 Hello, my name is Bill Geiger, and welcome to the companion video for my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist Magazine, introducing the technique of using terrain simulation software to create images for model railroad backdrops. Terrain generation software is used for creating backdrops in movies and computer games. The realism possible with this software is amazing, and the added benefit of being able to simulate real locations to the use of actual elevation data, which is available for most places in the world, give you a real unique opportunity for realism. I believe this may be the first time the use of terrain simulation software for model railroad backdrops has been published. If you're not artistic like me, it offers a great alternative to creating your backdrops. Before we get to the software in the process, here are a few images to perk your interest in this technique. In each case, we will see a real photo of an actual location and that same location modeled with terrain simulation software. Here's a view of the valley near the tiny town of Virgil along the Missouri River in central Montana. Here's a computer simulation of the exact same location. Here's a second actual photo of the same valley and the simulated view. Here are the former great Northern Railway tracks at Fort Benton, again in Montana. And here is the simulation of those same hills without the tracks, of course. And finally, here's a location you may actually recognize, Lizard's Head Peak in Western Colorado near the former Rio Grande Southern narrow gauge railroad. And here is the simulation of the same location. As you can see from these images, computer simulation can produce some pretty convincing renditions of natural backgrounds. Terrain simulators are the software that makes all of this possible. There are several terrain simulation packages on the market. Product I chose is called Terogen 2 from Plantside Software in the UK. This package has been used in several Hollywood movies and is considered by enthusiasts as having some of the most realistic results. Plantside provides a demo version of Terogen that is only limited by the resolution of the output image, but otherwise is fully functional and does not expire. This is the Terogen user interface. On the left side of the display, a view of the various control elements that make up your simulation are presented in an outline view. In the upper right corner, we have a draft rendering view that represents a rough rendering of our scene. This image is constantly changing as you make adjustments, and in the end will only present a rough view of how your image will appear. In the lower right, we see an alternative view of the elements that define the simulation. This is called the network view. As your model gets more complex and larger, this view can become more efficient to move around and adjust your model parameters. Let's examine the starting point of the simulation, the terrain. The terrain represents a geographical space of length and width with height variations that represent hills, valleys, and mountains. Terogen can generate a terrain on its own from a random number seed you provide, or my favorite technique is to use digital elevation map data, which you can obtain for free from the U.S. Geological Survey website. This data is the actual elevations in any location in the U.S. Mdata is really available for most places in the world from other sites as well. This approach is how I was able to create backdrops that look very similar to the actual locations. Looking at the other elements of the simulation, we have the object section. In order to simulate larger plants and trees, one turns to object models that can be inserted on top of your terrain. Terrain tools can take a single tree and randomly place and rotate them to create a convincing forest. Free models have been made available by Terogen Habeas or are commercially available for a nominal fee. We look through the other sections, the shader section is important. This is the simulation elements that create distant rocks, dirt, and grass layers and produces most of the coloring you see in the simulations. I will not go into detail with the other elements, but there are sky, clouds, and lighting which represents the sun. All these aspects of the model are adjustable with dozens of parameters and options. The terrain modeling paradigm includes a camera, which is your view into your virtual world. The key element of making the wide images necessary for typical model railroad background work is creating a view of your scene, rendering it, and then rotating the camera a bit and making another render. If we repeat this several times, we'll have a series of images that overlap. When these individual views are combined into a single panoramic image, we get a wide aspect ratio view of our scene, which is what we need for model railroad backdrops. So we are going to go ahead and make our first image through the rendering process. This is where computing power is very important. We are speeding things up here, but this rendering actually took 10 minutes. Final resolution renders can take hours to days depending on your computer power and the complexity of the model. This is a great excuse for a new high-powered PC, and it's just one of the many benefits of this approach. So here is our final render image, and after saving this image off, we would rotate the camera and create another. How many images depends on your scene and backdrop needs. I have used up to 14 images for my 17-foot-long backdrops on my shelf layout. You have your images form a quality panoramic stitch. You want your views to overlap 35-50% of the previous frame. If you are working with the default 50mm focal length camera