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

The rollercoaster area was quite difficult to create. If N3V provided a true smoothing tool in addition to the plateau tool it would have been a lot easiet.
I laid the track first, then adjusted its elevations to make the mini hills and valleys after which I hit 'S' and smother the roadbed below the track into conformity. Then I used the plateau tool to run "ribs" out at right angles from the roadbed at the peaks and troughs and started filling in between them. The filling in took forever. I'd get some done then look at it and decide the hills/valleys were too high/low and adjust the track. Then repeat the terrain smoothing process. Again.
Then I painted the ground and chased around it looking at the contours from low elevation. This showed places where it was too rough or too smooth. Given the length of this area that was a LOT of chasing round adjusting elevations.
I think I put at least a week into the ground contours, painting (I ended up using a reddish PBL foliage texture with minus feature size...) and repainting, planting the occasional bush, tree, and lots of sagebrush.
Then I realized the some of the track that was supposed to be straight had gotten worked out of line back when I was adding curves (thank you for that feature N3V, not...) so I laid a roller from one end to the other of the unstraight section a tweaked the track to follow the ruler. Then I needed to go back and move underbrush, cuts, phone poles, fences, and dry grass TurfFX. I kept all the textures in this area PBL to avoid TurfFX artifacts that arise when transitioning from PBL to non-PBL

I got the idea of rollercoaster from the Portland and Western track running from Beaverton to Hillsboro next to Hwy 8 (Tualatin Valley Hwy). There are a series of small hills there, probably a max delta height of 15'. The train crews call it the rollercoaster.

HF

Horace,
I'm loving the tour. It looks wonderful, and very convincing for representing the area. The screen shots really show off your work. Very nice!

Heinrich505

Mountains are one of the hardest things to make convincing ,these are looking very nice, keep up the good work.

Thank y'all for your kind comments. Flattery will get you everywhere.

HF

Encountered a nasty bug in TRS19 that has me dead in the water.

Details at: https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?154081-Weird-bug-in-TRS19

Sigh.... Well my wife is happy, now I can't waste time building my route!

H.Fithers

Custom BC&SJ boxcar reskin uploaded to DLS

Like the header says, I've uploaded the BC&SJ reskin of the 40' box car to the DLS.

At least I think I have uploaded it.

Would someone see if they can download the assets titled

hf_bcsj Custom 40' Boxcar - #1 <kuid:884720:900000>
hf_bcsj Custom 40' Boxcar Lib <kuid:884720:900001>

then place them on a route somewhere?

They should look like this:



Please let me know if it works or if it's bogus.

Thanks,
HF

... at this moment in contentmanager or downloadstation: not yet .. time 23:44 netherlands ...
... beautypics and greatroute btw ...
grtz
daveric

The Upper Roberts Creek that almost was... (sigh)

Well, the problems I was having turned out to be non-fixable (at least by me). So I'm regressing to a saved version from two weeks ago, and will need to redo a LOT of terraforming.

However, I managed to shoot this video. So here it is, the Upper Roberts Creek that should have been...


Hope you like it.

Horace Fithers

ps. When you're working on a route, be sure to make a LOT of .cdb external file copies of it so in the event of a corrupted database you'll something to go back to.

... very realistic view in a marvelous landscape with beautytrees ... splendid pilot with cinematic flight feelings ... like it very much: :clap: 5 stars :clap: ...
grtz
daveric

... and the boxcar is downloadable ... thankz ...

Upper Bear Creek - in memorium

This part of the BCSJ route works OK in driver (with care). Other parts don't. So I need to regress back to where it's stable. The texturing in this area will be no more.
In memorium, RIP.

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Horace (ruffled) Fithers

Brilliant....very impressive work....the route rocks.

Rail-fanning the BC&SJ from Deschutes Jct west to Sherman Butte

This video covers twelve miles of the BC&SJ from Deschutes Jct. west to Sherman Butte. You'll follow a double-head pair of Southern Pacific SP-2 4-10-2 3-cylinder steam locomotives. These locos have a distinctive sound because of the third cylinder (located between the drivers). Loco models by Jointed Rail.


Hope y'all like it.

