July 29th, 2009

Things have been a little squirrelly here at "Cromwell Manor" lately. There are grandkids here for the summer, a persnickety cat, a 16 year old dog who still thinks she's a puppy (when she's not convinced she's human) and the usual thrilling details of home and auto ownership that eat up your weekends. This week we had the added adventure of a baby who is trying to arrive about eight weeks ahead of schedule.

Despite these things, or because of them, I still find time to whittle away at MSTS projects. Of course this does steal time from other past times. The N scale version of the Allegheny Eastern suffers accordingly, as does the bobbed Yamaha and the NC milling machine (don't ask).  I digress...

Anyway, Tim Muir and I have been hacking away at what Tim calls Moritz, Muir and Musick Motors (almost sounds like a law firm). We have been rolling out more versions of the White WH-4 tractor and trailers to match. My favorite is this Bekins rig Tim came up with...

There are a number of others, including these Signal trucks from Tim..

The model A in the right hand shot is also Tim's. The red pickup is a Diamond T from the first series of trucks done last year. As I mentioned before the difference between that little pickup and the Bekins rig is THOUSANDS of polys. That and the fact that the Moritz based textures are a gjillion times better looking

Lately, Tim has been adding more details to his versions, witness this Mobile shorty with spotlight, gog lamps, mirrors, tank steps and horn....

and compare it to the same truck in a "low poly version. The number of normals is only a few hundred higher on the detailed version, because of the new textures it is no longer necessary to add thousands of polys. In fact the previous series has less detail.

Here's some more of Tim's wizardry...Not only do his models look great, his screenshots really show them off...

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Here's a preview of some of the other trucks being built in this new set...

While many of them are moving vans and box trailers, we also threw in some variety. There is a set of horse trailers that includes a generic "aluminum" pair for repainters...

Other aluminum trailer set is this LASME rig and a LASME "twin"...

A "stainless" milk tanker...

Finally, more goodies for the repainters, a "generic" aluminum copy of each of the other trailers in the set....

This current crop is being refined and readied for posting at the Elvas Tower web site.

Tim and I are planning more trucks, as there seems to be no limit to the variations on these things. I have to force myself to turn my attention to other projects. I'm hoping to move forward on the Lincoln sedan and Ford coupe using Dan Palatnik's textures. After that I'll be producing even more trucks and cars for MSTS.

Going forward all the new stuff will be based on Dan and Niko's textures. I'm learning a lot just from editing and adapting their work to TSM models. I hope to learn enough to produce my own textures, but that may a while in coming. In the meantime, there is no shortage of excellent textures from these two gentleman.

Well I think that's about it for now...Thanks for listening.