Waterfall Scene

Here is a brief glimpse of the new waterfall asset I created over lunch. I'll follow later with more details on how it was created.

Sandy Plains

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

On the Farm

My Farm. You may notice a whole host of older assets, the picket fence, the voxel sheep etc. All fit perfectly on the farm. I have three overlapping driveable loops around the farm. Once again I've used invisible track for this to make the paths of the vehicles appear more random. Currently I have AI tractors driving on two of the loops and the player driving on the other. I'll upload some vids to Youtube later tonight.

Farm Assets : Barn and Tractor

Another themed area I wanted to include was a farm area (hence the tractor). Here is the tractor shown in the editor this time, along with a new asset for a barn. I think I'll need a windmill asset soonish, animating nicely in the wind.

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.

Paris Skyline

Here we have a few shots of Paris. I played with the scale of the buildings and landmarks until I got the skyline I wanted. There are only a few unique assets used here, but used over and over a lot. Once again simple but effective. Hopefully I've captured the Parisian style.

Paris Cafes

I spent a few hours over the weekend creating two buildings to represent the shops and cafes of my Paris street. Once placed in the route, despite their simplicity, the two buildings seem to work well allowing huge areas of the city to be blocked out quickly.

le Tour de France

As mentioned in a previous post, I have made some progress with my road-race assets. You might recognise my take on a famous French landmark.

The new assets in this scene are a cobbled road loft, a monument and padded crash barrier. The asset for the padded crash barrier was created as a pair and populated either side along the road loft using population geometry. Simple really. Videos to follow...

Lighthouse on the Rocks

I've now started to use all the ideas I've had (most of which are on this blog somewhere) and put them all together in one route. That was always my intention to have a single route where I could freely drive many types of vehicle.

The latest asset I created over lunch today was a little animated lighthouse. This was for my coastal area, and works well placed amongst the rocks.

The light beam node has simple linear rotation, and uses a basic AddATex shader to create the light itself.

Route Update

A quick screenshot update showing progress on my route. I haven't had time to build any new assets, so for the time being I'm simply populating the level. Originally I was going to plan the route layout. Boring. I found it was much more fun using the powerful tools to create the level and 'wing' it as I went along. Who knows what it's going to end up looking like?

Air-crafty

Ok, so here is a quick update on what I've been up to recently. I'll go into more detail about some of the assets seen here at some point in the near future.

I've created a new type of vehicle for RailSimilarity to populate the skies.

It's a driveable vehicle, with flashing wingtip lights and animated prop.

To make the flight more convincing, I have also created a loop out of an invisible track for the aircraft to 'fly' along. I used the gradient tool to modify the track to allow a short section of the loop to be at ground level (covering the runway), and the remainder of the loop up in the clouds.

A new runway asset and I now have a working airport in my world.

Dam Wall

I've just built a new asset for a dam wall. This will easily allow me to have different areas of flat terrain at varying heights, and will allow impressive views from the top.

The dam consists of 4 assets:
-the wall and railing; created using a loft xsec
-the wall and railing end caps; positioned using start or end geometry references
-the wall supports; the middle geometry asset reference
-the pipe outlet; a clutter asset positioned by hand

The Middle geometry and Start (and End) geometry.

The pipe outlet. This asset has scrolling UV animation applied to get the water to appear to flow out of the pipe. I've also cheated by having two layers to the water. The inner layer does not animate, but has a specular material applied. This provides the base colour and highlight to the water. The outer layer has a simple additive material which has the scrolling water surface.

The complete loft.

I've also created a new particle effect which creates the bubbles at the base of the pipe outlet.

Animated Level Crossing

I was thinking recently about how to create an animating level crossing. Currently the codebase will need extending to get the crossing barriers to activate with an approaching train.

Here is my dirty hack (solution).



This is an entirely art based solution using LOD functionality. As we all know, the LOD code will swap geometry depending on distance to camera. So I've created a level crossing, where the gates are closed in the nearest LOD and open in the distant LOD. Currently, the gates pop between the open and closed positions, but many more LODs could be inserted between these two current LODs to make the gates move more smoothly.

Thinking along these lines, there could be many other uses for the LOD functionality:

- Static people, who start waving as the train or camera gets near
- Grazing cows, who look up as the camera or train gets near

I'm sure there are other uses than simply using LODs to swap different resolutions of geometry.

Sports Zone

Been very slow on here recently, due to working all hours. So very late last night, I decided to build a couple of new assets for myself.

The simple stadium and statue will be used in a recreational area/zone of the route. Looking at these shots this morning now makes me realise I'm gonna have to create a driveable blimp to hover over the stadium.
I'm quite pleased with the stadium at night. Using a simple 'Tex' material for the interior ensures it always looks lit regardless of the environment lighting. The floodlights and their glows are illuminated at night using 'night nodes'.

Road Network

Recently, I have been trying to improve the complexity of the road layout by adding junction assets.

With rail track, this is a simple problem to solve, as the junction assets consist of two elements; ballast and rails. With roads however it required a bit of experimentation to come up with junction assets that would work correctly and provide the 'clean' look I was after.

Here is the cross-section for the road junction asset. The junction asset must contain two nodes called 'Ballast' and 'Rail' (both case sensitive) for it to render correctly across the junction. In my road junction asset, you can see the 'Ballast' asset represents the tarmac, and the 'Rail' (not used in this case) is simply hidden below the road.

With a very subtle hump in the centre of the road (see the cross-section above), the road polygons cleanly intersect one another without any z-fighting issues.

I've also placed small 'filler' assets at the apex of the internal corners to help with the visuals. This is the result in-game.

Eastern District

Here are a few screenshots to give a flavour of the Eastern District. The only new assets here are the overhead banners stretching from building to building. These simple assets are double sided and mapped so they can be viewed correctly from both the front and back.

And at dusk...

And here is a similar shot showing the monorail cutting through the centre of the cityscape.

Tower Blocks

I've also been busy building a few er...buildings. Tower blocks more precisely for the Eastern District in my route. Once again these are very simple assets, low polygon count and low texture resolution. These will be used in the centre of town, where neon signs and billboards will be the dominant features.

For the banners and fake logos, I've used a cool free font (called Massive 10 K) by Keisuke Asami. It seems to perfectly suit the style I was after. So thanks Keisuke Asami for the work on the font.