EverTrainz
Electric Blue
Hi all
in my freetime between exams and studying I've been working on something I hope will find good use on many routes. I've been working on "ballast scatter" meshes, which, as implied, is ballast that is scattered along the ground, away from the main track ballast.
There are four colors of ballast, and seven unique formations (of shape and size) to represent the random factor. Each mesh asset weighs roughly between 1 to 3K polygons, so must be used with caution. The lowest LOD reduces the scatter mesh to a hundred or so triangles.
These can be loaded into the clutter tool and painted all along a yard, with a decent distance between, or they can be concentrated in proximity and painted in a smaller area. Personally I'd recommend judging whether it is worth using these before just painting them on - you do not want to have a massive amount of ballast cluster where it isn't going to be seen a ton. Smaller spacings may find better use along station platform ends, along signal boxes, or on ground between tracks. Larger spacings are better for painting along a rail line in a remote area. A good middle ground can be experimented with to save performance in large yards.
Although the ballast scatter could/should be done through a ground texture I find that ballast finds itself fallen relatively far from the track in a yard, on all sorts of surfaces - to create these groundtextures with a different color of ballast in different shapes and sizes with parallax would be a major pain and handled much easier with a clutter asset.
Hopefully I can do this for all sorts of trackside clutter, such as paper trash litter, growing weeds and small shrubbery, and bigger piles of ballast.
in my freetime between exams and studying I've been working on something I hope will find good use on many routes. I've been working on "ballast scatter" meshes, which, as implied, is ballast that is scattered along the ground, away from the main track ballast.
There are four colors of ballast, and seven unique formations (of shape and size) to represent the random factor. Each mesh asset weighs roughly between 1 to 3K polygons, so must be used with caution. The lowest LOD reduces the scatter mesh to a hundred or so triangles.
These can be loaded into the clutter tool and painted all along a yard, with a decent distance between, or they can be concentrated in proximity and painted in a smaller area. Personally I'd recommend judging whether it is worth using these before just painting them on - you do not want to have a massive amount of ballast cluster where it isn't going to be seen a ton. Smaller spacings may find better use along station platform ends, along signal boxes, or on ground between tracks. Larger spacings are better for painting along a rail line in a remote area. A good middle ground can be experimented with to save performance in large yards.
Although the ballast scatter could/should be done through a ground texture I find that ballast finds itself fallen relatively far from the track in a yard, on all sorts of surfaces - to create these groundtextures with a different color of ballast in different shapes and sizes with parallax would be a major pain and handled much easier with a clutter asset.
Hopefully I can do this for all sorts of trackside clutter, such as paper trash litter, growing weeds and small shrubbery, and bigger piles of ballast.
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