Bear Creek & South Jackson - progress reports - Building a Mountain Railroad (1080p)

HF. Looks like coming up on a year since you signed on and you’ve accomplished a lot of impressive work on your route in a short time. Looking forward to seeing more development to come.
Cheers,
Casey
p.s. Please thank Leif for the tour when he gets out of jail for ignoring air traffic control.
 
I can neither confirm nor deny having any knowledge of Leif Skinner's whereabouts...

But thanks for the kind remarks about the BC&SJ route.

HF
 
Horace,
Wonderful video as always. It's such a treat to see the route in all its present glory. It looks great!

As I understand it, the Clean-up guys, M. Howard, C. Howard, and L. Fine, were complaining about cleaning all the branches and leaves out of the wheel wells and undercarriage of the TWA airliner while TWA officials stood by after arriving to reclaim their aircraft. Leif sure was cutting it close - I thought he was going to land on the beach at one point, haha.

Great nod to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" Movie and their credits. My sister was once bitten by a moose. I gather that all the script writers for the credits were sacked.

Seeing the Constellation was a nice trip back for me. My father used to drive us up to the Philadelphia International Airport on weekends and we'd go up to the observation deck to watch the big TWA prop planes fire up their engines. There was always lots of flames and smoke as they fired up the engines, and, ominously enough, a fire truck standing by as one by one, the engines screamed to life.

The route looks very good! You are doing a great job on it.

Heinrich505
 
Revisiting Oakhill - part 1

Oakhill is a town up high in the mountains east of Bear Creek. It's home to log loading and a gravel quarry, a few stores, a seedy hotel, gas station and some houses. In the summer Oaks Lake attracts tourists from down in the flat-lands.

Since I originally posted about the area, I've made another pass through Oakhill as part of a systematic spruce-up of the route.

Here are some screen captures...

(1) Train 111 entering Oakhill hill westward...

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-01.jpg



(2) Same shot, different angle. Oakhill now sports signals and new PBR ballast.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-02.jpg



(3) Train 202 waiting in the hole for 111 to pass by. I spent a bunch of time re-doing ground textures.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-03.jpg



(4) Downtown (lol) has a number of new (new to Oakhill) buildings. I picked these because 1) they were on the DLS, 2) they're low in polygons, and 3) things don't change very fast in Oakhill so older style buildings are just the thing.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-04.jpg



(5) Looking westward toward the B. Josef quarry in the distance. I really like the new ballast.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-05.jpg



(6) The valley in the background leads to the log loading tracks in a box canyon around the bend to the left. I think I went overboard with the rock textures in along Oakhill's Main St. They're another PBR texture, but the carry a minimal amount of vertical perturbance compared with PBR Stone 1 (seasonal) which you'll be seeing in a while which is major league 3D. The loggers went through this area about 5 years ago and trees are starting to grow again. The hill behind the steam locos is Oak Hill (go figure...)

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-06.jpg



(7) Train 111 passing the Oakhill wye track (the wye's tail track leads to the log loading area) which is obscured by the trains.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-07.jpg



(8) Oaks Lake in the distance beyond the trains and town.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-08.jpg



(9) 111 from the ground level is almost to the west end of town.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-09.jpg



(10) The B. Josef quarry i (We Will Rock You!) in the background. The rocks in the foreground are that very 3D texture I mentioned earlier, PBR Stones 1 (seasonal). Approach Medium mentioned in his Rochester part 1 video that he had to make the magnification of his PBR textures the same to get them to play well together. I'd never figured it out before, but he's pretty much right about that. Especially where textures are next to track, highways, other flat splines, water, or TurfFX using mixed magnification PBR textures (or mixing PBR and non-PBR textures is a really bad idea causing weird rendering side-effects. Doing so can also make cars placed on the terrain appear to not have all four wheels on the ground. I now use PBR textures set to minimum magnification to ensure a match (there are no detents or numbers of the magnification dial in the F2 screen which makes it tough to do otherwise. I do make exceptions. In places where there are no roads, etc. nearby I sometimes crank the magnification with this stones texture to make impressively big stones.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-10.jpg



More coming in part 2...

H.Fithers
 
Revisiting Oakhill - part 2

Continuing from where part 1 left off...


