I created a Vehicle Properties Blueprint using Jeff's .igs file for the vehicle source, so I had something to run on the road. Next I made the Traffic Control Blueprint which populates the road with as many vehicle blueprints as you wish to select and finally the Vehicle Path Blueprint which links your vehicles with the road. In this case I chose an invisible road for convenience as I had previously set it up when I was animating Captain Bazza's ships. They were all exported to game with the following result.
As you can see, the wagon is facing the wrong way and RW have still not resolved the problem with vehicle paths which turns the model inside out and the wrong way round!
Firstly, to deal with the direction of travel I imported the .igs file back into 3dCanvas (realising how much I had forgotten since changing to 3ds Max) and rotated the model 90 deg left. From the film you would think it should be 90 deg right, but remember that RW turns the in-game model end over end. Then I normalised the objects, which resets the pivot point to the correct orientation, and the lorry should now run the right way round.
Next, I needed to solve the problem of the inside out look. There are 2 ways to do this in 3dCanvas. Firstly, use the double side plug-in, which does exactly what it says... it makes all the poly's double sided. Not the best option as it doubles your poly count and may cause some z-fighting issues.
The second way is to open the properties pop-up of the object then enter BackfaceCull=0 in the RailsimX field. This tells the game to texture both sides of the polys, so overcoming the inside out effect.
Whilst altering the properties I took the opportunity to change the Diffuse value to 50, as 3dCanvas' usual setting is a bit bright in RW.
So, I then re-loaded the model into RW with the following result.
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I think that's a success, although I can see there's some z-fighting on the underframe.
Discovered the problem with the underframe was due to overlapping polys, so deleted the excess polys. Whilst I was working on the model in 3dCanvas I took the opportunity to add softshadow, stencilshadow and night glows to the model.
One problem remains to be solved and that is the wheels, which don't go round. Looks weird! Don't know if scrolling textures might solve that, will have to think about it?
There is an "inverse" operation in 3dCanvas, which turns things right-way/inside out. In case you didn't know.
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ReplyDeleteThanks and well done Phil.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the "inside out" traffic model could have a smaller texture file to reduce the drain on resources and disguise the non rotation of the wheels.
The separate static model of any particular vehicle could then retain more polygons and a larger texture file.
The problem would be to prevent a user placing the "traffic" (inside textured only), model as a static object.
On my trucks a have animated textures on the wheels. (made 2 textures) It looks fine, only it looks weird when the truck is waiting for a passing train on a level-crossing. A problem which didn't excist before last update...
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