lens, 20-degree adjustments to the rotations work out perfectly to a 50% frame overlap. Of course there is a lot of details I am leaving out of this brief overview. Terrigin is a fairly complex piece of software, and there are no books or even a complete manual available for the product. To be successful with this technique, you need to take advantage of all the information out there on community lists and material the Terrigin experts share, and be prepared to experiment. The way I looked at it, learning this new tool became another adventure in the hobby of model railroading. There are other terrain simulation packages out there. I can't comment if they are easier or more difficult to use. There is no question, however, that the quality of the output from Terrigin can be truly phenomenal in the hands of the experience, and success can be found even with novices such as myself. Once we have simulated different views of our scene by rotating the camera, we need to stitch these images into a single panoramic view to build an image suitable for a model railroad backdrop. For this task we turn to photo stitching software. There are a number of packages on the market, from free open source to professional packages. Early in this project I could tell I was going to be doing a lot of stitching, so I went for the middle of the road and bought a personal version of the product called PT GUI. PT GUI is from a company in the Netherlands, and for purposes of this project, the personal addition does everything we need. Package is very simple to operate, which really helped streamline my workflow as I performed hundreds of stitches during the development of my images. To make a panoramic stitch, you simply load in the images from your simulation. Next you select the align images operation and you get to see a small version of your merged image. You can test several different stitching algorithms to see which works best for your image. Finally you perform the full stitch operation and save off your merged image, where you can edit and trim in your favorite imaging package. Ok, so now we have completed our backdrop image. We need a large format printer to bring our simulated scene into the real world. After a fair amount of research, I selected a local printer that specialized in fine art or g-clay large format printing. These folks seem to be more sensitive to accurate color reproduction and knowledgeable about which materials and inks provide long life. I'd stay away from the vinyl banner guys as most of the materials employed have very short life ratings. You cannot find a local shop that offers g-clay printing and you certainly can find them on the internet. Material my printer guided me to is actually an industrial custom wallpaper substrate. Vinyl paper based but completely matte or dull on the surface so that I would get absolutely no reflections. Using wallpaper application would be the same as hanging wallpaper. I used 36 inch wide paper and was able to print two scenes side by side in one very long 17 foot sheet so I would have no seams in my backdrops. I pre-trimmed the paper to the exact height for installation on the layout before trying to install. My layout is actually suspended on a cable hoist from my garage ceiling. Weight is a constant concern so I constructed my backdrop substrate from a plastic material called Coroplast. It sort of looks like corrugated cardboard but it's made from polypropylene and is very lightweight and somewhat flexible in one direction. Since there's a slight ridge surface to the Coroplast and to assure a good surface for the wallpaper backdrop to adhere to, I applied a standard wallpaper liner on top of the Coroplast after it had been primed with regular latex primer paint. The painted backdrop substrate provided a nice smooth surface for hanging our wallpaper backdrop. Final wallpaper pace was applied and the paper booked as they say in the wallpapering business. Hanging a 17 foot piece of wallpaper horizontally no less made for an exciting 15 minutes but the paper was quite durable just like wallpaper and after getting it in place we were able to smooth any wrinkles out. Final product was quite striking. This is the scene on my layout representing Fort Benton, Montana. This location, the Great Northern Yard, was right up against the hills. In another scene I modeled Carter, Montana which was out on the Flat Prairie. Grain bins were photoshopped into the final panoramic image. Mountains in the background are some 50 miles away. Paragen handled modeling them and shading them an easy distance. The third scene on my layout is Virgil, Montana. Striking elements of this location are the sandstone cliffs just on the other side of the Missouri River. You can see this scene I modeled, small cumulus clouds, all possible with Paragen. Final scene on my layout is Cole Banks Cooley, a canyon near Virgil, Montana. Near Terrigin does an excellent job of perfectly imaging the perspective of this canyon as it extends miles into the Prairie Plateau. I hope you've enjoyed this very quick overview of using terrain simulation to create model railroad backdrops. There was a lot to learn with this technique and took many hours to experiment, become proficient with Terrigin, and I certainly have a long way to go to match the experts. Casco, however, became just another one of the entertaining challenges of this multi-classic hobby. Results are very striking and every time I look at my layout I can back how realistic the images actually are. Compress slide details in a short video, but hopefully there's enough here to inspire you to consider this as one of your options when making the decision on how to tackle that very important element model railroad, the backdrop. Thanks for watching.