Sandy Plains

A quick desert scene. The blobby shadow underneath the fir trees work well pinning them to the terrain.

Fir Tree

Another year, and another post. I had a bit of spare time over the holidays, enough to build a new tree. This fir tree has no stencil shadow, nor cel shaded outline. This was due to the use of transparency. I could have put the outline in the texture itself, but it looked too harsh and solid.

This shows the simple structure of the new fir tree. The tree uses the simple TexDiff shader with transparency to create the branches/needles.

Cycling through Sunflowers Video

And here's a quick video showing the new sunflowers.

Sunflowers

During le Tour, you will always see the classic shot of the peloton riding past endless fields of sunflowers. To create that shot in RailSimilarity I'd need to get dirty with the procedural flora (grasspack.ace) and terrain textures to create myself a sunflower.

Here's the classic shot.

To recap, the procedural flora (if enabled of course) is a bunch of code created cruciforms that get placed on the terrain in the near-ground. They alpha out (fade out) over a short distance to keep the performance overhead down. Each terrain texture (the texture on the ground) can have an associated flora texture if desired.

Initially I created a simple terrain texture for the ground. This will be visible underneath the procedural flora. Remember that this will also be the texture that will be visible once the flora fades out in the distance.

Then I modified the grasspack.ace to include my sunflower. This will be the texure that gets mapped onto those little procedural flora cruciforms. This looks crude, but once it has the correct alpha channel and mapped onto the cruciforms, it works a treat.

Fruity fruity

I've also created a smaller fruit tree as an animated scenery blueprint. This tree has the same gentle swaying animation as the larger tree, but with additional animated falling fruit.

Each tree has around six static fruit positioned around the base. Another fruit is animated to fall from the treetop to the ground using a simple looping animation.

This asset is really effective once multiple trees are placed alongside one another. In Rail Simulator, the 'auto-animations' all start on random frames, so in this case the fruit all fall at different times (and NOT all at the same time). Some of the falling fruit can be seen in this screenshot.

Train and trees

Just a quick update the show the Class 166 amongst the trees. I'm pleased with the trees. Simple, cheap but effective.

You can't see it in these images, but in-game the trees sway gently in the breeze...

Tree

I'm now starting to think about assets other than the vehicles themselves. I'll create a number of items of foliage to add a bit of variety (trees, shrubs and hedges). Here is a tree to show the style I'm adopting for the trees.

The upper dome of the tree has and inner and an outer part (both elements using transparency at the bottom edge). The inner element is simply a smaller dome with inverted face normals and has a darker texture applied. I've also added a few stray leaves again using transparency. I've also applied a few keyframes to these trees to get them gently swaying.

The in-game tree should be very similar to the one seen above in the 3DSMax mock-up with one exception; the in-game stencil shadow will be a more simplified shape.

At the moment, I'm tempted to try the voxel approach for the hedges. I'll obviously show any progress with this idea on here. I'm also thinking of creating the hedges as two asset types; lofts and stand-alone assets.