Horace Fithers

Horace,
Wonderful video. I liked your commentary as well, giving hints and suggestions. The creek bed technique you talked about sounded like a real good work-around for a creek grade.

I enjoyed the tour. It felt like I was really there - your vistas and use of panning really give a sense to your efforts and attention to detail, as well as the remoteness of the particular area. I'm loving your route! I was so bummed to hear about your problems with the route, but I'm glad you were able to bounce back from that crushing situation.

Glad to see that your veteran Grip, Hans Shaeker, was employed during the filming of this video. Important to note that no animals were harmed or sent on beer runs during the filming. Can't be too careful with PETA around. Your film credits are such a hoot!

You have a wonderful route going, and it really captures the look and feel of the area you are modeling. What a great job. :Y:

Heinrich505

Boxcars OK on my Route

horacefithers said:

Like the header says, I've uploaded the BC&SJ reskin of the 40' box car to the DLS.

At least I think I have uploaded it.

Would someone see if they can download the assets titled

hf_bcsj Custom 40' Boxcar - #1 <kuid:884720:900000>
hf_bcsj Custom 40' Boxcar Lib <kuid:884720:900001>

then place them on a route somewhere?

They should look like this:

Please let me know if it works or if it's bogus.

Thanks,
HF

Click to expand...

Hello Horace.

I went camping last week, and just got back a few days ago, it wasn't on the DLS before I left, but today, I checked, found, downloaded, and made a picture for you....they look great....thanks for the Creation, I am old Boxcar fan, I used to play around, climb on them, etc, as kid.....SO they will always have some on the routes I play with.......

Sorry to here about corruption on your Route, I had the same thing on Maria's Pass Route, lost a good years of work, because I didn't make backups.......For now, I put it aside as I work on another Project, but you are absolutely correct on back up files.........Take care and thanks for the wonderful Videos...

By the way, what Video Software do you use for yours?

Thanks guys!

Heinrich:
I'm working on the next video, a tutorial showing how I installed water and did final detailing on the creek that runs up to the Itza mine near Sherman Butte.

Blue:
Glad to see that the boxcar is of use. I thought the best way to protect it was to upload it to the DLS. The reason it took so long is I'd never uploaded anything before and had no clue what I was doing.

In the past I used Vegas Pro 15 to make my videos. However, VP15 started to crash more than ever when I got my new computer and Magix wasn't much help getting it fixed. I used work arounds for a while, but starting the Upper Roberts Creek Over Flight video I've been using Davinci Resolve 16. I'm still facing quite the learning curve but I'm getting better at it. I get the feeling that the DaVinci crowd is hungrier than the Vegas crowd. I'm using the free version of DaVinci (so far) and haven't hit limitations (yet). Upgrading Vegas would be a couple hundred $$$. And DaVinci renders substantially faster, too. It rendered the 22 minute tree top flier video in 1080p in about 8 minutes. I hate to wait.


I'm also planing a video on disaster prevention techniques to help mitigate the damage should another corruption occur.

• SaveAs to different route titles frequently
• Export to a .cdp file after each major change
• Copy the latest .cdp file to the Cloud or somewhere else not subject to the same acts of God that might strike my computer.
• If things seem kinky after a TRS19 crash, power outage (I have UPS), etc. don't continue to add onto the route file that was in use at the time. Go back and work from a previous version.

I figure this should allow me to build a new database when necessary and be able to import the routes .cdp file(s)
Also, it's a good idea to keep a logbook (Word file is fine) inidicating what has been downloaded from 3rd party sites (like Jointed Rail, K&L, TrainzItalia, or RailForge) and the models within.
Keep copies of the .cdp or .zip files that were downloaded locally and on the internet (lest after a crash, discover that the source URL for a file or two no longer exists)

Regards,
H.Fithers

Building a mountain creek with spline-based water

I demonstrate how I use spline-based water to create a mountain creek in the following video.


Hope it's of some use to y'all.

H.F.

Thanks heaps for the tutorials and thanks for having sum interesting back ground music to listen to at the same time they are a joy to watch listen and learn from.
Cheers Mick.

Thank you for another great video

Informative and inspirational and also most enjoyable viewing.

Many thanks, evilcrow

Great video. All sorts of things to help with creating scenery. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for posting.