Dear God, what a month! Aside from a certain lack of interest in most things MSTS (I'm guessing some form of that train related SAD syndrome), I've been in and out of the hospital twice in the past week for dehydration. Seems some form of critter has moved into my gut and has been wreaking havoc. Hopefully it's coming to an end.
They say that even John Allen (of Gorre & Daphetid fame for the younger folks amongst us) had his doldrums too. I guess anybody who has spent twenty years filling his basement with trains gets that way on occasion. For my own part I look around the office at the rows of books, drawings and other paraphernalia and wonder "What was I thinking?". I guess I can imagine John feeling the same way sometimes. I'll bet he thought of taking up golf more than just a few times.
Most of these periods (at least since happening upon MSTS) pass quickly. I'll get re-inspired by something or someone and lean into it again. I think this time it's more about feeling better physically than anything else, but that will work too...
The Quills are being redesigned yet again...Some new techniques developed by Tim Muir and Phil Moberg are being applied and I've redone the drive sections.
The
drivers and their spiders were 3D for a time, but this became much too
complex. It occurred to me that they might be better represented by a good
texture rather than an actual shape. I used the 3-dimensional parts I had
made to produce the basic texture I'll be using.
The idea is to fill in all the little bolts and springs and other contraptions by altering the picture, not the part. It's a pretty obvious idea, I know, but sometimes it takes me a while to stumble upon the obvious. I've been looking at Gaetan Bellangers' exceptional photo realistic textures for years and it has slowly sunk in. Sometimes the right picture reveals a whole lot more than solid details.
I've done this in the past with moderate success, especially on the trucks used on the Babyface series...The actual part is a general shape with journals and other major chunks modeled in 3d, overlayed with a photo of the actual truck. On the Baldwin units it worked pretty well, especially on the NYC units and other locos with light colored trucks. I tried the same trick on the DL109's, but because I had to darken the image I think not so well. I have to learn the trick of coloring black and white photos. I pretty sure that's how Gaetan's been pulling off all the great stuff Rick and he have been releasing. I'm sure that at least some of the paint schemes are colorized grayscale images. Whatever his actual secret is, the end result is about as close as you can get to the real thing in MSTS.
Looking at some of the older models after a space, I get to see what works and what doesn't. On NYC 3200, I still like the overall effect. There are some things I'm going to try and change on future models. The panel lines on 3200 for instance, are done as lines a shade or so darker than the rest of the shell.
While the idea was based on the fact that the real panel lines are the same color as the adjacent areas. It's only the light and shadow that makes them appear to stand out. In reality, however, the effect is too subtle for the simulation and the body lines tend to wash out. So it turns out that the model needs some help in fooling the eye to see things that are not really there.
On the Quills this subtle shading was
not enough to highlight the very visible rivets and ribs on these units. I
went with more
contrasting colors, especially on the early black units. While the NYC unit
shown above may have gotten by with what looks like welded panels, rivets
are a whole 'nother story.
One other technique I've stumbled across wasn't really a technique...I had downloaded Allen Norton's ALCO HH600 hoping to model this early switcher (1930's) as Lehigh Valley #105...I have a photo of the locomotive as it appeared when stationed at Easton to handle switching duties for the "John Wilkes" streamliner. The basic model went pretty well (so far), but some of the construction techniques Allen had used gave me ideas...
It seems that Allen had actually modeled the window frames in 3D. I have attempted something similar around doors on some of the cab units, but it never occurred to me to give the windows some depth. While the Baldwins and DL109's have separate windows, they are little different from their alpha channel counterparts. Adding some "thickness" would make a world of difference in those areas. The frames would not have to be massive, just large enough to indicate the walls have substance...On the detail of CNJ #70 below you can see the effect on the appearance of the doorway.
CNJ #70 also illustrates two other points I've been discussing. Because of the doorway, it is now obvious that the cab window looks "un-natural". The appearance of the cab would be much more realistic if that window frame had some body to it.
The other point is that even though the CNJ unit uses 2048 x 2048 textures, the subtle rivet and panel outline gets lost in the overall color. Once again, this is more realistic as far as paint goes, but it falls flat as a shading trick. A little more contrast would set all that detail off and make it "pop" as they say on TV. The rivets are presumably much too large (and numerous) to be realistic. The size and number would have to be adjusted on any update of this locomotive. According to Lucas Lusser the 2048 x 2048 textures are probably overkill. He believes that 1024 x 1024 images carry more than enough detail without killing performance the way the larger textures can. I'm inclined to agree with him. The machine I'm running at present has quite a bit of horsepower and graphics capability and still stumbles over 2048 x 2048. So in the future I'll be dropping back to smaller textures.
So future work will use slightly smaller textures, painted details whenever possible and 3D tricks to create the illusion of substance. These techniques are being incorporated into the Quills as they are revised yet again.
So despite the winter doldrums, I'm still experimenting and still plugging away at MSTS and model railroading in general. Who knows, maybe I'll start real work on the Johnstown section of the Allegheny Eastern.
That’s about all for now…Thanks for listening.