PolyCount

[Dilson]

Hello aksingha -

I am a fan of the IR (Indian Railways) and I am happy to see that you are working on locomotives for the Indian Sub-continent.

Hope to see more of your work in the coming months.

Dilson

[JerryC]

Lemme just go ahead and blow the cat out of the bag. The U30C is 325,000 triangles, and will top out probably around 350k before all is said and done. 125k of that is the cab view. GE loved rounded corners, and that is most of the reason for the poly explosion - rounded hoods, cab, door latches, latch recesses, etc. The locomotive runs on both my laptop and mainframe with no issues. That being said, there are several things that can be done to help out with rendering. Numero uno is use your modeling program's Smoothing functions. Better to have a 12 or 16 sided cylinder that is program smoothed than a perfectly faceted 64-sided cylinder. Two, LOD the hell out of it. There is no reason a small screw, nut, or bolt needs to be seen farther out than about 8 meters. Three, if in doubt, break it up. RW treats one central shape and several smaller shapes differently than it does when rendering one giant shape. And four, use as few textures as possible. Draw calls do matter, and if you don't believe it, try adding 100 different AO maps to 100 different parts and see what your computer will do.

If worse comes to worse, buy a better graphics card.

[OldProf]

A lot can be done with shadows and highlights.

I once made backdrops for theater and we made a stone wall for a castle by painting plywood gray, then painting a grid of black lines, then a grid of white lines 1/2" offset, and suddenly from 20 ft away you could swear it was a stone wall.

Last night I was watching an old episode of Mission:Impossible (season 3 ep. 1), and they used the exact same trick.

My intention is not to derail this topic, but Chacal's message has made me feel less alone: for many years I designed, built, and painted theatrical scenery, which taught me that even a doorknob could be believably painted onto a flat surface -- as long as no actor tried to turn it! Eventually, I learned that placing paler and darker shades of a color so as to create the illusion of light and shadow is called chiaroscuro and I do see it at work all the time in Railworks.

[JerryC]

And I do believe that technique in RW is performed by the Ambient Occlusion / Shadow Baking maps. That is important, ever so important to DTG, more so than proper controls or realistic function.

[aksingha]

Over the months I have made many more locomotives and other freight and passenger cars..and in the process I have made some improvements which have helped me to get better looking models with a little less polycount(I am still learning).And many thanks to all the members who have always helped me with the work

[aksingha]

Hello aksingha -

I am a fan of the IR (Indian Railways) and I am happy to see that you are working on locomotives for the Indian Sub-continent.

Hope to see more of your work in the coming months.

Dilson

I hope I can finish all the work before TS2016.

[aksingha]

Lemme just go ahead and blow the cat out of the bag. The U30C is 325,000 triangles....If worse comes to worse, buy a better graphics card.

325,000 ..that must be very detailed...and yes maybe I must get a new desktop PC..unfortunately I am low on budget now..my machine is just an entry level laptop..
Specs-
4gb RAM with win 8.1 64 bit
Core i3 processor(poor)
Nvidi GeForce GT820m video card

[JerryC]

The U30 is detailed, but it's not the "biggest" model i've ever seen. While researching our next locomotive, I came across one that someone had built for TS that was over 500,000 triangles. Super detailed down to the rivets. And it was a half-pint switching locomotive! It's unfortunate that that one did not make it into the game.

You have a good looking model there. Press on with and see where it goes. You'll figure out over time what it takes to get the unit to work with the game.

[Dilson]

Hello aksingha -

I am a fan of the IR (Indian Railways) and I am happy to see that you are working on locomotives for the Indian Sub-continent.

Hope to see more of your work in the coming months.

Dilson

I hope I can finish all the work before TS2016.

The works of all the users has inspired me to try my hand at modeling. I have started to find some time to learn it so that I can give back something to the community that has helped me to learn quite a lot. Not sure when, but I hope I will have my contributions for the community someday.

Dilson

[ErikGorbiHamilton]

The U30 is detailed, but it's not the "biggest" model i've ever seen. While researching our next locomotive, I came across one that someone had built for TS that was over 500,000 triangles. Super detailed down to the rivets. And it was a half-pint switching locomotive! It's unfortunate that that one did not make it into the game.

You have a good looking model there. Press on with and see where it goes. You'll figure out over time what it takes to get the unit to work with the game.

What switcher would that be?