Progress on the Uintah RW

normhart said:

Inserting

rotate-yz-range -5,5
rollstep 0.1

into the config.txt may fix that depending on which way Ben did the y axis. Your tank may lean a bit but should still be interactive.

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thanks , I already tried it, but it only tilts sideways , not much use.... and a 5 degree tilt would not look all that great either. its possible that his gmax original models will be donated and will be able to be changed , I note one was changed recently on DLS although i cant remember in what way. i don't think it was a reskin. all the URY rolling stock needs mods to the couplings , I asked him if he would do it but he wasn't keen , I guess it was old work and he wanted to do something new. also, the URY side dump cars will not show loads unless manually loaded from interactive tipples.

I've never understood why N3V could include the rotate-yz but not include rotate-xz, weird.

It is amazing what you can get away with when tilting things. When I was fooling with Rollins Pass NG I ended up tilting a whole town's frontage at a 3% slope. 6 buildings including a water tank, station, etc. I would have suggested trying the tilt at 2.5 and seeing how big a bump it made and fiddling with it till it looked OK. If nothing else you could always stick in some boards to simulate propping up the tank.

I have another possible fix. Using PEV Tools Attachment Maker add two new attachments points for the track and change the config.txt to have the track attach to them. I've never tried that but it might work.

I just took a look at that water tank and it looks to me like it might be possible. You'd need to add two attachment points, a.track1a and a.track1b perhaps at locations that would match the slope and still pass through a.trig4 (eek math!) and then modify the config.txt to attach the track to those vertices.

normhart said:

I've never understood why N3V could include the rotate-yz but not include rotate-xz, weird.

It is amazing what you can get away with when tilting things. When I was fooling with Rollins Pass NG I ended up tilting a whole town's frontage at a 3% slope. 6 buildings including a water tank, station, etc. I would have suggested trying the tilt at 2.5 and seeing how big a bump it made and fiddling with it till it looked OK. If nothing else you could always stick in some boards to simulate propping up the tank.

I have another possible fix. Using PEV Tools Attachment Maker add two new attachments points for the track and change the config.txt to have the track attach to them. I've never tried that but it might work.

I just took a look at that water tank and it looks to me like it might be possible. You'd need to add two attachment points, a.track1a and a.track1b perhaps at locations that would match the slope and still pass through a.trig4 (eek math!) and then modify the config.txt to attach the track to those vertices.

Click to expand...

i'll consider PEV, trouble is I have to go into windows to use it , because i never have much fun in that environment so i never get round to learning how to use it and thus its a mystery to me, and that's a hassle, as i know i could easily spend a day or so fiddling on just the tank., . the tank is just one of about a million things i have to do to get the route complete, so that's probably a task for later ( if and when ) i get the route out to test. thanks for the suggestion, it is appreciated !

Ive done more work on Mcandrews lake



I based this section on a nicely detailed photo from around mid 1920s as well as some film footage

still more grass to add as its nearly summer , late fall tends to turn the whole of this area brown



navigating the first hairpin bend . still some shrubs to add here .


just past the hairpin

pulling towards the second hairpin


number 2 .


this should probably be even tighter.

overview of the section. still more shrubs and trees to add on the left and the upper part, this will need a recent 4gb card at least to run well when completed.

:wave: Evening Dan,

Was looking at your shrubbery and Trees, one of the great looking elements I see here, you have hand planted your items so they look quite natural and not the Paste and Stamp same type of asset or group of assets consistently in Tile after Tile on routes I have seen....

Anywhere you look on the Route, it looks unique with the way your plants, and such are laid out, hats off to you sir.

And what really enhances the route is the way you use your Texture Color relationships, I think I recall in the past your were have some time to get the color blending in the way you wanted for this particular part of the Desert effects your route runs through!

I think you nailed it there too, as the subtle color variations come together perfectly with the Plants. It works for me in the visual appeal department.


This as they call it in the stock market really looks like a TEN BAGGER" keep up the good work, attention to detail continues to show. Stunning Route!!!

I hope your able to get your Asset situation with the loss of Ben Dorsey........Read your comments a while back, hoping you have good luck in that regard.......And my offer to donate some Cash with others here, for Ben's Computer is still on the table........Thinking go fund me would be a good deal if Ben's Family thinks it'll work for them.........

blueodessey said:

:wave: Evening Dan,

Was looking at your shrubbery and Trees, one of the great looking elements I see here, you have hand planted your items so they look quite natural and not the Paste and Stamp same type of asset or group of assets consistently in Tile after Tile on routes I have seen....

Anywhere you look on the Route, it looks unique with the way your plants, and such are laid out, hats off to you sir.

And what really enhances the route is the way you use your Texture Color relationships, I think I recall in the past your were have some time to get the color blending in the way you wanted for this particular part of the Desert effects your route runs through!

I think you nailed it there too, as the subtle color variations come together perfectly with the Plants. It works for me in the visual appeal department.


This as they call it in the stock market really looks like a TEN BAGGER" keep up the good work, attention to detail continues to show. Stunning Route!!!

I hope your able to get your Asset situation with the loss of Ben Dorsey........Read your comments a while back, hoping you have good luck in that regard.......And my offer to donate some Cash with others here, for Ben's Computer is still on the table........Thinking go fund me would be a good deal if Ben's Family thinks it'll work for them.........

Click to expand...

