Warehouse Buildings with angled walls

I am attempting to build a TANE switching route that is mostly industrial park. Lots if industries with track going in all the right places. There are several locations that require warehouse buildings that are not rectangular. I have downloaded most everything on the DLS that is labeled "warehouse" or "factory" or "industry" or "building", but the pickings are quite slim when it comes to non-rectangular.

Here are two picture of places I'm coming up short on DLS equivalents. If you know of any such buildings on the DLS or of a content creator that would create or modify some existing assets, please advise.




The walls on these two buildings have a 350ft radius.



Thanks for any suggestions.

David

Time to learn Blender, young man

I have tried, but I've been 30+ years of using one CAD program to design things. And I have attempted to learn Blender, but Blender does not work anything like my CAD. Getting my old brain to wrap around a new way of doing this has me flummoxed.

David

On the other hand, these simple geometric shapes would be a very good and simple start to try blender again. :hehe:

I've made a few of these for the Laurel Line, but not with those angles. I believe they're on the DLS.

Greetings from overcast Amsterdam,

Jan

Love the idea of building those angled / round edged buildings.

I personally have two minor things that prevents me from jumping this immediately:
- No time the next year or so
- Don't have the texture / not that great with creating textures yet

I agree with Jan though:
If something is a great thing to start learning Blender (or any 3D tool) it is these relatively easy shapes .

Where did you get those from-above shots btw? A Google Earth location link preferred . Just curious about the environment / track work in that area.

It is sometimes possible to overlap a building to get angles that you want. The same asset placed twice and one rotated to an angle. Move one into the other and it is possible not to see the join.

Ya know it might be possible to "modularize" these (in Gmax in my case) so you could put the various sub-assemblies together in a lot of different combinations. By that I mean I make relatively short wall sections for different purposes.
One for a single truck access door.
One for a single rail access door.
One for 1 wide window.
One for 2 narrower windows.
One for 3 really small windows high on the wall.
One for a people sized door and a narrow window.
One for double people sized doors for the main entrance.
One blank (no doors or windows).
One with a large vent.
One consisting of a roof and floor only (interior section.
A few odds-n-ends to put on the roof.
They would all be the same height and width and include the floor and roof.
You gents put them together in various combinations to fit your scene.
One question is industry interactivity. The only way I could do that would be to make each one individually industry interactive and frankly I think that would be a can of worms we don't want to open. To small and too many different potential products. I think there are utilities out there that would allow users to make them industry interactive after assembly. For that reason I would not include any built-in track.

I'd need photos of them from ground level so I have some idea what the various walls look like.

Whatcha think gents?

Ben

This is a great idea, Ben.

How about putting the same roof texture on all parts so there's no need to put an extra roof part on. All we do then is stack 'em up however we want.

Yeah - there would have to be a lot of "commonality" involved. Floors, roofs, wall height, wall thickness, textures, and so on. I could make some blank walls in odd lengths for use when someone makes a building and things don't come out quite even at one corner, lol. Hopefully overlap when it occurs wouldn't be very noticeable. Keep in mind the more complex the wall texture is the more likely it is to look a bit odd at the joins between sections so I'd suggest a simple stucco or concrete texture (but if you want brick - I'll do brick).

Something else to consider: There are undoubtedly 100's and 100's of items on the DLS that could be used with these. Stuff to go on the roof or butt up against the side of a wall and so on.

I jotted down a few ideas and came up with at least 15 different walls and that was in just a few minutes.

Not sure about truly curved walls. I could try making a few with different radii but would have to do a little testing to see how they could be used (or rather how well they fit together with the others).

So gents: You folks need to get together and decide on:
Wall height (it has to be high enough to get a traincar inside and probably having sufficient height for an overhead crane inside as well).
Preferred texture (I'm not going to make several different sets each with a different texture - I'm crazy but not that crazy, lol). I suggest making them all 1 ft thick.

Ben

Curved walls could be done as splines which could attach to a fixed straight wall in a similar way to a road spline attachment to a junction.

Yes they could (but I hate splines, lol). However - splines have a repeat length. For a blank wall spline this could be 1 ft and generate a very smoothly curved wall. But what about a wall with a 16 ft wide door or window? It would require a repeat distance much longer then 1 ft and might not make a very smooth curve (depending on the radius of course). Almost easier to use multiple flat sections and change the angle as needed.

This doesn't mean other folks couldn't make parts for this "kit" of any sort. The more parts the merrier - splines included.

Ben

I made a warehouse with a curved dock:


Warehouse 4 Mar15 DES <kuid:101046:103181>

I have only found and used 3 Angled industrial buildings namely "Industrial AO8 <2:9000:27108:1> / AO9 27109:1> / BO7 27207:1>

All by "Weevil" and are built in / in TS12. (although Build 1.3)
Did not find any Buildings with Rounded Sides !
Perhaps worth a look at ?

NormP.

bendorsey said:

Yes they could (but I hate splines, lol). However - splines have a repeat length. For a blank wall spline this could be 1 ft and generate a very smoothly curved wall. But what about a wall with a 16 ft wide door or window? It would require a repeat distance much longer then 1 ft and might not make a very smooth curve (depending on the radius of course). Almost easier to use multiple flat sections and change the angle as needed.

