Tangara Progress

Here is a shot of the other end of the base model for a change. Ive been working on the intercar gangway area. Its important to get this right as what I do here will appear on all variations of each car that will be created from this model.

Unfortunately Im kind of stuck trying to get my head around how it will work. Nothing major, just trying to get a picture of it spatially in my head (ie: in 3D).

What I want to do is have the gangway and coupler both attached to a dummy bogie attachment point so that they swivel as the train goes around a corner, keeping the gangways and couplers of inter-connected cars aligned. Because its so wide (almost the width of the carriage) the gangway will have to be carefully positioned so that it doesnt show through the interior walls when it turns.

I also want to animate it so that it retracts when the car is decoupled. I had always thought it retracted in a particular way, but I cant find any photograpic evidence to support that, so I will probably model it like the photos I have, which will mean that the animation will be slightly simpler. There are not a lot of photos around of decoupled Tangara cars, although I have found a few.

Having said last time that the front end was just about done, I noticed a problem with the upper section which led me to totally redo the rounded edges, both at the top, and at th bottom. I also noticed that the windows on the exterior are slightly out of alignment with the interior windows - probably as a result of the boolean operations to make the headlight, ditch light and marker light holes. I'll tidy them up once the body is done.

Im really trying to avoid using boolean tools now, and often cut holes by recreating whole panels from a few selected verticies and hand created polygons. I leave a bit of a hole and then later refine it into the shape I need. Not as fast as boolean, but it doesnt mess up other parts of the model.

Andi06 kindly offered the use of a library that he created for his AEC Railcars, so Im looking forward to incorporating that into the Tangara. Being new to Trainz Script (but not to programming) I was having a hard time setting up a structure that would be easy to maintain, so in addition to the code, this will help a lot with that. Many of his supporting utility functions will come in handy, as will a few others I have collected.

I was wondering about push buttons a while back, and today I discovered a couple of undocumented config tags in an Auran examle (the transporter turntable). From memory I think they were kind button_onoff and kind button_whilepressed. If they do what I am thinking they do, it will make the push buttons in the cab a lot nicer. I also have a couple of other ideas, including using animated levers and colision meshes to achive the same thing.

Current Version: 319
Poly Count: 10,400