Cast irony
- Thread starter Dinorius_Redundicus
- Start date
Very nice Deane. Perhaps you could add some rust and maybe turn up the intensity of the bump map although it is evident that it is a cast object.
Was the image taken in Trainz or within Max? If it was Trainz, was it in T:ANE? I'm still having problems getting a tbumpenv material working to my satisfaction.
Was the image taken in Trainz or within Max? If it was Trainz, was it in T:ANE? I'm still having problems getting a tbumpenv material working to my satisfaction.
knifeswitch1
Jointed Rail
Same here as with Bill above. Beautiful work Deane, thanks in advance!
Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
Thanks all. To answer the various questions;
The screenshot was indeed from T:ANE. Just a preview of what I'm working on. When I finally release these, they will have a T:ANE trainz-build number.
@ Paul - Regarding the intensity of the bumps, they are a bit more apparent in game, but they are deliberately not strong. I studied a huge number of photos of these things over the last 2 years and can say that painted cast iron is quite a tricky surface. It has pits and bumps from the casting sand for sure, but the paint smooths them out to a degree that is quite subtle. Also there are areas such as the outer surfaces of flanges, that are machined smooth then coated with paint. They don't have bumps but still have that dull sheen from the paint. Some globe valves have fully shiny flanges but I'm not doing any of those, at least not yet.
I wish you luck with m.tbumpenv (and m.tbumpgloss). I did a lot of experiments with both these bump/reflective material types but could never get a satisfactory result with either of them on this model. The reflection or gloss never looked like the diffuse specular shine I was after. I found m.tbumpenv had a major problem with its environment map projecting forest/grass along the side of the valve, while the sky was always at the bottom, facing the ground. I should have taken a screenshot, it was awful. Changing the texture mapping made no difference. m.tbumpgloss always put the shiny bit on the side facing away from the sun - the opposite of what was needed. Why they behave so badly is probably a topic for discussion somewhere else, but I gave up on both of those materials and went back to m.tbumptex. It's far from perfect (from some sun angles I think it looks more like grey plastic than metal) but the results with that material were the closest to what I was chasing.
@ Bill - I still have a lot of work to do, so I hope you can get on with other aspects of your route while I finish these off. Lay all your pipes now and add the valves later. To give you an idea of the tasks I need to do before release;
- LOD's on the manual and actuated valve types.
- scale all meshes to suit maybe 6 different pipe diameters. Valves with hand-wheels will only be for pipes from 0.05 to about 0.3 metre diameter (limited by what a person could reasonably operate), while the mechanically-actuated type will cover all diameters from 0.05 - 2.0 metre. Valves on 2m pipes are absolutely gigantic - I seriously wonder if scaling to that size would be realistic. Note that many pipes available on the DLS have been named according to their radius rather than diameter. That's rather stupid in my opinion, but be aware of it when choosing a valve to match. I will be naming by pipe diameter in metric units.
- provide a parallel series of valves that can tilt vertically. The ones shown in the screenshot are only good for horizontal pipes. They rotate horizontally and roll around the horizontal pipe axis, but do not tilt in the vertical plane. I wish N3V would provide something useful like 3-axis rotation in Kind scenery. It would save us all from needing double the number of models.
- repeat all the above in different colours. I plan on doing rusty, red, blue, yellow and green. Maybe others, like stained colours, will come later if I have the energy.
If I add up all the variations, it's quite a daunting number of assets. I'll probably release them by colour series as they are completed, starting with grey aluminium-painted ones.
~ Deane
*insert smiley of man drowning*
.
The screenshot was indeed from T:ANE. Just a preview of what I'm working on. When I finally release these, they will have a T:ANE trainz-build number.
@ Paul - Regarding the intensity of the bumps, they are a bit more apparent in game, but they are deliberately not strong. I studied a huge number of photos of these things over the last 2 years and can say that painted cast iron is quite a tricky surface. It has pits and bumps from the casting sand for sure, but the paint smooths them out to a degree that is quite subtle. Also there are areas such as the outer surfaces of flanges, that are machined smooth then coated with paint. They don't have bumps but still have that dull sheen from the paint. Some globe valves have fully shiny flanges but I'm not doing any of those, at least not yet.
