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nickboggia

This should also be your Trainz username as well as your forum username. If you are logging in as something else here, your installed and registered versions won't show next to your username.
 
thundrert said:
The Triangle amount doesn't affect it. The engine loads easily.

And that doesn't solve my problem.

How do I make that balloon disappear?

How do i change the color numbers?


Nevermind. The problem's fixed now.
Click to expand...

105 draw calls plus a very high poly count. Yes you can load one of these on some systems but on a low end machine it will cause major problems.

Buy a $30 copy of TANE and register it. Then we can work with you to create models that will run reasonably well.

Cheerio John
 
Well, despite it not being well received, at least now there's a model of the BR GT3 roaming about. So many failures before it, and now it actually exists. And thanks to a change in the smoke volume number, the thing works fine. It's rough, but it works.
 
johnwhelan said:
Buy a $30 copy of TANE and register it. Then we can work with you to create models that will run reasonably well.
Click to expand...

Wow...have we really gotten to the point where we can only help people that have T:ANE and nothing else? Geez...he said he has games registered, they just don't show up. Cut the guy some slack.
 
chris2001trainz2010 said:
Wow...have we really gotten to the point where we can only help people that have T:ANE and nothing else? Geez...he said he has games registered, they just don't show up. Cut the guy some slack.
Click to expand...
Uh? The post was answered and the problem is solved. That's a fair amount of slack, especially when OP never bothered to follow up with the support ticket from a few months back.
 
thundrert said:
What is nvidia?
Click to expand...

Well in some ways that question "stuns" me - how could someone working in graphics technology not know what NVidia is? But then it is probably also a reflection of how far that technology has progressed that we can "get by" without ever knowing the name.

To answer your question. NVidia is the brand name of the company that probably built the graphic video card in your computer. They make the GTX series of video cards. The other major manufactures are AMD and, for lower end machines, Intel.
 
I did not know that. Of course, I'm not exactly Bill Gates.

"Graphics Technology". You mean that building models has a higher-sounding name?
 
chris2001trainz2010 said:
Wow...have we really gotten to the point where we can only help people that have T:ANE and nothing else? Geez...he said he has games registered, they just don't show up. Cut the guy some slack.
Click to expand...

No we have got to the point that if you are serous about creating content then TANE is the best version to use but there again if you're using sketchup for locos you aren't serious about wanting to create quality content. LOD for a start.

Normal mapping perhaps? nVidia have a normal mapping tool by the way. Perhaps you could let him know about nVidia and how it is of interest.

Cheerio John
 
For one thing, i use sketchup because it has a simpler interface. I've tried blender, and it ate me up.

Second, i am quite serious when it comes to making models. My only handicap is that i'm wet behind the ears.

And third,-what does the normal mapping tool do, and where is it?
 
thundrert said:
For one thing, i use sketchup because it has a simpler interface. I've tried blender, and it ate me up.

Second, i am quite serious when it comes to making models. My only handicap is that i'm wet behind the ears.

And third,-what does the normal mapping tool do, and where is it?
Click to expand...

You need about 5% of Blender for trainz and finding which 5% is a problem. Normal mapping is way of adding detail that looks like its raised or lowered but its done on the graphics card using a material that contains two textures.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender do the moving house tutorial. There are other tutorials around some on you-tube but you want Trainz specific ones.

Cheerio John
 
If you are going to use Sketchup, you are not serious about creating Trainz assets, as all Sketchup assets fail the maximum poly count in Trainz, and what few do make it through to the DLS are so high poly that they are worthless

Sketchup = FAIL

Many others have tried Sketchup ... All have failed
 
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cascaderailroad said:
If you are going to use Sketchup, you are not serious about creating Trainz assets, as all Sketchup assets fail the maximum poly count in Trainz, and what few do make it through to the DLS are so high poly that they are worthless

Sketchup = FAIL

Many others have tried Sketchup ... All have failed
Click to expand...

Well, lots of people have scenery objects with sketch up, signs, trees, fighter jets, houses, buildings, etc. Some of em looked pretty good. The late Bob Cass did a series of Sketch-Up models of steam locomotives that were to be used as scenery objects that he never released.
 
ktain.ny said:
Well, lots of people have scenery objects with sketch up, signs, trees, fighter jets, houses, buildings, etc. Some of em looked pretty good. The late Bob Cass did a series of Sketch-Up models of steam locomotives that were to be used as scenery objects that he never released.
Click to expand...

The objects may look nice, but there are inherent problems with the Sketch-up models due to how the program works and how the models are exported. Sketch-up uses a B-spline modeling engine to create objects. With B-splines, you are not defining a square area, for example out of two triangles you are defining the area as if it's made from a sheet of cloth. The sheet of cloth gets translated into way more polygons (triangles) when the model is exported. This is only one problem. The other problems have to do with optimization so they work within the game its self.

These huge, polygon-wise models, for starters have no LOD or level of detail built into them. This can cause major lag due to the amount of polygons that forever have to remain loaded. What does LOD do?

LOD reduces the number of polygons and faces the model uses the farther it is from the camera. Take a building for example. You have a house created in Sketch-up, and the house, along with all the faces and all the textures, is loaded even if you are 5 km from the house. With LOD there are targets set where the number of faces is reduced and the number of textures are reduced. You see these referred to as percentages of LOD. The farther away the model is from the camera, less of the model is created so eventually you have nothing but a smudge of texture representing the object at its farthest distance from the camera. What this does is reduce the load on the video card so that there now less to process. Keeping this in mind, imagine if some of these models are huge buildings or objects with 400K or more polygons. Having one of these might be okay, but add in very complex models such as a steam locomotive and a bunch of highly detailed passenger cars, and lots of them because the building is located near a terminal, and you have awful stutters.

The other problem, due to how the textures are applied, we end up with hundreds of individual textures applied to different faces. The way computers work is they like to put stuff in memory and read from there because the memory works faster. If they can read the information only once, it gets processed at lightning speed because the data only needs to be accessed once instead of a gazillion times. To make this happen, modern programs make use of texture maps. UVW mapping as it's called places all the textures in a single or only a few separate texture files. These texture files are like the old decal sheets we use for real models - you know the ones that have signs, windows, doors, etc., printed on them and we cut them out. In this case, the textures are referenced in the program via coordinates so the program knows where to place the textures.

With Sketch-up models, each and every face, as mentioned above, receives its own texture file. This is additional overhead because each and every file has to be loaded from disk, processed, referenced, then painted on the model. This is slow and cumbersome and adds more to the stutters.

So keeping this all in mind, if you've followed this so far. You've got a brilliant city building you've created or downloaded from Google. It looks really, really nice as a model in Google Earth. Using the model export utility, we now bring this into Trainz. It looks okay and you place it where you like. Now you've got a few of these buildings so you place some more. Everything is okay so far.

You start up Driver and go for a spin. Now we've got 3 fps and a slide show. The buildings are sucking all the performance right out of the program because it needs to translate, load, and display assets with 450K faces textured with 450K texture pieces, and to make matters worse there is no let up when you move the camera away because the model doesn't reduce to a few polygons (or less) with some texture on them.

Don't get me wrong. Sketchup has its uses, but not in Trainz or in any program that is animated. They are fine models, but not useful for the job.
 
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