Railworks America

I plan to weather some of my locos and would like to increase the volume and darkness of the exhaust smoke to simulate a clapped-out engine. I looked through the SDK and I couldn't find anything seeming to discuss this aspect. I see the locos have a Particles folder and therein a .bin file with variables like fEmissionRate, fVelocityVariance , fLifeCycle etc. Has anyone ever written a tutorial on what typical values should be?

Ken

Hi,

I'm not aware of any tutorials, but a bit of experimentation can yield good results quickly with this blueprint. Most of the settings do pretty much what they say. My recommendation would be to copy the data from the engine exhaust you like best into a new blueprintg and then play around with the settings.

Some key settings are:

MaxParticles -- use higher numbers for faster emitters like a diesel/steam engine exhaust or you may end up with 'gaps' in the particle stream, but don't overdo it for the sake of your frame rate. I find ~250-400 to be good values for a diesel engine.

InitVelocity -- sets the speed in each three main directions (x - sideways, y - up/down, z - lengthways). For a building chimney I've used y=1 here, for a diesel engine y=4. Negative values are possible (so you can blow the exhaust downwards if you want by setting y=-n)

Cheers
Michael

Near those parameters are also some R,G,B and alpha for RED,BLUE,GREEN-- varies the color of the smoke; and alpha affects transparency