End of the year wrap up...

The last few  months have been busy to say the least. In addition to being busy at work on various assets for R8, my wife and I also welcomed a new baby girl into our family.

Anyway, I wanted to share a few of the assets I have worked on. All of them have been released within the last two game updates.

Happy New Years!

More DODX

Made a little progress on the diffuse map for the DODX flat this morning. This series of cars also includes retractable pedestals for containers, that will be probably be included with the release.

And finally a quick mockup for the container set up. From what I can tell this series can carry either four 20' or two 40' containers. All of the reference images I have found only show 20' containers which I am guessing is a standard used by the DoD.

Still At It

So its been a while since I've been able to post anything on here. I made myself a promise, in the beginning, that I would try to keep this blog updated regularly but unfortunately that's not the case.

Things have actually been pretty busy, between work and classes starting back. Anyway, as far as projects, I have been working on a few assets for the Run8 team. With that being said, unfortunately all my personal projects have taken a backseat to contract projects. The following screenies are of a few of the assets I have done.

Breaking out the Tarps

Here's another quick Stryker update. At this point I've finished up sculpting the tarps in Zbrush, decimated them and re-imported into Maya. In the first screenshot we have both high res, decimated tarps in green. At their current resolution they come in at 65k and 150k.

And now we have the flat tarp baked down to a low res 88 tris version, now in grey.

So with the tarps applied I'm really hoping that they will actually reduce the overall polycount of the vehicle, especially in the vicinity of the gun mount which will in-turn eliminate the need to model the optics, sights, smoke grenade launchers, etc.

Loads of Details

Here's the first round of details for the Stryker loads I have been working on which mostly consists of all the button objects that cover the vehicle. I'm not quite sure what they are or do but there are a ton of them. Anyway, they will be baked down into the normal map itself. Minus those, the model is sitting at around 3400 tris. I was orginally hoping for 3k total when finished but it looks like I may wind up going over a tad. Once I get everything finished up I can have a better idea of what needs to be pared back. So far its looking like a lot though since the gun mount is nowhere near finished.

The Birth of a Baby....Boat

So here she is, exactly where I left off sometime last year I guess. Now that I have a much better understanding of Railworks and the requirements for getting a piece of rolling stock in game, I definitely think its time to get this one finished up.

Areas that need revisiting include:
Blomberg B trucks
UV Packing and materials
A few minor geometry tweaks

Moving forward...

Tonight I wanted to talk about a few of my projects and where things are headed. With the insulated boxcars in testing and the chip hoppers soon to be released, I have now changed my focus to two, new, major projects. The first project is more of a shift to contemporary railroading and consists of recreating 89' DODX flat cars with various military loads.

Military trains have been a big part of railroads throughout history and two of the biggest events that happened during my time with the railroad involved our entry into two different wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. Traffic boomed for the crew change point I worked out of and leading up to and during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, we were tasked with quickly moving a whole division along our route. I wont go into specifics of who or where we moved things since I'm not necessarily keen on having the FBI show up at my house but I will say that we shuttled multiple loaded and empty trains a day and due to this our pool of crews stayed depleted for several weeks. The number of trains we moved daily was absolutely insane, in addition to all of our regular traffic.

Anyway I've posted a few screenshots of the models. So far I have two different loads in the works but I've only posted the first for tonight. This load will consist of three Stryker IAVs configured for transport. This basically means the vehicles are stripped down of anything that can be lifted off of them, most importantly any kind of weapon. Also different portions of the vehicles will be covered with tarps. So far the geometry for the flat car itself is mostly done though the loads still require a lot of work. To say this project is a challenge would be an understatement since I am wanting to provide the highest quality loads I can. There has to be a big effort to balance the poly count and the detail but lot of the detail work will be left to the diffuse and normal maps. These cars will also be much higher in polycount than anything else I have done up to this point, roughly doubled. I am hoping to bring these in somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 depending on the details.

The first pic includes the unloaded flatcar. Which will be provided in a set of both loaded and unloaded cars and also a Stryker scenery object to place at your local base or port, if needed. This is an early version of the unloaded car and still needs to have the camber added to the body.

 Tires are a really big part of these vehicles so I've put in a lot of effort to make them pop. So far I'm really pleased with the results which consisted of making a high res model and baking textures and normal maps down to a low poly version.

 Chains are also a big deal with any military load so I've been experimenting with that heavy duty and busy look that the loads have when chained to the car. If I remember correctly, I still need to add two additional pairs of chains.

So at this point this will be a long running project in which you will see a car released one at a time. I wont ever give an estimated release date, all I can say is stay tuned!!!

The second project I will be working on will involve finishing up the U18B I started way back when.

A large part of this model is done, including most all of the geo, UV work and even textures. After sitting on it for a while, I have noticed several areas that I want to revisit and improve. You know, one of those deals where I went back and asked myself, "what was I thinking when I did that." One major area I want to work on are the trucks which, once again, will involve making a high res version and baking down to low. Its a really time consuming process since you are doubling your work but I think in certain areas its well worth the effort.

A little FGE progress

Quick screenshot of the FGE insulated boxes in game, tacked on to the head end of an old school Frisco/Coast Line run thru.

FGE 50' Plate B RBL

Finished up a few things on the textures and added a few details to the geometry. The biggest changed involved rebuilding the 100 ton trucks to the correct 70 ton version with 33" wheel sets.

I think I have all the loose ends taken care of in Maya so now its just a matter of importing to Max, setting up the hierarchy and shaders. It would be an understatement to say I'm pretty stoked about getting these in game since I have a lot of fond memories of these cars passing through town on various Coast Line freight trains.

