Railsystem Status

Due to sickness over the weekend I could not start with the recording session but I still managed to crawl to my pc to work on the system. 

As I already mentioned the course will not cover detailed modelling in the first chapter but there will be modelling support principles. Basicly what the polyshifter will be for.

To give you a few more impressions on what this first chapter will cover here are the latest additions.

First I wanted to fully break up the process of deciding what needs to be placed from the actual placement. So first I needed to create alot of data that will help me later.

So I split the whole rail into segments that have certain data like length, height, starting and end points.

First I wanted to have some sort of heavy tower that can hold the rail while transitioning into a different segment, like a cliff for example.

As with the two-legged proxy tower I had to somehow create a model that is based on a single point on the rail and takes into consideration how the terrain is behaving.

The result is a construct that does exactly that. The ring structure is directly based on the point while the tower elements start from the surface. It only creates as many pieces as fit underneath it whily a dynamic polyExtrude takes whatever is on top and extrudes it exactly far enough to connect with the rings bottom. 

The design itself is plain and simple but we work on that in later chapters.

The next bigger system i implemented was a weighted support system. That means each tower provides a certain value of support. That value manipulates when another pillar is needed to hold the rail. In my current example I had created a two-legged version but to simulate the use of different strengths they are color coded to indicate that the system can choose from a heavy, medium and light version. That system is already in place and works as intended.

It basicly allows you to create a ruleset in which pattern you want to place the available options. In this small scale example I place the red one, then yellow, then green. After that I choose a random one which sets needed strength for the next one. But all of that takes into account how each of them distributes support value.

So the remaining tasks I need to solve are 

- the creation of bridges

- some example details for the inside of the tunnel

- hinges on the train to make the rotation smooth

So I am trying to start recording as soon as possible. I already have enough content available to get this going. 

From an asset standpoint - I started to create a base railsystem asset which can be used to create the whole system with the terrain and a curve while the polyshifter started to grow creating many small helpfull tools.

But more on that when we start the course.

Edit:

After an initial try with a version that spins above the segment...

I changed my approach and am quite happy with the result.

This has some nifty tricks in it which I look forward to show you!

Cheers

Dave