Railworks America

Hello All,

I've done some searching in this and few other forum's. I've looked thru the Dev doc's but I can't seem to find any info on building bridges in Railworks. Is there anything special I need to worry about? liek how does one get the track to snap or vice versa. I'm not doing a loft, but a really long one off viaduct.

Best,

Roger

Unless the bridge is animated I don't think you need to do anything. Just make it a scenery object. It will not snap to the track, but then nothing really does unless you loft it.

Nice and easy thats the answer I was hoping for

Thanks PapaXpress

Roger

PappaXpress,

Do you know the limit on poly's for a static mesh? At my current rate of consumption I'm looking at about 10,000 ploys when I'm finished with this bridge......

There are a lot of post floating around here about how many is too many. If memory serves I think people were saying 2~4k was OK. I am sure other modelers here will chime in.

You can find the Arthur Kill bridge in the library, that one is fairly poly heavy (and animated) and no one has complained about it yet.

http://railworksamerica.com/index.php/d ... =22:models

I could swear the source files were available, but perhaps they were not brought over from the old library.

Ouch 1 have almost a 1000 for one arch section of this bridge, and there is ten of them to do............ this pup is going to have to go on a diet.

If you have 10 1k models you will be fine.

Download that bridge and take a look at it. I am using that, and 10 other "extensions" that came with it. I haven't seen any problems.

Also consider making a test route and put down a ton of scenery, or clone a route which you feel has the right density of scenery, and test your models on it.

For example with the GP40-2 I am working on right now, I cloned a scenario from Horseshoe Curve so I can see how well model (simulation) and the game core handles it.

Here is a great conversation about locomotive models. Granted that scenery should be lighter on the poly count as they can be more numerous than one locomotive, but the idea is the same.
viewtopic.php?p=103259#p103259

Pappa,

I guess i could break it down to 10 models but that would be a real pain to place I would think. I took a look at the Autherkill bridge, nice model, allot of work went into that. It's funny, I grew up about 30 minutes from that bridge. Drove past it many times. Never knew the history till i read a little after I downloaded it. Anyway, to give you an idea of what I'm working on here is a quick render I did in max. This is not stitched together yet as I'm building one quarter and just mirroring it. but it does give the scale of things. On the ground is a Genesis engine I'm also working on.

You know, you can almost loft that as middleware.

Throw a texture on it and get it into the game. I think it will hold up just fine. Remember that from the cab 90% of it will not be seen so the FPS won't drop much. Overall I love it, but there seems to be an issue in the top of the middle inner arch.

Can you show a wireframe of it?

very nice bridge.

Thanks gents,

The problem with the middle is she's not stitched together yet and there is one poly missing from the top of the arch's. I did a little more work on this tonight, I finished up the castle-mates. Now to finish off the deck and mirror it and stitch it together, then make the two end arch's texture and vola one viaduct.

Anyone recognize this yet?

I do. But the name escapes me.

Not sure what the name of the bridge is, but it's located in Pennsylvania.


By the way, excellent bridge, will be nice to see some new freeware bridges available for the sim.


I actually know how to build bridges, but I'd much rather building skyscrapers and semi trucks, and some cars and trucks.



You're going to be an excellent bridge builder. Perhaps also the Hoover Dam.

The wireframe shows good opportunities for reducing the number of polys.
The major culprit is the small archway between each of the larger arches. This generates lots of polys, is barely visible and is not an essential part of the structure.

My preferred solution would be to delete these apertures and simulate them with texturing.

Actually each span seems to consist of two spans side-by-side. This could also be simulated with texturing.

Edit: Also if your bridge casts shadows, its performance impact is increased, although this depends on each player's shadow settings. Still, this sould be taken into account when evaluating the complexity of a structure.