Getting started 5: Terrain
The tunnel from step 4 still stands rather lost in space. In this step it gets a mountain around it.
Load File → Example plans…, folder Tutorial, plan tutorial5a: one track, one tunnel,
and the two tunnel annotations from the last step.
tutorial5a: the track with the tunnel and the two markers that produced it.
With Add Terrain you put a block of terrain
into the plan. At first it's a slab with a small rise; tutorial5b shows this state.
tutorial5b: the slab is there, the tunnel still stands free on top of it.
Select the terrain block and click it again to enter the terrain editor. This is how you reach the editor of any object, everywhere — see Conventions.
The terrain sculpting tools
The Terrain sculpting tools panel holds four brushes at the top. They differ only in what the brush does to the heights beneath it:
| Tool | Effect | |
|---|---|---|
| Raise terrain | raises, most strongly at the center of the brush | |
| Lower terrain | lowers | |
| Flatten to clicked height | pulls everything to the height you clicked first | |
| Smooth terrain | averages out differences and removes edges and spikes |
Below that sit Brush radius and Strength.
Gently, and several times
A small Strength value and several strokes give a more even landscape than one heavy stroke. With Smooth you can fix afterwards whatever came out too jagged.
Now it's your turn: drag a mountain up over the tunnel, until the tunnel disappears inside it.
Bringing the tunnel into the mountain
The mountain stands, but the tunnel doesn't know anything about it yet. It was built when the terrain didn't exist yet.
Finding markers under the mountain
And here you run into a practical problem: the two tunnel markers now lie inside the mountain. In the 3D view they can no longer be clicked.
Annotations are found in 2D
Switch to 2D view. From above, nothing lies over the markers — they're just as easy to grab there as before the terrain existed. That's the normal case as soon as a plan has landscape: you build in 3D, you edit annotations in 2D.
Refreshing them all at once
But you don't have to hunt for the markers one by one at all. Tools → Track annotations… lists every annotation in the plan. Whatever no longer matches the layout shows stale, and Refresh rebuilds it.
tutorial5c: after refreshing, the tunnel sits inside the mountain, and the mountain has been
given a hole.
That's the payoff of the annotation: it describes a stretch of track, and when refreshing, Raily itself looks for whatever stands in the way there. A tunnel made by hand is a body, and knows nothing.
What's still stuck in the ground: cut and fill
Look at tutorial5c at the tunnel mouths. The tunnel sits cleanly in the mountain, but the
track in front of it and behind it still runs straight through the terrain. What's missing is the
forecourt a real portal has.
There's a second kind of annotation for that. In the annotations' multi-tool button, choose Add cut & fill annotation.
It works exactly like the tunnel annotation, and the rules from step 3 apply unchanged: lie on the track, a counterpart bounds the region, then refresh.
The difference is what gets built. The cut & fill annotation cuts away an area above, down to the given height, and inserts an embankment of the given height below.
Set a pair at each tunnel mouth, from the portal side outwards, and refresh.
tutorial5d: with one cut at each end, the track runs freely out of the mountain.
You set the shape of the cut on the annotation: Trackbed width, Slope of the batter, Depth, and the materials for batter and trackbed. More on that under Track annotations in detail.
Color on the terrain
A terrain block starts out colored "Alpine": meadow at the bottom, rock above it, snow on top. Other palettes are under Surface colouring in the property panel.
Match colours to terrain
For the colors to fit your mountain, Raily needs to know what height range they run over. The button at the bottom of the tool panel reads it from the actual heights. One press, and the snow lies on the summit instead of on the plain.
More under Terrain editing (terrain & sculptor).
Next
See also
- Getting started 4: Tunnels
- Track annotations in detail: the refresh dialog and the parameters of cut and fill
- Embankment and ramp: the track heights the terrain adapts to
- Import a heightmap: a terrain from a greyscale image, instead of shaping it by hand