Reimagined: Sherman Hill

The "Reimagined" series mods primary focus is track and terrain ballast adjustment, and to remedy any quirks with a given route. The main goals are to get rid of the visible difference between the track and terrain ballast, to make sure that they stay consistent through the various lighting conditions and to minimize the "hard edge" effect of the track ballast. This is a really vague summary, as there's typically much more that goes into it, but ultimately whatever changes I do are to try and achieve the above as best as possible.

In regards to Sherman Hill - all ballast textures were replaced. Default ballast textures do not match up, the parallax height and normal maps are for a different pattern of ballast and it just makes it look awful (added couple images of default ballast for comparison). The base color map is new, rebalanced to get rid of bad pattern, the terrain normal map was also re-baked to be considerably more defined and the parallax height map was redone with one that minimizes the "plataeu" effect of DTG's ballast (the flat tops). Additionally, I rebalanced the specular and roughness for the entire landscape material, replaced the "pee" yellow sand texture that is found mostly surrounding the track. On top of that, I replaced the grass mesh that had the bad LOD with something appropriate, and rebalanced the textures to better match the terrain texture so that the distance fade is pretty much imperceivable.

Tags: sherman-hill smh union-pacific