I wish you luck with m.tbumpenv (and m.tbumpgloss). I did a lot of experiments with both these bump/reflective material types but could never get a satisfactory result with either of them on this model. The reflection or gloss never looked like the diffuse specular shine I was after. I found m.tbumpenv had a major problem with its environment map projecting forest/grass along the side of the valve, while the sky was always at the bottom, facing the ground. I should have taken a screenshot, it was awful. Changing the texture mapping made no difference. m.tbumpgloss always put the shiny bit on the side facing away from the sun - the opposite of what was needed. Why they behave so badly is probably a topic for discussion somewhere else, but I gave up on both of those materials and went back to m.tbumptex. It's far from perfect (from some sun angles I think it looks more like grey plastic than metal) but the results with that material were the closest to what I was chasing.
@ Bill - I still have a lot of work to do, so I hope you can get on with other aspects of your route while I finish these off. Lay all your pipes now and add the valves later. To give you an idea of the tasks I need to do before release;
- LOD's on the manual and actuated valve types.
- scale all meshes to suit maybe 6 different pipe diameters. Valves with hand-wheels will only be for pipes from 0.05 to about 0.3 metre diameter (limited by what a person could reasonably operate), while the mechanically-actuated type will cover all diameters from 0.05 - 2.0 metre. Valves on 2m pipes are absolutely gigantic - I seriously wonder if scaling to that size would be realistic. Note that many pipes available on the DLS have been named according to their radius rather than diameter. That's rather stupid in my opinion, but be aware of it when choosing a valve to match. I will be naming by pipe diameter in metric units.
- provide a parallel series of valves that can tilt vertically. The ones shown in the screenshot are only good for horizontal pipes. They rotate horizontally and roll around the horizontal pipe axis, but do not tilt in the vertical plane. I wish N3V would provide something useful like 3-axis rotation in Kind scenery. It would save us all from needing double the number of models.
- repeat all the above in different colours. I plan on doing rusty, red, blue, yellow and green. Maybe others, like stained colours, will come later if I have the energy.
If I add up all the variations, it's quite a daunting number of assets. I'll probably release them by colour series as they are completed, starting with grey aluminium-painted ones.
~ Deane
*insert smiley of man drowning*
.
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Tony_Hilliam
Trainz Plus - enjoy Trainz from just 20 cents a da
Is your card DX11? (I would assume so as anything middling or above would be DX11). If so, it will run TANE - what makes you think it wouldn't?
Deane - there are some updates to m.reflect to match TS12 visuals (coming soon)
Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
Care to expand a little on that Tony? If it has been discussed in the TrainzDev forum I missed it, but I do have access.
You know what would be a real advance for us content creators? A single material type that could do any and all the effects that are currently distributed piecemeal amongst several frustratingly deficient material types. What a relief it would be to have a "m.tbumpuniversal" where every type of control works;
- speculars (both material-wide and per pixel)
- glossiness (both material-wide and per pixel)
- self illumination (both material-wide and per pixel)
- opacity (both material-wide and per pixel)
- bumps (per pixel)
- reflection (per pixel and with user-controlled maps and mapping, ie. not always spherical mapping)
..and probably a few more that I can't think of.
I don't think it, I know it. A friend of mine bought T:ANE, not realizing it was for a 64-bit machine only. He brought it to my house to see how it looked as I do have one. It installed but then we ran in problems making it run. After making every setting the lowest it could be, I was finally able to coax out a slideshow - about 1 frame per second. My system, which run TYS2012 adequately, but not spectacularly, manages frame rate in the teens. My system consists of an Nvidia 8400GS with 1GB of RAM. Running TS2012, the GPU temp hangs around 46-50C, I noted temps as high as 60C during the abortive T:ANE running. I have a 3-CPU motherboard and 8Gb of RAM aboard. It will not run properly. I removed it from my system and now my friend is saving up for a super-system to run the game. I am singularly unimpressed and, being 73, I realy don't want to buy another computer that may outlast me.
Sorry, Deane. Didn't mean to butt in here.
Bill
Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
The first series of these globe valves is now available on the DLS.
Kuids are 68213:27104 to :27119, plus a big mesh library, kuid:68213:27103.
This first series all have a grey bumpy specular texture meant to represent clean, aluminium-painted cast iron. It's not perfect, but was the best I could do. There are 16 models covering several variations;
- Manual type (with a hand-wheel) for pipes of 0.1m, 0.25m, 0.5m diameter. Restricted because humans would struggle to turn anything bigger (even 0.5m is huge).
- Actuator type (with hydraulic or pneumatic cylinder attached) for pipes 0.1m, 0.25m, 0.5m, 1.0m, 2.0m diameter.
- H (horizontal) and V (vertical) versions for each model. That refers to the plane of rotation available to the model to allow for placement on pipes laid horizontally or pipes that have gradients (-90 to +90 degrees).
Series in other textures to follow.
