[Hamza97]

disc, on 20 November 2015 - 01:37 PM, said:

BTW <100000 triangle should be enough for any locomotive. An optimized loco with 4 very detailed pantographs, and a lot of cylindrical insulators, and cables on the top, with very detailed bogies, and body can fit in 70k triangles.

That's good piece of advice/poly recommendation as I am also modelling an electric loco...... :)

[nicober]

disc, on 20 November 2015 - 01:37 PM, said:

Also fewer bigger textures are better than more smaller textures. I'm sure that OR can handle 4096x4096 textures too.

Yes, I used a 4096x4096 texture on a touristic wagon for the Quebec-Charlevoix route to illustrate perfecly some delicate drawings. And this train looks and runs very good in OR.

Regards

[Casey Jones ICRR]

The one draw back is for buildings..... Since OR does not have a route editor, you're limited to what the MSTS RE can handle polygon wise. (Unless I'm wrong on that.) From Personal experience, I've had to keep my buildings under 10,000 polys otherwise it crashed the MSTS RE. One exception was a building that was almost 12,000 polys. I still to this day don't know what I did for that building to load in the RE!!!

[captain_bazza]

This is very useful information for new and all (me too ;--) modelers, so I've pinned it for easy access.

Cheers Bazza.

[captain_bazza]

MSTS is a very strange beast. (Background info:) It was developed in the late 90s and early 2000s, being release late '01. The developers, Kuju, did some strange workarounds to get such a complex (for the era) sim to run on PCs of that era. IE, early Pentiums, W95/98 OS, when sys ram was severely limited and video cards were level entry at 4 to 16 MB. No GPUs then and even so, MSTS didn't use any processing power on later generation cards. I stepped up, rapidly, from 16 MB to 32 MB video cards and MSTS, frankly, looked awful. The money trail led, at enormous cost, eventually to 64 MB then, best of all - to a 128 MB video card, which made MSTS really 'pop' out visually.

One early gen trick, being well before MSTS Bin, was to attempt to optimize scenery models in order to populate the burgeoning number of new routes from both amateur and professional route builders. Everything depended on NOT crashing the tricky, wily, spiteful, MSTS Route Editor, a nasty beast even on a good day. One trick was to try and fool the editor by cutting back on the number (there were limits imposed that you never found out about until the RE trashed your latest build) of models in the scenery, per tile, etc. This trick was to build a 'batch' model, where several objects were built as a single model. The best example would be - say - group housing. You could build individual houses as separate models, but MSTS treated them as a SINGLE unit, thus two individual houses were counted as TWO models. However, if you built two houses as part of a single model, the sim was happy to treat it as a SINGLE unit.

It worked! But MSTS, being willful, could still bite when least expected, but you NEVER advanced the hobby unless you took risks. The rest is history, but the principle is the same. You still need to take risks to advance the Hobby.

Cheers Bazza.

Minor edit.

[ErickC]

It should be noted that the big problem isn't so much the number of triangles as it is the number of texture vertices. It might sound like there is a determinate number of vertices for a given mesh, but this is actually not true. UV coordinates add extra texture vertices. It is important, then, to ensure a minimum of UV coordinates with efficient mapping. This means welding all coincident vertices and planning layouts in a way that creates the fewest number of divisions across the part. Key here is also minimizing the number of materials. Remember that it is more efficient to have a single large bitmap than several smaller bitmaps of comparable pixel area. This not only reduces drawcalls, but also can reduce the number of UV coordinates if a large part now uses a single bitmap to cover its span versus several.

Also note that hard edges (smooth group boundaries) also raise the vertex count because triangles can only share a vertex if they also share a normal vector. Create hard edges only where absolutely necessary. Many smaller parts in dark areas can be in a single smooth group without the difference ever being visible.

[sergio]

I created a train model for open rails made on Blender, the problem start when i imported the train model to shape viewer 2.2, the wheels were not aligned correcly.
Where i can find any official measures (in meters or cm) or rail reference (in .obj or .3ds etc.) to perfectly align the wheels on the rail.
Thanks

[longiron]

What's your issue? gauge, height, both? Are you using Wayne Campbell's excellent Blender to MSTS exporter?

chris

[espee]

The top of Default standard gauge MSTS track is 0.042 metres above zero. So select your entire model and raise it 0.042 metres, then select your MAIN and reset its Origin back to 0, 0, 0

Should you be using a different type of track - let us know, it may be the same or different.

eg, 3 foot narrow gauge has a railtop height of zero...

I think UKFS is different again as is Via Metrica track...

I can attach a .blend file of TrainSimModeler's Rail Reference if it will help ?

[sergio]

espee, on 18 November 2017 - 05:24 AM, said:

The top of Default standard gauge MSTS track is 0.042 metres above zero. So select your entire model and raise it 0.042 metres, then select your MAIN and reset its Origin back to 0, 0, 0

Should you be using a different type of track - let us know, it may be the same or different.

eg, 3 foot narrow gauge has a railtop height of zero...

I think UKFS is different again as is Via Metrica track...

I can attach a .blend file of TrainSimModeler's Rail Reference if it will help ?

I would appreciate your help, if you attach the .blend mutch better for me, thank's.