This doesn't mean other folks couldn't make parts for this "kit" of any sort. The more parts the merrier - splines included.

Ben

Click to expand...

Dave Snow and others have made doors, loading docks, stairs, windows, and other bits that we can add on to the blank walls so there's no need to do a lot of extra details on the fill-in spline.

davesnow said:

I made a warehouse with a curved dock:


Warehouse 4 Mar15 DES <kuid:101046:103181>

Click to expand...

Yup, I've got it and use it all the time.

That's what I meant - there are literally 100's odds-n-ends on the DLS that could be added here and there to these basic warehouses to give them individuality.

Once you gents decide on the basic parameters I can get started on them. None of the parts are large or complex so I don't think this would take very long. Items that might be complex (things to go on the roof for example) have pretty much already been made. I have a few items I can easily modify to go up there but most would come from the DLS (and other folks of course).

I'd suggest: walls 1 ft thick 20 ft wide and either 30 or 40 ft tall (but not both). This allows for doors large enough for traincars and assumes the possibility of an overhead hoist inside.
I would make a few shorter blank walls as mentioned above to allow correction for irregularities cause by angled or curved walls.
Wall, window, and door textures are up to you but I need to know which (texture and color) you want. All windows and doors would use the same basic textures but will different in design. Windows will have nightmode.

Up to you gents. Let me know please.

Ben

Interesting idea! I guess you are thinking of a mesh library such as used for procedural track? I'm imaging a "parent asset" with lots of attachment points for walls and roofs. Individual walls could have their own window and door attachments.

Not sure how efficient it might be but worthy of a joint project. i.e. multiple contributors of mesh libraries of building parts. Doesn't matter if they are built in Max, GMax or Blender. I'll exclude Sketchup. :hehe:

Would probably work very nicely for modern industrial buildings.


Not sure if this answers David's original question.

I don't think it would be that hard to make some wall splines. Maybe some blank and some with overhead doors. Even some with windows for the office partition that most warehouses have. Let me study on it.

Hey Ben--- why don't you like splines?

I'm gonna look into the spline "angle" (Pun intended!!)

Cheers,

Dave

Hi Paul:

Nope - not that way at all - in fact I have no idea what you mean by a mesh library, lol. Come on Paul - you know what a dinosaur I am,:hehe:.
I would make a series of discrete parts and export them to the DLS each with its own kuid. No parent part and no attachment points. Seems to me that would limit how parts could be put together. The idea here is all the parts can be put together in any order and at any angle of rotation to make buildings from the very small and plain to the very large and complex. The only limit would be your imagination. The height would be fixed (no height-adjust line in the config). The first part in the "kit" would contain a README file with a listing of the parts. Folks could print that out for reference if desired. If other folks made parts for the kit they could add them to the READ me file and perhaps post a link to it so others could download it and do a save and replace of it in part 1 of the kit.

For modern warehouses perhaps a concrete block texture would be best. Just a suggestion. Up to you gents what I use.

Hi Dave:

Splines have limitations (here and there). I won't deny they have their uses (track is nice, lol) but my biggest gripe is the way N3V has changed how they are done. I will make one if there is absolutely no alternative but otherwise - forget about it, lol.

In this case the idea of adding doors and windows to a blank wall spline will not generate a feeling of depth since the added door or window would be on the front of the blank wall instead of recessed within it as in the real world. Won't be able to see thru those windows and nightmode wouldn't work very well either (if nightmode works on a spline at all).

Ben

Ben,

Mesh Libraries are cool because instead of individual assets referencing the same mesh copied multiple times, it saves resources because there is only one reference which gets loaded into memory. It also saves you time because you only make the single mesh and then each asset pulls up the parts needed and applies the textures as needed to that mesh.

Here's a config.txt example which illustrates a mesh library.

mesh-table
{
01
{
mesh "bankw8h10s1.5s2.im"
auto-create 1
}

02
{
mesh "w8h1045L.im"
auto-create 1
}
}

This is from Dave Bird and belongs to his bridge ends.

Anyway this asset contains the meshes as referenced in the mesh-table just as they normally would. Any model that needs to use the same components will reference the Kuid here <kuid2:195134:200000:7> instead of having the same mesh components in the individual folders.

A mesh-table from one of the bridge ends...

mesh-table
{
main
{
mesh "1t30l.im"
auto-create 1
mesh-asset <kuid2:195134:200000:7>
}

Hope this helps.

John

Hi John:

in all honesty I don't have a clue, lol.

Ok perhaps the slightest of clues (I'm guessing here so this might not be how this works).
I still make all the individual parts (assets).
The base asset contains a bunch of attachment points indicating where the individual parts are located.
The config file for the base asset assembles the complete item in surveyor.

Seems to me this makes it a bit more complex to use. The whole idea is warehouses can be made "on the fly" directly in surveyor. Misalignments are seen and corrected immediately. Ditto changes.

As a mesh asset if you place a part in the wrong location you have to modify its attachment point position on the base asset, re-export it, and test it (take a look in surveyor) to see if it ok (and if not do it all over again). Plus you must change the base asset config file if you change parts.

Ben (who really is a dinosaur, lol).