Thanks Blue for your kind words, i am trying to get away from the repetitive patterned look that so many routes have, its hard to avoid, as textures tend to do this. there are at least about 5 different textures all over the route as a base color , I've changed the base color a number of times and it makes a more natural look, but it does take a lot of experimenting and I've spent days on textures and modifying colors in some of the trees etc so they represent changes in nature.

i was trained as an artist and used to do landscapes etc, and one of the things i like most about modelling the rocky mountains they are so changeable , you can go from lush forest to arid areas in just a few hundred yards in some places. we are fortunate to live in a time where someone in Australia can find almost all the data they need to make a pretty accurate version of country the other side of the world.

i dunno whats going to happen over Ben's computers, not heard anything back from the guy who was in touch with his family, lets hope that haven't already been sold. it would be tragic if we lost the original models , but I guess if that's whats going to happen it will happen , i think once he fell ill he just was so sick that thinking about his models wasn't a high priority, it did occur to me to mention it , but i didn't feel it was my place to do so, i now wish i had before he started having chemo, as that just wipes you out and your normal interests just fade away , as you feel so awful :-(

a few shots of train movements at Wendella on the uintah rwy , this was probably one of the busiest spots on the line as it was the hub where wagons were left to be sorted and worked up the pass, watering spot too for dragon rainbow and and watson as none of these 'towns' had a fresh water supply . also there's a few further down the track at Sewall, where theres a passing loop and a few ranches, here we get into cattle and sheep grazing country which is still active today .









Sewall area








all the ground has received a sparse covering of green grass since i took these shots as in summer it greens up a bit , i've based this on videos take by trailbikers , it shows its very dry in fall but greens up in May .

i'm making some new splines which are from photos taken in the evacuation creek area and i'm quite pleased with this one , overall though when one places splines facing in a certain directions its annoying how much the color changes .

Looks really good Dan, especially the Color Combos when you look from a distant point....................... Just curious, was there such a thing as Tumbleweeds, and do they even exist as an Asset?

blueodessey said:

Looks really good Dan, especially the Color Combos when you look from a distant point....................... Just curious, was there such a thing as Tumbleweeds, and do they even exist as an Asset?

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yeah theres one animated one, i think Norm mentioned it in the narrow gauge screenshot thread this week. i don't think they exist in this part of the world, more prevalent in open deserts such as the mohave.
. but they can be a nuisance. this is what i found on wikipedia .

There was a significant outbreak of Panicum effusum in the Australian town of Wangaratta in February 2016 that attracted international attention. The seed heads of the weed, known locally as "hairy panic", had piled several meters deep in some places, forcing residents to spend several hours removing it to regain access to their doors and homes. The local council subsequently indicated it was considering attaching large vacuums to street-sweepers in an attempt to control the outbreak

dangavel said:

yeah theres one animated one, i think Norm mentioned it in the narrow gauge screenshot thread this week. i don't think they exist in this part of the world, more prevalent in open deserts such as the mohave.
. but they can be a nuisance. this is what i found on wikipedia .

There was a significant outbreak of Panicum effusum in the Australian town of Wangaratta in February 2016 that attracted international attention. The seed heads of the weed, known locally as "hairy panic", had piled several meters deep in some places, forcing residents to spend several hours removing it to regain access to their doors and homes. The local council subsequently indicated it was considering attaching large vacuums to street-sweepers in an attempt to control the outbreak

Click to expand...

Thanks Dan.......I'll check it out........Have a great weekend my friend.........

dangavel said:

There was a significant outbreak of Panicum effusum in the Australian town of Wangaratta in February 2016 that attracted international attention. The seed heads of the weed, known locally as "hairy panic", had piled several meters deep in some places, forcing residents to spend several hours removing it to regain access to their doors and homes. The local council subsequently indicated it was considering attaching large vacuums to street-sweepers in an attempt to control the outbreak

Click to expand...

Well that sucks, pun intended.

now i have 50 splines for this part of the route, beginning to experiment with using them , quite pleased so far .blending them into the ground is the hardest part as trainz tends to make straighter lines then i'd like



still a lot more to do on the surrounding hills ...:-(

i'll probably use some other textures on the parts of the cliffs where there's no spline, this is probably the hardest part of the route to model as the canyon is so long and the vistas so large.

so after a few hours working on this section , have this result...

I'm feeling rather chuffed with myself as i've finally managed to get a decent spline for Watson, i color corrected an otherwise unusable photo of the cliff so its a representation of the actual surface of that cliff , shame i do not have more i could use, but it seems to be able to repeat itself and not look too bad.
this is start of the the proposed ( but never built) extension to Bonanza , which had a stiff 3.6 percent standing start climb out of Watson. the wool industry sidings are in the foreground.

a string of empty water cars are en route to white river where they will be filled from water pumped from the river.


looking back at Watson and the sheep pens

this is the only bridge on the route not made by Ben Dorsey


I spotted a gap under the end of the bridge, so that needs fixing , overall theres more work to do here with lots of arid area bushes to plant by the vegetation team. Me ! ....:-(

Damn Dan, as someone who spent quite a bit of time in the deserts of the southwest in my youth I have to say you are doing a very realistic job of it. One or two of your screenies brought back memories (and smiles).

been working on the outskirts of Watson still not 100% happy with the blend of colors and splines, but getting there, this is the section where they intended to extend the railway and never did, so no photos exist, i have to work by using google earth and a few images from the adjacent area. .

leaving Watson


view from the bed of evacuation creek

pulling up the bank , the grades here are comparatively mild. the other side of the canyon is a mean of 4 percent , but this side is mostly about 2 percent max.

view back down Evacuation canyon

been working on the wool industry at Watson among other things, many thanks to John Whelan for his work on adapting Ben Dorseys flat car to carry wool and for making the product load. cheers John !



bags were stacked on an earth bank and planks were placed across to the flatcar, the bags were manhandled into place for transport to grand junction and beyond.

Always very interesting.
Landscape OK.

Horrible bags!

jango said:

Always very interesting.
Landscape OK.

Horrible bags!

Click to expand...

But, much better than no bags!