Road Clutter

In the middle of a very busy work period, I decided to give myself the first night off in many weeks. And what do I end up doing? Some new Rail Similarity assets. I sometimes feel like I'm married to 3DSMax.

I've spent the last few hours knocking up these new clutter assets for the road network. Once again, simple assets and quick to make. The 'zebra crossing' beacons flash on and off using simple animated textures. The markings on the 'zebra crossing' are a simple quad overlay using transparency.

I've included a 3DSMax render to show them in their full glory.

Animated traffic cones

Using the technique described in a previous post, I've created a simple traffic cone with a nice flashing light on top.

The flashing light was a 4 frame animation; frame 1 being ON (the flash), and frames 2,3 and 4 being OFF (each one was a fully transparent texture). I wanted these extra 'OFF' frames to extend the time over which the light was 'OFF'.

It looked great initially, but once I'd placed a number of these down in the scene it looked a little odd as they were all flashing in perfect sequence.

As a quick solution for this, I created two identical cones, but varied their animation setup so that they animate at different rates. Here are some screenshots.

Night-time screenshot

Here is a simple night time screenshot. I want to see how I can develop the night-time effect whilst staying true to the art style. I chose not to have any graduations on the floor glows leaving them with crisp edges.

First screenshot

Here's a quick screenshot showing the buses in position on the new (very clean) road loft.



Just for the purpose of this screenshot, I've given the road loft a huge paved run-off to cover the default green grass terrain texture as the texture obviously didn't fit the art style of my route. Eventually I'll replace all the terrain textures to be in keeping with my art style.

It's already unrecognisable as a modified Rail Simulator.

Cel-shaded bus

I've now tried out a cel-shaded style for the bus.

Here I'm using a simple dual-pass shadow-mapped shader (main texture in slot 1, and shadow-map in slot 2).

The method for creating the black outline has been around many years since the days of the original 'Quake' modding communities. I'll document it here at some point for those who aren't aware of how it's done.

Here's an in-game shot from the asset editor.

Cute super-deformed bus

The super-deformed bus. It's still created from basic polygons, but it's been stylised to add character. There is no reason why the entire route could not be created in this style.