none of the contour lines, etc. Didn't think much of it.

Now that I've used TransDEM to set up my second route (followed the same tutorial I used for the first), my whole route seems to be the ugly, dark, unuseful grey...no sign of the DRG until I zoom way out. Of course, the grey goes away when I turn wireframe on, and I then see the UTM tiles. So I know the DRG "texture" is there, and the UTM tiles are there. But the texture is no use unless it's actually available down at the lowest level, where I'm trying to apply a "better" texture over it.

So...am I crazy? Am I imagining the DRG texture being available at a useful level on my first route? Have I forgotten to set something this time that I set last time when exporting from TransDEM? Did the Trainz upgrade really change things (and I'm not crazy)? If so, is there anything I can do? Or, am I the only one having this problem? I've been digging around and trying things for weeks now and am out of ideas (and almost out of hair to pull).

From your observation and description I would suspect that you are missing the TransDEM ground textures. When you zoom out in TS12, Surveyor will eventually switch to the mini map and as that has been created by TransDEM (and not yet been updated by editing work) you'll get the DRG. Zooming in, Surveyor uses the baseboard surfaces, and as they are DEM only, creates some grey terrain representation with DEM shading.

Check for the 20 TransDEM textures in Content Manager.

Yay! And much thanks! Interesting, though. When I checked CM, as you suggested, there were just 8 TransDEM20 files: 01, 02, 03, 05, 08, 10, 18, and 00. And the date of each was 13 Jul...which is about (best I can recall) when I did the Trainz patch. I went ahead and re-imported all the textures, again (per originally), and now I have 28 (8 showing as obsolete), and the DRGs show up in Trainz as I had thought they should! Guess I'm not crazy afterall (in this regard), but strange that it happened in the first place.

So...on to my next route. Your prompt help is much appreciated!

This "built-in" content in TS12, by mistake. Nobody ever planned to include them, but one of the routes in the TS12 package, which was created with TransDEM, wasn't properly cleaned before submitting it to Auran/N3V. Now we have these remnants causing confusion.