Thames Trent Version 2

Pleased to hear from you and see that TT V3 continues to progress. Spent some time trying to orientate myself as I worked on a housing (city flats) development at Potato Wharf which is probably somewhere on Screenshot 3? It's also near to where the Rochdale Canal enters the Bridgewater Canal.

Once again the pictures of the viaducts make the wait worthwhile. Excellent work Clive.

Great work, Clive!

Just love those custom models.

Those bridges look just like the real thing, except the real ones now look a little worse for wear.

That is truly beautiful work Clive! Glad to see and hear from you.

All the best

Andy

Hi,
Thanks for the comments.
Yes Alec you are correct re the Rochdale canal meeting the Bridgwater canal in screenshot 3. The Rochdale canal will disappear behind the many warehouses that populated the area. The line into central swings away at about that point and won't really be seen.

The viaducts are a reasonable representation of the real thing as it was. I luckily found a model railway forum full of line drawings of a model someone was making. His model of castlefield viaduct was 4.5 metres long!!!!!!
I sadly, have had to simplify a lot of the detailing his drawings showed, simply because of poly counts and getting all the viaducts to load without destroying frame rates. He had no such problems and grabs of his models are superb.
Cheers
Clive

wow what a job and very nice work as usual Clive... sure was lucky they had lots of spare bricks back then very nice and the docks and wharfs and such will a lot of fun to see too.

Quick question for Clive - I was having an enjoyable trundle between Bedford and Northampton yesterday evening (going the long way round to Market Harborough) and was struck by how good looking the lineside foliage is. You couldn't confirm where these were sourced from as they would be quite a useful addition to my asset library.

I was also studying the terrain textures and trying to work out which ones these are, or whether they are custom textures made for the route? My own enterprise in that area hasn't been that successful partly due to my ancient copy of Paint shop Pro not creating a truly seamless selection from a good source so any tips you can share would be welcome.

Hi Vern,
Trackside vegetatation are a mixture of  Refmans models, a set of trees, shrubs etc etc from the Steam4Me site ( MSTS utilities section called 'czech vegetation)', and my own models, usually pre-fixed ch. All of them have free to use when not for profit etc, etc. When I started the route, I also made fencing with shrubs built into the models. A sneaky way to edge the tracks,  as the shrub at one end hides a bit of mis-alignment . Also they are snappable which again helps alignment and speeds up placement.

Terrtex is also from the czech vegetation files although I modified some of the base textures a bit to create transfers. Probably  99% of the route  has transfers that edge the tracks.

Cheers
Clive

Thanks for that Clive. I think I grabbed the Trundra trees and terrtex off Steam4Me when I last reinstalled MSTS and I may take you up on the use of your other items too, as my 3D modelling standards were never very good.

Use of transfers along the track is an interesting concept. I haven't really bought into the idea of Mosaic as acclaimed by our American cousins, so something else to experiment with once I get something up and running in the editor.

Hi Vern
I edited after you had posted .

I am actually playing with the new editor (TSRE 5) at the moment. My RE works pretty much faultlessly so the object placement functions etc aren't of much interest but, TSRE5 has a paint option which i've been experimenting with to try and reduce the number of transfers I use.
The only downside is each painted tile adds a Terrtex file of 777kb. It could bump the route size up to a 'silly' size.

Cheers
Clive

Haven't tried the new RE yet but agree it's looking promising.

Re use of transfers on top of terrain, the only thing I noticed TTv2 in ORTS is quite a bit of flicker under the track (I think the technical term is alpha fighting?), particularly when the train is stationary.

With regard to file sizes yes that could be an issue though hopefully there will be scope to use the same tile pattern more than once.

My other hope for the new RE (and sorry if I'm getting off topic here) would be some sort of mapping overlay as possible in the other sims, as this greatly reduces the time spent doing markers.