Scale-rail Implementation

[devise]

Howdy,

As a new member to this forum, but not new to rail-sims. I am willing to conform myself to the endless possibilities RW:TS has to offer. I am still in the process of learning to adapt to the code used to develop custom content for the sim and enhance the experience with my limited knowledge.

I appreciate the amount of resources I have found here and owe a big thumbs up to the host of RWA and a multitude of you contributors for the information provided on this forum.

Below is a high definition track mesh project I had created for on another sim, the entire mesh consists of 28,144 polys, 15,490 verts which has taken approximately 8 hours and still incomplete. The dimensions are the correct size and width for a 4ft-8in concrete sleepered track with pandrol fastenings based on the initial design of track which is commonly used throughout Australia and Europe.

Textures contain alpha, photo-realistic diffuse, indepth normals and specular mapping. Baked textures are also in the pipeline.



Q; Is it possible to export your own scale-rail mesh instead of using the default mesh in RW ?

Cheers,

devise

[Bananarama]

Nice piece of track! Unfortunately, you would have a hard time using such work in RW, as the poly count is through the roof. My own track typically has about 75 or so tris (faces). Even then that's considered moderate, as a scene may contain miles of track within a small area, such as a yard or industry complex.

[thecanadianrail]

Im interested in seeing in how this track will turn out

[devise]

Nice piece of track! Unfortunately, you would have a hard time using such work in RW, as the poly count is through the roof. My own track typically has about 75 or so tris (faces). Even then that's considered moderate, as a scene may contain miles of track within a small area, such as a yard or industry complex.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hack, I've taken your point of view in to consideration and would firmly agree.

I guess i'll have to revert to capturing an image in top view port of Max of the textured meshes (fastenings, sleepers and ballast plane) without the rails attached to copy`n paste and import to photo-shop and alter to use as the preliminary base texture on a low poly plane. Deleting the 3D fastenings & sleepers (where most of the polys are) would decrease the faces immensely, re-aligning the rails over the plane and weld as one complete object should be sufficient.

Going about that method may be the ultimate solution, but on the down side it will certainly bring tears to my eyes losing a fair amount of the eye-candy that I wish could be left intact.

I'll give this a shot and try a few other alternatives over the coming days.

Cheers,

devise

[thecanadianrail]

The best thing to do is to redo the clips to something simpler, 2 faces only on the top side and only a few angles. The sleepers are not bad, just remove the soft curves on the edges and it will be usable.

[devise]

The best thing to do is to redo the clips to something simpler, 2 faces only on the top side and only a few angles. The sleepers are not bad, just remove the soft curves on the edges and it will be usable.

thecanadianrail, without being too technical, I went back to one of my earlier backups. The sleepers were meant to be pre-stressed and needed that slight curvature look when touched up with the smooth modifier.

Anyway; I assume you mean't something like this ?




devise

[thecanadianrail]

That looks much more poly friendly than before. Although im shure you could get away with a 1 or 2 sided version of the clip, as you probably already know those very small details are not easily noticeable at any sort of speed and are really only useful for doing stuff like screenshots. With how poorly RW/TS is optimised the track you originally showed although looking good would most likely "cripple" your pc when you try and use it. Although im not shure if anyone has tested a higher poly track like what you have so it could end up turning out that it works very well, as noted it was proven that the poly count for locomotives and freight could be pushed up much further than we originally thought. Some time ago we thought that a reasonable limit would be around 40k polys, but as it was shown with the release with the connie that it can be pushed up into the hundreds of thousands without hurting your frame rates. I think you should at least try out what you originally made in your first post and then work from there if needed.