Kettle Valley Railway

Jayturf said:
TUME: I am a huge fan of yours. I use your route in 2010 as a benchmark for quality. I love how you did the tunnels on your route too. You are right that I am having trouble with the portals. My major problem is that most of the tunnels didn't have concrete portals at all and it was just bare rock. I would love it if you could help me out with some portals as it would make my work look a lot better. I just recently converted over to your MILW dusty track as it is more the look of my prototype. I also have been using some of your rock-bitter textures. I have found it quite satisfying to make my own textures from photos to get the perfect look.

If you're willing I could send you some pics of some of the concrete portals on my route. I think the bare rock portals would have to be totally made from scratch. I have just started to learn how to make my own content and tunnel portals are still a ways away!
Click to expand...

Hallo Jayturf,

thank you very much for your compliment about my work!

Well, I guess all the tunnels will have to be made from scratch. For my Milwaukee Road tunnel portals, I created a basic mesh, but I had to change and to adopt it for each location individually – just as required by the slopes around the tunnel portal! In fact, I had to build 18 tunnels for the Milwaukee Road Mainline and 1 for the NP Lookout-Pass-Line. So the whole route now contains 38 tunnel portals. But there have only been three locations, where I could use the same mesh, just changing the texture because of the different tunnel numbers. In all other cases, I had to change the mesh more or les. I don’t expect a different situation at your route and especially the Othello Tunnels should be worked out as realistic as possible, as I think this will become a special part of your route.
It will be a challenge for us, to get tunnels out of my gmax, into your route so that it fits perfectly. But I think it can be done – both, the concrete and the bar rock portals.

I suggest something:

First:
Place your tracks and tunnel-tubes into your terrain, just as needed, to meet the reality as close as possible. You may use my tunnel-tube-objects from the Avery-Drexel route. There is a tunnel-tube-object without catenary, used for the NP-Tunnel at the Lookout-Pass-Line. I am sure, you will find it. Use the dig holes – may the same I used too.

Second:
Arrange the ground texture around the tunnel portals as needed.

Third:
Take screens from the location from different view points. This also should contain a view from above, from the side and the front of the location. But also from several other angles, so I can see the geometry of the terrain and its texture situation. Also make some screens while the ground texture was switched of, so I can see the terrain grid.

Fourth:
Get the terrain tool and measure the height of the grid points around the tunnel portal – lets say of about five or eight grid points from the portal in each direction. Take a screen without ground texture – just terrain grid – and write the heights of the measured grid points into the screen. Also I need the height of the track. So, I can build the location into my TS2010 for the needed adjustments of my portal mesh.

Fifth:
Collect the ground textures you used around the tunnel portal collected into a cdp file. I would need this texture to bring it onto the mesh. Therefore, I will have to change its brightness a bit and also I will have to get a grey filter onto it. This is required, because the same texture would appear in a different way on terrain and scenery objects.

Sixth:
Send me all this information including any real photos you have for each of the tunnels. Then I can start to work out the portal objects.

Per haps we should start with one tunnel, just to see how this kind of collaboration works.

Also I want to come up with the blank rail wood trestle, but unfortunately I did not find the time to do this little work. I hope, I will remember to do so during the next days.
:)

Have a nice week.
Your’s TUME
 
I've been putting a lot of time into scenery lately. I'll try and throw up some pics soon. I am also now putting in the Osoyoos sub so that is taking some time as it was about 20 miles long. Also in the works is the Merrit sub but I'll most likely release that seperately. I also have a CMTM system working so that adds a lot of fun and challenge to the route!

Scenery wise there is about 350 miles of track...and I'm trying to do it as accurately as possible regarding slides, forest placement and other things.

I might consider releasing an unfinished version as I presume that scenery will take a couple years! Maybe TUME has some advice on banging off a large volume of scenery in a short time?
 
spline trees are a bad idea. They really slow things down when you're operating the route. I just copy past the trees and textures. Basically I just need to standardize my textures and trees for each region and just go crazy!
 
twstone said:
Any updates on this wonderful route???
Click to expand...

Thanks to your encouragement I sceniked 20 miles of track between ruth and Chute Lake! Not much to see really though...pretty much the same look as the myra canyon area. This part of the route traversed an almost totally uninhabited part of the province. Really the only variance in scenery was the giant canyons and odd forest fire or clearcut.

I am looking for a good grassland texture set to use for my Midway/ Kettle valley region. Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
I'm back!!:D It's been almost a year now since I started this project. I haven't really done any work on the Kettle Valley since may as work has been very busy. I hope to get a large portion of the route scenicked in the next month.

I have also been playing around a lot with CMTM. It really brings the route to life. It also brings a lot of issues to the route as well. I'm going to need some serious beta testing especially as the route is 300 miles long and can have up to 20 trains on it at a time!

I'll post up some pics in the next few weeks here.
 
ok so I did some work today on the Coquihalla canyon between Lear and Jessica. I also started to hand sculpt the cliffs and pretty much all the areas close to the ROW. I am now afraid that this will never get done as this is really time consuming but totally worth it in the finished product. I just hate the look of the smooth terrain that is so common on most trainz routes.






Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Thanks for looking!
 
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I need some motivation....please haha. I'll be on holidays for a week so won't have many chores to do. Looks like I might get some more done over the holidays.
 
well I didn't get much done in the way of scenery over the holidays but I did get DAP's CMTM2 working so that's cool. Now I can play with the operations side of things to keep me interested.
 
so not much has been done this year. I am now wondering if anyone would want to help or just have the route for some fun. I can share it via dropbox if anywone wants.
 