Kuids are 68213:27104 to :27119, plus a big mesh library, kuid:68213:27103.
This first series all have a grey bumpy specular texture meant to represent clean, aluminium-painted cast iron. It's not perfect, but was the best I could do. There are 16 models covering several variations;
- Manual type (with a hand-wheel) for pipes of 0.1m, 0.25m, 0.5m diameter. Restricted because humans would struggle to turn anything bigger (even 0.5m is huge).
- Actuator type (with hydraulic or pneumatic cylinder attached) for pipes 0.1m, 0.25m, 0.5m, 1.0m, 2.0m diameter.
- H (horizontal) and V (vertical) versions for each model. That refers to the plane of rotation available to the model to allow for placement on pipes laid horizontally or pipes that have gradients (-90 to +90 degrees).
Series in other textures to follow.
Hello Deane,
very impressive assets - presented within nice looking screen shots
In my point of view the bump-effect and its appearance in general does not need any changes. I can understand that people are asking for some weathered looking items as well. Therefore I do not repeat this question - I just type "season change?"
I really need to install the latest T:ANE-SP1 to check out all your new stuff.
It looks like the assets contains a lot of polygons and as far as I know the latest T:ANE version requires to keep the polygon numbers down below 500 at the lowest LOD-mesh (which makes sense so far). Unfortunately I did not know that when I started to create my new City-Building-Series and so I will need to redo about 400 houses again. May I ask how many LOD-steps did you create for that valves?
Thank you for this superb looking assets.
Never loose your fun doing content creation
Yours TUME
very impressive assets - presented within nice looking screen shots
In my point of view the bump-effect and its appearance in general does not need any changes. I can understand that people are asking for some weathered looking items as well. Therefore I do not repeat this question - I just type "season change?"
I really need to install the latest T:ANE-SP1 to check out all your new stuff.
It looks like the assets contains a lot of polygons and as far as I know the latest T:ANE version requires to keep the polygon numbers down below 500 at the lowest LOD-mesh (which makes sense so far). Unfortunately I did not know that when I started to create my new City-Building-Series and so I will need to redo about 400 houses again. May I ask how many LOD-steps did you create for that valves?
Thank you for this superb looking assets.
Never loose your fun doing content creation
Yours TUME
Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
Uwe
I'm not doing any season change for 2 reasons - 1) the valves can be rotated in many ways, so there is no unique "up" direction for the snow to fall on. I feel it would look unrealistic to have snow on all sides. 2) with all the variations of size, orientation, control mechanism, colour (plus LOD's) I need to make so many meshes. Adding snow/summer versions for each one would double everything again. It's just too much for me.
Regarding poly-count and LOD, the description on each valve asset does list the exact details, but basically the poly count starts at about 6000 (lod0) reducing to 12 (lod4). That is 5 levels of detail for each model.
~ Deane
I'm not doing any season change for 2 reasons - 1) the valves can be rotated in many ways, so there is no unique "up" direction for the snow to fall on. I feel it would look unrealistic to have snow on all sides. 2) with all the variations of size, orientation, control mechanism, colour (plus LOD's) I need to make so many meshes. Adding snow/summer versions for each one would double everything again. It's just too much for me.
Regarding poly-count and LOD, the description on each valve asset does list the exact details, but basically the poly count starts at about 6000 (lod0) reducing to 12 (lod4). That is 5 levels of detail for each model.
~ Deane
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Hello Deane,
thanks for your answer.
Yes, I can imagine that SC would require a lot of work. In the other hand many pipes caries hot media and does not become covered by snow anyway
Ok - I did not see the description yet, thats why I asked. Five LOD-steps is quite a lot and I can imagine the hard work -again thank your for it. My heaviest city building now has about 2900 polys and sometimes it is hard to chose the right cut between two LOD-steps in connection with the right distance of changeover to save on polys and to make the disappearance of details not too obvious.
Yours Uwe
thanks for your answer.
Yes, I can imagine that SC would require a lot of work. In the other hand many pipes caries hot media and does not become covered by snow anyway
Ok - I did not see the description yet, thats why I asked. Five LOD-steps is quite a lot and I can imagine the hard work -again thank your for it. My heaviest city building now has about 2900 polys and sometimes it is hard to chose the right cut between two LOD-steps in connection with the right distance of changeover to save on polys and to make the disappearance of details not too obvious.
Yours Uwe
Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
Hello Deane,
thanks for your answer.
Yes, I can imagine that SC would require a lot of work. In the other hand many pipes caries hot media and does not become covered by snow anyway
Yours Uwe
I'm laughing because that is exactly how I rationalised it to myself.