Bring on the doors

Most of the modelling time since the appearance of the tail lamp renders has been spent experimenting and baking the textures for the 102t bogie tanker. Work commitments at the moment mean there's no access to a pc with RailWorks installed to check the appearance so it felt best not to show any of the progress until the wagon and textures are actually in the simulator.

For a bit of a change tonight we've had a play with the VDA van and have been rendering the high poly doors onto their low poly siblings and adding some colour to check out how they appear. The image above is a quick render of the baked textures for the doors brought back into the modelling programme to see what they look like with a few other parts unhidden to bring the doors into context.

This really is a bit of experimentation with two liveries and associated locations of lettering. Perhaps we could justify it by saying the wagon has been damaged and a couple of doors have been salvaged from a withdrawn example ....

Protecting the rear

It's been a bit quiet of late due to pressures of the day job and the needs of real life. However, there's still been a chance for a bit of modelling in between and the time has been used creating some of the little details that bring things to life.

There's no real surprise that one of these little details is the thing every train should have at the back to prove it's all still there and to protect the train when stopped. One of a Signalman's duties were to ensure that trains passing his 'box carried a tail lamp and as such the section was not obstructed.

The tail lamp is one of the things we felt really should have some extra care lavished on it as it will be appearing in a lot of stock packs over the coming months and would need to be in keeping with the rolling stock. That said there were some lines that had to be drawn to keep the resources sensible, so if things look a bit lumpy don't forget that this is probably the largest you're ever going to see the shape!

It's quite surprising when you consider how important a tail lamp was, the number of simers and modellers that will happily run their trains without a tail lamp, luckily that won't be a problem with our stock.

Would beer help?

Ok, it's a light hearted post this one, and nothing to do with the current releases for Project East Coast. Then again it's been a week where beer could have been handy at times.

Not much to show on the tanker and friends as most the time from the last post seems to have taken up with driving around the North West and various bits of admin. to keep HMRC and friends happy.

Anyway on a more RailWorks related note. While doing all the boring stuff I stumbled on this render of a model that was being tinkered with a while ago. The model is one of the last batch of four-wheel grain hoppers that were originally built with vacuum brakes for BRT in the 1970s. With the demise of vacuum braked trains the wagons from the earlier batches were withdrawn but a number from the final batch were converted to airbrakes and gained the striking Grainflow livery. Although originally used for grain (including trips to breweries), with the decline in this traffic they found use on other traffics including alumina to Fort William.

A grain wagon pack has been at the back of our minds for Project East Coast so these wagons can run with their much larger companions. Naturally it's one of those things for the future, but it will happen.

Shiny tanker

As a final act tonight a quick render of the 102t tank was made after putting on the last of the fiddly texture bits that have taken most of this weeks modelling time.

It's all very plain at the moment with just the main colour areas laid out and ready to start having things dulled down and some of the finer details drawn onto the textures. The render has shown up a few little errors that will need to be addressed but luckily nothing too major. Various other parts that are shown at the moment are there as markers to allow final parts to be lined up.

It's a little disappointing that some the items that have been added don't show up in the render, guess we'll have to take some track side pictures a little later to show what's going on! Fairly obviously the next task is finishing off the bogies alongside adding depth and detail to the body textures and getting ready to bake the shadows.

That bloated feeling.

It's audience participation time!

Having had a quiet week with various things sapping time away from the modelling there's a sparkly ex-works 102t tanker (without bogies) sitting here. As the paint has gone on thoughts have turned to what people want to see in stock packs in terms of dirt and weathering while not bloating their system too far.

Presently thoughts have been along the lines of ex-works, lightly weathered and filthy versions, which obviously creates three versions of each model. As we intend to include both loaded and empty versions (with physics to match) that then increases the number of individual items to scroll through to six per model and then naturally any other variable doubles the numbers again. Obviously this isn't so much of an issue for those of you who just use included scenarios and those you've downloaded from elsewhere, but for people who use the scenario editor you can end up with a long list very quickly even if you use the available filters.

We'd really like to strike a balance on this one and would really appreciate your thoughts. Please add a comment to this post, pop something onto the Facebook page discussion or drop us a line using the contact form on the website and we'll try and make as many people happy as possible!