(11) Train 111 crossing the grade crossing at the railroad west end of town.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-11.jpg



(12) And again from the other angle. Upper Bear Creek in the background.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-12.jpg



(13) The spurs in the Oakhill get serviced by the Oakhill Turn (aka The Lumber Jack by crews). On the HO scale BC&SJ the OHT runs out of South Jackson Yard. On the virtual railroad, South Jackson (which doesn't yet exist) will be about 60 miles away on the east side of the summit so the OHT will likely run out of Bear Creek Yard, a measily 30 miles away. Here the Lumber Jack is dragging MT log cards out to the loading area.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-13.jpg



(14) The OHT on the Oakhill Wye. Oak Hill is on the right. I fond another ballast texture to my liking that looks like it belongs on sidings, branch lines (and in yards). I used to use a PBR Mud 2 texture for these purposes, however it was Payware, so I'm trying earnestly to replace it.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-14.jpg



(15) OHT with Oak Hill beyond. Performance on the BC&SJ has been less the exhilarating with frame rates sometimes dipping below 20 fps with an RTX 2080 ti. Speed trees have a LOT of poligons in them, especially the big ones. I've been doing some major tree replacement away from the tracks using tb_xxxx billboard trees. They don't look anywhere near as nice, but they have next to no polygons.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-15.jpg



(16) The OHT again. There's a small farm out here. There's a logging road leading up into the hills/mountains on the right. All the logs that come out of here have to come from somewhere!

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-16.jpg



(17) Almost to the log loading area

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-17.jpg



(18) The log unloading area at the end of the canyon. This area needs more details, but this will have to do for now...

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-18.jpg



(19) Spotting the empties. The loco will cut off and run around the train while the (invisible) gantries stack logs on the empty log cars.

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-19.jpg



(20) Looking down from a mountainside at the end of the canyon we get a good view of the log loading area, a bunch of logging roads and the highway that leads up to the Summit station (taking a non-train-worthy short cut over the mountains).
Oakill (the town is visible over the ridge. I used a log of rocks/stones PBR textures in this area to simulate scree and talus slopes (to break up the monotony of all the PBR Cliffs 3 textures)

bcsjv_191110_oakhill-20.jpg



I guess that's about it for now. Hope you enjoyed the shots.

Cheers,
Horace Fithers

ps. If anyone knows where I can lay hands on high performance but good looking Douglas Firs or some 1950's logging trucks and paraphenalia I'd appreciate a note...
 
Looking fabulous as usual, a truly excellent route to be proud if. The unfortunate fact is, high detail can bring even a humongous GPU almost to its knees, it's a shame , but that's the trade off for making this game look close to reality. I used to use grass splines but too many just killed frame rates, and as I'm still in TANE now it's judicious use of specific grasses near the track and a sprinkling of vegetation , just enough to relieve the emptiness but not enough to make the route unplayable.
Just out of interest,how many gb of vram is on your card ? I have the far less powerful Rex 580 with 8gb, would love to have a gtx with 16gb or 11 gb.
As for 50s US trucks , there ain't many of those around ,logging or otherwise , I've not been able to find any logger kit from the 50s that I can use on the timber ridge .... sad to say , there's a major shortage of large US commercial vehicles of most kinds from about the late 20s to 1960 ....
 
Last edited:
Looking fabulous as usual, a truly excellent route to be proud if. The unfortunate fact is, high detail can bring even a humongous GPU almost to its knees, it's a shame , but that's the trade off for making this game look close to reality. I used to use grass splines but too many just killed frame rates, and as I'm still in TANE now it's judicious use of specific grasses near the track and a sprinkling of vegetation , just enough to relieve the emptiness but not enough to make the route unplayable.
Just out of interest,how many gb of vram is on your card ? I have the far less powerful Rex 580 with 8gb, would love to have a gtx with 16gb or 11 gb.
As for 50s US trucks , there ain't many of those around ,logging or otherwise , I've not been able to find any logger kit from the 50s that I can use on the timber ridge .... sad to say , there's a major shortage of large US commercial vehicles of most kinds from about the late 20s to 1960 ....

Dan,

RTX 2080 ti cards have 11GB of vram and I thought long and hard about it before sending EVGA the $$$ for it!

The city areas tend to have the worst fps performance. It caused me to go through a litancy of houses/trees checking poly counts. The Farm House 1 (2,3, and 4) assets turn out to have many thousands of polygons. So I've started a replacement program to get the city polygons down, too. I found a huge culprit was the 2-arm telegraph poles (sorry, don't remember asset name or kuid) which iirc had over 10K polygons per span!!!! I looked and looked for a lower poly alternative, but the best I could do (that I could stand to look at) was a 1-arm telegraph pole from the same family with half the polygons. When I was looking at Salem yard with the Performance Monitor turned on, quite often those telegraph poles led the pig parade of slow fps-ity.

I sure wish N3V would make measuring the relative performance of assets easier. Ideally, when an asset is added to the DLS I'd like to see the add process measure performance up front and personal and at middle and far distances, then display that in the Content Manager along with LOD levels.

While I'm wishing, it would be nice if Content Manager would let a user sort content by more than one field at a time - for example, sort by build #, then type, then name... It would make looking for stuff a lot easier. If I didn't know better I'd say that N3V spends time thinking of how to make their user interfaces harder to work with...

