[charlie]

regards,
charlie

[thegrindre]

WOW! That first shot is a doozy! Beautiful mountains...

:oldstry:

[ILuvSantaFe]

Nice Pics! Could you please tell me what route this is?

Bill

[charlie]

ILuvSantaFe, on 06 April 2011 - 11:56 AM, said:

Could you please tell me what route this is?

Silverton Branch, D&RGW, Version 1.9944. :)

regards,
charlie

[Coonskin]

Excellent route work Charlie!!!

Love the textured mountains. For the Rockies, that's SOOOO much better than a single terrtex.

[atsf37l]

Yep, he does good work. He's been painstakingly planting aspen trees for weeks now. :)

[timmuir]

Absolutely beautiful first shot. Taking pains surely makes for gains when it comes to scenery and settings. How were the textures for the Rockies made, Charlie? What technique did you use?

[charlie]

timmuir, on 06 April 2011 - 09:52 PM, said:

How were the textures for the Rockies made, Charlie? What technique did you use?

I'm amazed to note that the rock terrtex project started on 7/25/2002 when I saved a "brown rocks" ace file. That texture was assembled from photographs that were taken from a good vantage point across the river from the vertical cliffs of the High Line just north of Rockwood. I just pieced it together whilst leaving out the trains. :)

Not being nearly as clever as I thought I was, I then made some transitions to forest, scrub, etc. in exactly the same scheme as the default terrain transitions. About a month later the "gray rocks" for other locations was a simple H/S/L shift of the brown, and got a similar set of transitions.

When I got to dinkin' around with version 2, I made several more transitions to take care of more situations. One of those is seen below on the gray example.





After I made all of the extra transitions, I toured the whole route again. I tried to make things look like good "geological sense", or at least plausible. It think it worked out OK.



One thing that may not be really noticeable in the previous pics in this thread is that the DM terrtex's have been painted to match the near terrain so the the view in the distance is seamless. It's just that "not really noticeable" is the whole point.

I've been doing this for years on any number of routes. I guess that SeaView5 and the freeware Surfliner would be the most notable. These two views were chosen so that you can see it. Everything beyond the farthest visible objects is painted DM terrtex.





The time-consuming part about all of this terrtex activity is generation of the snow textures. This has been done so that the character of the rock faces has not been lost, for either near terrain or distant.



I brought this on myself. :) I'm also carrying along two sets of snow. At the flick of a couple of batch files, you can have either "lite" or "hvy" snow.



regards,
charlie

[timmuir]

Thanks, Charlie. Your techniques work well, really gives the impression of far off mountainous landscapes and foothills. Your light snow textures are very good, too.