TransDEM Forum

I've managed to make a route which seems accurate height wise but my ground textures are appalling, I was hoping for a result like some illustrated within the manual but i'm getting a lot of purple and black blotches and very little discernible lines and images that would indicate the terrain type or where roads are etc .I used google earth as the ortho source and the text indicating towns is gigantic , much larger than on the map itself. , the google maps themselves seem very blurred within the map tile view window , not anywhere near their quality when using them within google itself and they are worse when I've processed them into a route. any idea what I have stuffed up ? obviously i'm missing something crucial .I've tried a few different ways as well as different sources for my images and nothing is acceptable so far
one other thing, when I import my routes into TANE , it is not actually transferring the contents of the folder into content manager, I have had to copy and paste the contents from the original folder into the folder within editing and then submit edits , its then ok.

We have a technical limitation here. Ground textures are limited to 1 pixel per ground vertex. The reason for that lies in the limited amount of textures you can assign to each baseboard. So, for the Trainz 5 m grid we are able to get 1 pixel per 5m, for the 10 m grid, it is one pixel per 10 m. That means, ortho-imagery will generally not work. Instead, you should apply a map to ground textures. For the 10 m grid, 1:50000 will be okay, and for the 5 m grid, 1:25000 or, in the US, 1:24000 will be fine.
We are also limited in the number of colours. The default TransDEM ground texture set is optimized for maps, not ortho-imagery. It only has 20 colours, however, for maps, that is enough.

Now, when it comes to larger scale, including ortho-images, TransDEM offers extra texture carrier objects, called UTM tiles. If you have done the "Muengsten" tutorial, you will already have seen these tiles, painted with a 1:5000 map. If you can't remember, or skipped that chapter, do that tutorial again. UTM tiles can carry textures of up to 4096 pixel for a 500m UTM tile object. theoretically resolving objects down to 10 cm.