HF
 
ps. If anyone knows where I can lay hands on high performance but good looking Douglas Firs or some 1950's logging trucks and paraphenalia I'd appreciate a note...

I know that hminky is eventually going to look into upgrading David Drake's stuff and may have already created some stuff that may be suitable.

As for 50's logging trucks etc.

These are on the DLS
<kuid:546049:2107> v1_kamaz_les1
<kuid:546049:2108> v1_kamaz_les2
<kuid:546049:2090> v1_kraz2
<kuid:546049:1098> v1_kr18
<kuid:546049:2127> v1_maz_7_les1 t agach
<kuid2:73394:25434:2> SWE SCANIA LS111 Logging Truck Green Black
<kuid2:73394:25435:2> SWE SCANIA LS111 Logging Truck Green Black Loaded
and may pass for 1950-60 era

and there are these which appear to be 40's era
<kuid:506034:479346> JR old Mack truck black (no trailer)
<kuid:506034:479344> JR old Mack truck black (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:479349> JR old Mack truck black emty (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:479347> JR old Mack truck red (no trailer)
<kuid:506034:479345> JR old Mack truck red (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:756737> JR car trailer logger
<kuid:506034:756738> JR car trailer logger empty

While payware now JR has a history of migrating older scenery assets to freeware over time.

Edit: here is what hminky has uploaded so far, pines on the left, spruce on the right, and the sole fir in the center. (they definitely look better than what you have shown above.)

My-Trainz-Screenshot-Image.jpg

Tane Sp3
More to come as Harold finds time. :D
 
Last edited:
Great looking pics as always.....:cool:

I see the Poly count caught up with you, glad you found the desperadoes.....Who would think a Dumb "the 2-arm telegraph poles" would carry so many Polys in that Asset??????

Applaud your efforts to help with lower Poly Counts.......:D

AS for GPU's

I went thru my issues with HP Integrated GPU, a horrid and debilitating situation, that almost drove me to the TRAINZ looney bin...:'(

...Finally remedied with 1050 GTI NVIDIA, and I know it is not the most powerful in the GPU speedsters, but I have to watch my Heat and Battery health, so this one works well enough with my ROG Laptop setup....:hehe:

I like your 11 Gig, card but it would melt this Laptop into oblivion, so you enjoy it for us.....I am jealous with full respect to you.....:p
 
Great looking pics as always.....:cool:

I see the Poly count caught up with you, glad you found the desperadoes.....Who would think a Dumb "the 2-arm telegraph poles" would carry so many Polys in that Asset??????

Applaud your efforts to help with lower Poly Counts.......:D

AS for GPU's

I went thru my issues with HP Integrated GPU, a horrid and debilitating situation, that almost drove me to the TRAINZ looney bin...:'(

...Finally remedied with 1050 GTI NVIDIA, and I know it is not the most powerful in the GPU speedsters, but I have to watch my Heat and Battery health, so this one works well enough with my ROG Laptop setup....:hehe:

I like your 11 Gig, card but it would melt this Laptop into oblivion, so you enjoy it for us.....I am jealous with full respect to you.....:p


Lol. The 2080 time sucks 225 watts and I'm not tweaking it... I put a 1000W psu in the system...
HF
 
Horace,
Really nice screen shots. I always enjoy catching up with your progress. Things are shaping up very nicely.

Heinrich505
 
Thanks Dan. You wouldn't happen to have kids for those trees?
HF
You need to thank Norm not me, I just tried searching for the thread he's referring to , but nothing came up, ( I'm on my iPad and nothing on the forum ever seems to work well using that ) but the trees are all updates of trees by other people updated by Harold minky using jvc blueprints , there's dozens of them all added within the last two or three weeks, on DLS .
 
I know that hminky is eventually going to look into upgrading David Drake's stuff and may have already created some stuff that may be suitable.

As for 50's logging trucks etc.

These are on the DLS
<kuid:546049:2107> v1_kamaz_les1
<kuid:546049:2108> v1_kamaz_les2
<kuid:546049:2090> v1_kraz2
<kuid:546049:1098> v1_kr18
<kuid:546049:2127> v1_maz_7_les1 t agach
<kuid2:73394:25434:2> SWE SCANIA LS111 Logging Truck Green Black
<kuid2:73394:25435:2> SWE SCANIA LS111 Logging Truck Green Black Loaded
and may pass for 1950-60 era

and there are these which appear to be 40's era
<kuid:506034:479346> JR old Mack truck black (no trailer)
<kuid:506034:479344> JR old Mack truck black (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:479349> JR old Mack truck black emty (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:479347> JR old Mack truck red (no trailer)
<kuid:506034:479345> JR old Mack truck red (w/trailer)
<kuid:506034:756737> JR car trailer logger
<kuid:506034:756738> JR car trailer logger empty

While payware now JR has a history of migrating older scenery assets to freeware over time.

