Railworks America

I received a question on how to use Railwork's gantry tool system to allow hanging wire from power poles. I thought I would respond here in case it was of interest to anyone else.

Railworks has a system that automates the placement of overhead catenary lines on electrified track. It involves building gantry towers that have connection points on them. The wires are hung from these connection points. The tool includes an automatic placement mode that spaces gantries along the track and connects them up. But the tool has more uses than just electrified railway track. It also includes a manual placement mode. This lets the user place gantries wherever he needs, clicking pole to pole to wire them up. This is a hugely useful feature for adding flexibility to power pole models. It makes it easy to run wires from pole to pole, or pole to house etc.

I made up a demo kit for scenery developers and have attached the kit here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzuoZRfI-rtqWnhPa01xOFpiZlE

It includes all the source and asset files that you can use as a working example for building your own objects. I am distributing them with NO COPYRIGHT restrictions - use them freely.

The source consists of:

POLE.XML - a gantry blueprint for the pole which specifies the node names, wire1, wire2, etc for the attachment points specifying WIRE.XML as its 'Loft blueprint ID'. These nodes are simple small rectangles with the 'Invisible' shader applied.

WIRE.XML - a loft section blueprint with its 'Special Curve' value set to 'Wire'

To use the poles:


1. Add the WACampbell \ Test folder to your browser:


2. Select the ‘Gantry Pole’ from the Railway Infrastructure tab in your Scenery browser and add them to your route.


3. Select the ‘Gantry Wire’ from the miscelaneous tab in your Loft browser. The connection nodes will appear on the poles. Click from one node to the next to hang the wire.

BDWorkshop wrote:I'm really surprised nobody out there knows about Blender and making these types of poles.
Anybody???

Oh, there are a few who use this, though my weapon of choice is 3DS Max.

Wayne's technique works great for rural areas and stringing lines from poles to objects, but you can also use a Wire Connector blueprint that automatically strings everything for use in urban scenes. Wayne's version will give you better control and is more forgiving of mistakes, however.

Does this make the wire hang Pole to Pole and NOT bend into lateral curves?

Hot dern! I always loathed that on HSC and the like, so I've avoided all track following lines in my own route. If we can do wires that hang properly that'd be great!

It's in the naming of the parts in the pole model. All attachment points are objects that must be referenced in the Wire Connector blueprint (Node Name). You can name them anything you want, but as an example, I used the following:

1_0128_ins01
1_0128_ins02
1_0128_ins03
1_0128_ins04
...etc...

Each is a connection point on the model and must be referenced twice in the blueprint, "fwd" and "bwd" (forward/backward), which are the start and end points. These are the insulators at the top of the pole and use a simple upright view facing material with alpha (they can be 3D, but it can quickly add up to a lot of polys in the scene). I limited the LOD to 128m to reduce alpha stacking, and you probably wouldn't notice the insulators further out anyway.

I made the wire a 3-sided loft object and it droops enough to give a realistic appearance.



The process is similar for Gantry blueprints.

There's a few screens on these pages:

http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread ... -Tehachapi

http://www.3dtrains.com/forums/index.ph ... hapi-pass/

Just a note to others who may be looking into this thread for info on using these Gantry Poles. The sample files I provided in the first post above are meant for the experienced builder and provide source file examples of blueprints and other needed files to use as a starting point for creating this advanced type of addon. I have had many correspondents report success using the examples I provided. There is a large- all capitals - note in the source folder of the download .zip advising that the .blend file is not compatible with Dom's exporter. It wasn't my intent that these files be used as a teaching tool for Blender exporting. Instead, the .blend file provides an example of the hierarchy and naming which, along with the sample blueprints, others I know have successfully used to create their own content in Blender, 3DC, and Max.

The files are correct and work as advertised and can be counted on as a reference for your own projects.

http://www.trainsimdev.com/forum/viewto ... f=12&t=135

See if this helps.