More on the way...

Today I thought I would post a few screenshots of another project I have been working on in addition to the all the other pans I have in the fire. This one is actually nearing completion and should be released soon since I only have a few things to add to the texture.

Diffuse, Normal and AO rendered in Mental Ray

This particular car is a representation of the early FGE built, plate B, 50' RBLs. The plate B cars, from what I understand, were not quite as common as the later plate C cars (think Solid Gold). I do intend on releasing a version of the plate C cars later.

Normal Map

Chip Hopper Pack

Finally finished up all of the repaints for the wood chip hopper pack that I will be releasing. Here is the grand line up of all the schemes included. Note the various road number combinations. All cars include dynamic numbering.

7000 cu.ft.. Fictional JRDX reporting marks. Numbers grouped in 2s

7000 cu.ft.. Fictional JRDX reportin marks. Numbers grouped in 3s.

7000 cu.ft.. Fictional JRDX reporting marks. Numbers grouped in 2s.

7526 cu.ft.. Fictional JRDX reporting marks. Billboard style numbers.

7526 cu.ft.. Fictional JRDX reporting marks. Numbers grouped in 3s.

 Additional repaints available.

Working With the Enemy

Today I wanted to share a little bit about one of the more interesting jobs I worked with the railroad. During the later portion of my time with them I was desperate to find some kind of reasonably sane schedule. I was tired of being on the road and tired of being tired all the time. Right after January 1st, I made a seniority move to the brakeman position on the yard job at a large paper mill located at Coosa Pines, Alabama.

The interesting thing about this job was the fact that it was shared between two competing railroads, CSX and NS. Now it gets a little more complicated than that. Coosa Pines is located on the outskirts of Childersburg, Alabama and Childersburg is located on the junction between the Southern (Anniston, Al to Calera, Al) and Central of Georgia (Columbus, Ga to Leeds, Al). A branch extended south, from the Seaboard Coastline (Manchester to Birmingham), to the plant as well. With all that being said, the yard job was actually a joint venture between three different railroads. The yard job consisted of three different crews that manned Y101. They included a day shift, a night shift and a relief job that covered the off days for the day and night shifts. Day and night shifts received 2 days off a week and the relief job had three. So my seniority took me to the night shift, manned by the former SCL crew out of Manchester, Ga. The day shift during that three month period was covered by the former Southern crew and finally the former Central of Georgia crew filled the relief job.

Power for the yard job was also shared between the NS and CSX which was quite interesting. The NS always provided a GP38-2 and CSX always provided a B30-7. On one occasion I remember CSX sending us a B36-7 which we quickly bad ordered and had sent back to Boyles due to the fact that B36s were horrible at low speed switching. Our particular engineer also preferred to run from the NS unit due to the EMD's throttle response and the fact that it was just a cleaner cab.

Now for years this paper mill was your typical paper plant in that it received loads of pulpwood and wood chips in droves. By the time I worked the job, the plant had been switched over to a completely recycled plant, only receiving a few truckloads of wood chips here and there. Even though it was recycled paper the typical stench still remained.

This will conclude the first part of the series. In the next few articles I will run through the general track layout  and a typical night switching the plant for those that might be interested i n recreating a paper mill job.

More new projects...

This morning I thought I would post a quick screenshot of one of the other projects that is well underway. There will be a LOT more work involved with this one...

52' Mill Gondolas

With a few of my projects completed and uploaded to Railworks America, I thought I would post a wip of one of the other current projects I'm working on.

Reading the forums the other day, I noticed an old discussion about gondolas only looking realistic if they are bruised and beaten. Gondolas are usually some of the rattiest cars in service and definitely represent the epitome of being weathered and beaten. With that in mind, I started thinking about how I could best simulate the dents and dings that are soo common with them.

After coming up with an initial game plan, I started on the low res version of the car.

Now for the dents and dings. I think, at least I hope, the best route to take would be utilizing Pixilogic Zbrush for that part. This process basically consists of creating a high res version of the car, importing it into Zbrush, then sculpting all the damage into the body. I'll be honest and say I very seldom use Zbrush for hard surface work, which is really a shame because it is such a wonderful program. So after doing a little preliminary sculpting on the car, and decimating the mesh to a more manageable resolution (roughly 8 million to 200k), I re-imported the mesh into Maya. With this part done, the high res details will be baked to the low res model. I'm hoping that all the dents will translate well in the normal map. The following image includes the high res version. I'm not completely happy with the bulges and feel like I need to tone the interior ones down, as well as a few of the exterior bulges. Its a start though, and hopefully this will work out the way I picture it.

Hauling Pulpwood

I hope everyone had a great 4th! After taking a bit of a vacation, I finally got around to working on the Magor wood racks. I've made a good bit of progress the past few days with only a few tweaks left for the brake settings.

From Woodchips to Pulpwood

The chip hoppers I've been working on are finally out for a round of testing and while I wait for some feedback and a few final tweaks, I've taken on my next project.

This project involves recreating a version of a Magor wood rack which was, at one time, so very common in the Southeast. With this particular car, I'm taking a little different approach in an effort to recreate the absolute most accurate physics. So with that in mind, the car will be released in two versions, loaded and unloaded. Doing so will allow me to completely customize the physics to that particular car and its current state. The biggest benefit will be accurate braking. The cars are currently in a very early rolling stage, in game, and still require a lot of tweaks an adjustments.

Anyway I've included a few screenshots of the work up to this point.