Edit: here is what hminky has uploaded so far, pines on the left, spruce on the right, and the sole fir in the center. (they definitely look better than what you have shown above.)


Tane Sp3
More to come as Harold finds time. :D
Shame the trucks are payware, it's strange how neglected the US truck assets are , given the numbers of UK cars and lorries that are available, it's weird that nobody has ever bothered to produce a larger variety of US bigger trucks form between the wars, pencil42 has some delightful Mack's and other light trucks , but none suitable for logging outfits of the 30s and 40s. I'd love to see somebody tackle a bigger six wheeler flatbed such as the ones seen hauling wool bales in in the late 20s and 30s in Utah . Still , making vehicles is probably as tricky as doing locomotives , a lot of work for a usually stationary object that gives a lot of atmosphere but can't be driven around .
 
Last edited:
Thanks Dan. You wouldn't happen to have kids for those trees?
HF

You need to thank Norm not me, I just tried searching for the thread he's referring to , but nothing came up, ( I'm on my iPad and nothing on the forum ever seems to work well using that ) but the trees are all updates of trees by other people updated by Harold minky using jvc blueprints , there's dozens of them all added within the last two or three weeks, on DLS .


The re-meshes only look good in TANE SP3/4. Jankvis has tried to eliminate the "moldy" look of the assets in TRS2019 but that is a "shader" problem.

The trees will look good in "Shader Quality- Low" but then everything else looks like Trainz 2006.

jankvis_tree2019_10.jpg


Had all but abandoned Trainz because the "speedtrees" always blobbed out at a distance and the billboards looked awful even in TANE.

The distance blobbing is a SpeedTree problem because they blob in TrainSimWorld, but blobbing is the least of that sims problems.

TSW_1.jpg


Slowly moving through the David Drake trees, they look good with the new mesh in TANE.

jankvis_tane_52.jpg


Harold
 
Last edited:
Thanks Dan. You wouldn't happen to have kids for those trees?
HF

These are the trees shown in the pic I posted.

Fir
<kuid:450846:25029> JVC:BLUEPRINT Trunda Fir 1

Pine
<kuid:450846:433> JVC:BP G:Tree 33 Pine 26m
<kuid:450846:31001> JVC:BP DMDrake Pitch Pine2 10m
<kuid:450846:633> JVC:NM G:Tree 33 Pine 26m
<kuid:450846:632> JVC:NM G:Tree 32 Pine 23m
<kuid:450846:631> JVC:NM G:Tree 31 Pine 17m
<kuid:450846:31005> JVC:BP DMDrake Pitch Pine2 30m
<kuid:450846:31004> JVC:BP DMDrake Pitch Pine2 25m
<kuid:450846:31003> JVC:BP DMDrake Pitch Pine2 20m
<kuid:450846:31002> JVC:BP DMDrake Pitch Pine2 15m
<kuid:450846:432> JVC:BP G:Tree 32 Pine 23m
<kuid:450846:431> JVC:BP G:Tree 31 Pine 17m
<kuid:450846:25027> JVC:BLUEPRINT E White Pine 30m

Spruce
<kuid:450846:31027> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 1 15m
<kuid:450846:611> JVC:NM G:Tree 11 Spruce 20m
<kuid:450846:31026> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 1 12m
<kuid:450846:610> JVC:NM G:Tree 10 Spruce 20m
<kuid:450846:31030> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 2 10m
<kuid:450846:31029> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 2 15m
<kuid:450846:31028> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 2 12m
<kuid:450846:31025> JVC:BP DMDrake Spruce 1 10m
<kuid:450846:31008> JVC:BP DMDrake Generic Spruce 2 25m
<kuid:450846:31007> JVC:BP DMDrake Generic Spruce 2 20m
<kuid:450846:31006> JVC:BP DMDrake Generic Spruce 2 10m
<kuid:450846:411> JVC:BP G:Tree 11 Spruce 20m
<kuid:450846:410> JVC:BP G:Tree 10 Spruce 20m

Some notes on hminky's nomenclature BP = Blueprint = Jankvis' original mesh, NM = New Mesh. I have not looked closely at the differences but have been using NM for my replacement experiments. :D

Judging from Harold's post above this list will be changing daily. ;)
 
Last edited:
The problem with the trees seems to be build 100240.

Here is a David M Drake re-mesh to Jankvis' latest mesh in build 98562.


taned2_0003.jpg


There is hope in the latest beta 104261 the trees look great, the other tree is a Forest Summer with the new mesh.

19beta_007.jpg


So aggravating to have the problem be the Trainz version.

Harold
 
Back
Top