Moving along to chips...

So here is a new project I started this week. The model is based on a Greenville 7526 cubic foot wood chip hopper. This particular model will pose a bit of a problem since it is darn big, measuring 73'3" between the couplers. The real challenge will be the textures. The particular sim I am working on suggested no larger than 1k textures in their documents. I've seen some people mention that they have used a max of 2k. I've seen others mention that performance takes a serious hit with 2k textures. So if I stick with 1k which I've been equating to 50' square, these cars will require an additional 25', roughly. I generally don't like mirroring sides unless I have to as I like to keep everything as unique as I can. After all, its all about the trains! On the flip side, you will never see both sides at the same time, so that does indeed make it a good candidate for mirroring. Since this car is so large I may wind up doing that. At this point I'm thinking I may have to break it up across two maps. I'll definitely have to research the texture situation a little more.

The car is also pretty high in polycount, coming in at a little under 10k or half of what is allowed for locomotives. Once again I'm going to use the size to justify the extra budget. The dev docs suggest 7k for a freight car. Well, I'm figuring that to be a typical 50' car.  Twenty five more feet would be another 3.5k coming in for a total of 10.5 in order to keep everything close in detail. The panels are currently modeled but I may just leave that part to the normal map depending on how good it turns out. If I do leave them in, I may have them appear at 16m. After all, they are a major spotting feature for this particular car.

I'm actually pretty excited about this particular car as I grew up seeing a LOT of them. Fast forward several years and I wound up working on them. As a side note, it seemed like all of the forest product related cars were the biggest pieces of junk. Old as hell and not in the best of shape. Also, all of the chip hoppers I worked around, that I can remember, utilized the high mounted handbrakes, roughly 15 feet up. Some of the absolute worst cars I remember working with included wood racks and ballast hoppers. There's nothing like fighting with a tight handbrake on a wood rack at 2a.m.. If you really wanted to piss someone off, set a really tight handbrake, then dump the air. This was almost a sure combination to make the handbrake tighter than Dick's hatband and a pain in the a$$ to knock off if there wasn't a release.