I'll glady take a copy off your hands, it looks awesome. I actually live in the Okanagan, and I've riden on whats left of the KVR. Such a shame they didn't leave the line intact.

As for helping with the line, I'm not sure at this point.
 
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Yeah...the line is maybe 30% scenicked so that's over 100 miles of sceniked track. There are a million dependancies so I'll have to make sure all of them are on the DS.

The route is very playable. I use the actual employee timetable available at cptracks.ca
The base session has all the portals configured for the timetable and the route ustilizes DAP's CMTM2 system.

I'll let you know when I have it uploaded and ready to share.
 
I'd love to have a copy too. I did a DEM map of the KVR (before TransDEM) but could never really get started. I've always loved the KVR even though I live in Victoria BC and don't get there anymore. I watched with horror the TV coverage of the fire and the damage to homes and the KVR.

Having said all that, I will await whatever you care to share.

cheers,
--michael.
PS My Trainz experience is as a Passenger. I love to look out the window or stand on the floorplate and watch the scenery go by.
PPs I love long routes. I merged Montana Rail Link with UMR2010 ande have a route about 430 kms long with 40 passenger stations.
 
Jayturf said:
spline trees are a bad idea. They really slow things down when you're operating the route. I just copy past the trees and textures. Basically I just need to standardize my textures and trees for each region and just go crazy!
Click to expand...

Hallo Jayturf,

nice screens – as always from your project. I have the same experiences as you in building the forest. Sometimes its really boring to do all this copy and past work and yes, it turns the creator creasy :)
Unfortunately I started building the Avery – Drexel route back in time of TRS2006. So there was no object replacement tool available. Because of several reasons I had to replace the forest two times – by hand!!!! You may imagine what that means ;-)

Because of the performance – I changed over to TS12. Even my Avery – Drexel route performs better over there. Unfortunately its not been included as builtin at TS12, but you can bring it over from TS2010. But if you do so, you will have to get some dependencies out of TS2010 as well to put it into TS12.

Anyway, the main important thing is, that my Milwaukee Road Avery – Drexel as well as my Milwaukee Road Othello – Kittitas project performs much better in TS12. Less jerking and a higher view distance. I used to create a set of ground cover grass and sage brush splines for my Milwaukee Road Othello – Kittitas route, as there is not forest in the Saddle Mountains. This much number of LOD splines counted the performance of the route down in TS2010, but does not in TS12. So may you should think about a change. Also your fantastic route may would better go with speed trees. In addition to this I created a new set of grass texture just to meet the real thing as soon as possible. The 2048x2048 season changeable texture performs very well and looks much more detailed in showing the mix of grass tufts, soil, stones and gravel much better than all other textures I found. Before I decided to go for my own texture set, I searched the builtin content of TS2010 and TS12. There are some good looking textures (invented within TS2009) but unfortunately the texture details appears far too large. It looks a bit strange if a single blade of grass reaches up to the same size as a sleeper of the track going beside.
I guess your route may also needs a lot of ground cover grass and bushes. Unfortunately it will need several months before I will have my content ready for release.

Keep up your great work!!
Your’s TUME

:)
 
Greetings;
In July 2011 Jason (aka jayturf) handed over stewardship of The Kettle Valley Railway route to me: Michael (aka froobie).
The layout history:
Kettle Valley Railway as was in 1943 Started by jayturf and carried on by froobie
Build 2011 NO missing assets 20-June-2017 Build 84204
Build 2010 edit Trout Creek 2015-Feb-08
Moved to TAN:E 500+ missing assets: speedtreez mostly
Build 2010 Near Brodie, Midway 2014-Aug-05
Build 2009 Near Brodie, Midway 2014-Jul-14
Build 2008 Heading to Spearing 2014-jun-30
Build 2007 Nicola Valley 2014-May-30
Build 2006-A01 Autosave recovery Archived 01-May-2014
Build 2006 Tulameen 2014-Apr-28
Build 2005 Osoyoos 2014-Mar-31 Archived 01-Apr-2014
Build 2004 Penticton 2014-Feb-28 Archived 01-Mar-2014
Build 2003 Fraser River 2014-Jan-31 Archived 01-Feb-2014
Build 2002 Ladner Creek 2013-Dec-30 Archived 01-Jan-2014
Now located on Adata 256 Gb SSD
Build 2001 2013-Nov-21, Now Archived.
Build 2000 is/are the upgrade(s) to Speedtreez
1950s-Era NorAm (F) Region,<kuid:154025:100018>

I've included a map showing what's nearly done and what isn't

d5194e221d34cbfa1e3607301b6eb83c.jpg
[/URL][/IMG]

Thanks!
Cheers,
--Michael.
 
The first major problem was a structural repair. Somewhere along the path from Jason to me, a 24 baseboard chunk of the layout - near Chute Lake - had all the elevations in the chunk lost (set to 0)

342b40ff8b41f91b9bd411054a505567.jpg
[/URL][/IMG]
The route is usable, but looks terrible as one drives by.

I deleted the broken baseboards. The fracture did not happen along baseboard boundaries, so after deletion there is a piece of track in mid-air.

9b856cdd285bed7760c025f5dae3fbfa.jpg
[/URL][/IMG]
After some fiddling with TransDEM, I constructed a fill piece which when merged looked like this:
There is a dead tree near the loco which is on the vertex of the join, and the area around the vertex has been pasted over with a cut from the adjoining, original ground.

a79e1a2e30794ef0dd7c7208bac9de5c.jpg
[/URL][/IMG]

Thanks!
Cheers,
--Michael.
 
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