To Shadow Or Not...

...That is the question.

Trainz ingame has an option that you could tick to enable shadows. Many people do that thinking it will make everything look 1000% more realistic.

Well, not all the time.

I for one have the option disabled, because as they say, you might as well. It does bog down frame rates and sometimes the shadows act really skippy, looking like rays pointing into oblivion.

But there is a nifty little trick to have shadows appear under a given asset. Rain or shine it is effective.

So what I do is when I landscape a given area, I seem to pick my textures from a family of grass colors. In that assortment there are light ones, and dark ones; I very well appreciate the presence of such a variety. Here is a photo comparing two ways I have landscaped the undersides of trees to.

The left was what appeared in many of my routes, even including the 2009-10 non-dem attempt at the Miami Sub. See how subtle and very bland it looks, with a constant shade of grass; it's like it's a tree of glass. (I no longer put my trees up this way)


The right is current, and in my current routes. As the Sanford Sub, Carters Sub, and FEC routes have been plagued by the left, they are getting updated with dark textures beneath trees.

The texture scheme works well for:

• Bridges
• Trees
• Culverts
• Conveyors
• Water Towers
• Tall supported platforms
• Billboards
• Sheds
• Covered areas (ie. Drive-thru banking lanes)
• Substations (dark sand or gravel)
• Plane displays

You can simply see the difference in the dimension, the right looks very three dimensional while the left looks flat!


The route this was shot on was a very short-lived CSX Freelance route from 2009 btw, couldn't get past 1 mile of track-laying due to boredom.....