Aaaaaargh.....!!!

The amount of work I put into modelling for Railworks is a good demonstration of how much I like the game, but occasionally it makes we want to tear my hair out. I hadn't intended to post anymore on the subject of the Transporter bridge but I thought I'd give a liitle background on my last few days, in the hope it may help someone else.

I have been trying to add sound to the model and had endless problems. It took longer to add the sound than to build and animate the model! As too often, the wiki is worse than useless and only confuses rather than informs, so the only way to go is looking at the work of others, for which Mike Simpsons RWTools is invaluable.

The problem I wish to draw attention to is caching by the asset editor. Here's a comment from Pete(karma99) which I found invaluable.

Sounds like the asset editor and it's infamous caching.. if you try and rebuild with a file that's older than the last one it saw, it will ignore it.
It's trying to save time recompiling everything on every build, but it's a pain in the ********* butt if you don't get every single part of the export perfect on the first go!

If you go to the Assets/Kuju/Shapeviewer folder and delete the appropriate folder in it (ie Scenery) you should be able to get a fresh export without it remembering everything.
Note: DO NOT delete the files in the route of the Shapeviewer folder. If you do this the Asset Editor can sometimes die horribly and just stop working altogether until a random point in the future!

Whilst this was good advise, I found it was also necessary to delete the entries in the relevant assets folder as well. Not certain but perhaps the .tgt files may be the culprit here?

Anyway, I found that everytime I made a change to the sound file it was necessary to undergo this tortuous procedure to ensure the changes took effect, otherwise I was never sure if I had made a mistake or the system was just messing about.

Ok, rant over, but I sometimes wonder if the phrase "user friendly" was ever used at Kuju?

Quick update and a problem.

I decided that a transporter bridge needed to move, so I created an animated version.



Whilst doing this I came across a problem. Both the bridge and the gondola have night textures which illuminate parts of the model at night, by use of the AddATex shader plus the suffix -night on the object name. e.g 1_0512_decklights_night

As the gondola is now moving, its night textures had to be seperate from the bridge ones, so I split them accordingly. Consequently, neither appeared in the game as, apparently, RW only supports one object with the -night suffix! Not an issue with static objects, but certainly a problem with animated items.

Very big crane!

Many of the counties in the UK have significant rivers flowing through them, Thames, Severn, Avon etc. but I was born and raised in County Durham which is (I believe) unique as it is associated with three major rivers. There is the Tyne to the North, Tees to the South and the Wear throught the centre.

Each of the rivers has iconic bridges associated with it and I grew up seeing them on a regular basis. Kuju have already created the Newcastle-upon-Tyne crossings for railworks and Darpor is currently doing a great job of the Monkwearmouth bridge at Sunderland, but there was a recent request for a model of the transporter bridge across the Tees at Middlesborough.

If you have read the earlier entries in my blog you'll know I like cranes and the transporter bridge is a very large variation on a crane, so I was unable to resist the challenge. So here we have it, the Middlesborough Transporter Bridge.




This is an extract from a history of the bridge...

The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge has been a symbol of the area since it was opened in 1911.

It is a total of 851 feet (259.3 metres) in length which makes it the longest of those remaining in the world. Its cantilever construction has three main bridge spans that give it its unique appearance. The bridge is, effectively, two almost independent structures joined at the centre of the River Tees. Each half of the bridge has an 'anchor' span of 140 feet (42.6 metres) and then cantilevers across the river some 285 feet (86.8 metres) from the tower leg to meet its twin from the opposite bank. The passenger gondola is suspended by steel cables and runs on a wheel and rail system approximately 160 feet (48.7 metres) above the River Tees.

The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge is fully operational and provides a regular quarter-hourly service between Middlesbrough and Port Clarence for 18 hours a day. It remains the largest of the Transporter Bridges operating worldwide, and provides a valuable public transport service, crossing the river in two minutes.

Traffic update

This whole traffic idea was stimulated by the shortage of 1930's vehicles for Railworks, so I'm pleased to report that Jeff Layfield has added a bus to my collection. Seen here causing a traffic jam.



I also took the opportunity to create another vehicle model of my own, so here's the pre-war Morris 8. Once again the spokes have been removed from the wheels on the Traffic version of the model.



I also experimented with laying the invisible path below an existing road. This works just fine, but I can't deny that placing the loft under an existing road loft is a bit of a pita!

More traffic news

Thanks to Jeff Layfield, I was able to place a couple more vehicles on the traffic blueprint, but this highlighted a further problem. As I hope you can see in the picture, the wrong way round effect puts the driver on the wrong side of the vehicle and the lettering on the front and back are reversed.



Consequently, it was necessary to mirror all the models, so they appear the right way round in game.



Its not easy to see but the second picture also illustrates what we decided to do about the non-rotating wheels. All static reference points were removed from the wheels, for instamce holes, nuts and spokes.

As a consequence of all the work that was needed to get these models working in game, I am convinced that moving vehicle models should be made especially, whilst static scenery models should be made seperately. It may be possible to use the same model for both, if it is a modern symmetrical vehicle and the glass is obscure, but totally pointless with asymmetric classic/vintage vehicles.

P.S. Just had a further thought on whether to have different models for static and moving traffic. Static traffic looks naff at night with its lights on and moving traffic silly without them, so another reason for seperate models.

Road testing Jeff Layfields Foden

As previously mentioned, I want to create some 1930's traffic for the route but it's not possible to create traffic in Railworks without access to the original .igs file of the vehicle model. Jeff Layfield has kindly agreed to donate his Foden model to let me try and see if I could get it working.

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?

Back on topic

There is a shortage of 1930's vehicles for Railworks, so I contacted Jeff Layfield to ask his help in providing motive transport for the route. More on this later.

But it set me thinking. For some time I have wanted to try out the poly-modelling technique of model building, as opposed to the primitives method I normally use. So, as I was looking for more 1930's transport, I thought a new vehicle was a good way to try out this method and here are the results.

Off topic

Just for a change of scenery I offered to help John Bennett with a couple of items for his Bacup route.

The first was an attempt to transfer one of John's sketchup models into Railworks using an import script I found for 3ds max. The importer worked fine, but then I had to tidy the model up a bit followed by renaming to RW standards.

Also took the opportunity to add night textures, stencil shadows, smoke and waterscenery effects.



John also asked if I could use one of his watercolours as a basis for a Burton the Tailors shop.



A generation ago these were on every High Street and all had distinctive "Art Deco" facias. On a personal note, at one time I used to do alot of business with Burtons and visited their Leeds HQ on many an occassion, but that was in a former life:)

Anyway, I gave it a try and with a bit of artisitic licence, came up with the following.