Got Your Number

Just a quick screen shot before turning in of the tanks in game.

Most of the time today has been spent getting the dynamic numbers in place and blending properly. All that's left to do now is some final texture tweaks and refinements, like swapping out the strange coloured couplings now we know they're in the right place and work and making some dirty versions, some tweaks to the physics and completing the scenarios to accompany the wagons.

On a personal note I love those big red numbers, always thought them a bit rebellious as a kid when you saw tanks with numbers boldly applied on the ends and sides not constrained by a tops panel!

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 Perhaps we could justify it by saying the wagon has been damaged and a couple of doors have been salvaged from a withdrawn example ....

Hazardous Stuff

With Easter over and family and garden time spent we're now back on with the Class A bogie tank.

Currently the major blocks of colour are being laid out ready for extra details to be drawn on and the weathering added. Alongside this there's the bit I most enjoy, creating the labels and decals. It's a strangely relaxing task with a little bit of problem solving to get things looking the way they should.

As a quick taster, here's the 'hazchem' board for the wagon, do you remember the days when London had an 01 std code for the entire Capital?

Unfortunately the compression of the image via Blogger hasn't done the artwork justice, don't worry it's not really that mushy.