It goes up, It goes down

A quick update to show some more of the pantograph. Ive added the cross-arms and animated it. There is still a little more to do on the details and animating other bits such as the pistons which operate the pantograph. So far the entire pantograph, including the base, weighs in at about 980 polys, which I reckon is pretty good, considering whats in it. I need to add a few more though.

I also discovered a small miss-match between the interior and exterior around the small side windows, so that has been fixed as well.

While I'm here, Im going to play around with the blog template a bit. It seems that I cant do much about the width without changing all of the background images. Eventually I'd like to redo the whole thing with a proper Redfern Workshopz header and a variable width template. Perhaps one day.

You can actually see that Im only working on half a loco in the screen shot above.

Update: 31 Jan - The pistons are now animated. Im not going to animate the springs. Still some polys to add on the contact. The pant is now 1020 polys. I removed some jigs that I had hidden - the model is now 8703 polys. File version is 108.

File Version: 106
Poly Count: 9031

Note: The poly count shown here is for the gmax model in progress. The count will generally be higher than that of the finished in-game model since it includes various tools, jigs, and other pieces which may not be part of the final model. LOD modelling will further reduce in-game polygons.

Alpha Sorting and other fun stuff

Ive been working on the secret side project a little, and spent a bit of time trying to figure out an Alpha Sorting problem. Alpha sorting is basically the layering of transparent objects so that you see what you would expect to see behind them. For example, when looking through a carriage from the outside, you would expect to see through the windows nearest to you, then the interior, and then through the windows on the other side to finally see whatever was behind the carriage.

I'm working on a door animation and when the doors are open they partly cover a window in the carriage body behind them. The problem is that the part of the window that should be obscured behind the solid door appears to be in front of it.

I found a few mentions of this kind of problem on the net, but none of the tips seem to apply to Gmax or Trainz. At the moment I'm ignoring the problem, but I will ask on the forums later on - I have plenty of other things to keep me busy at the moment.

Ive finished installing Gmax on Minotaur, and tweaked it the way I like it. I also have most of my other tools and utilities there now (Normals map generators, editors, format converters etc) so the new machine is feeling a lot more comfortable and easier to work with.

I also replaced the old template of this blog with the new "Blogger Beta" layout widgets which are a lot more flexible. When I moved this page to the new blogger I was worried that I would lose the modifications that I had made, but the guys at Google / Blogger are so smart that most of my custom modifications were automatically converted to the proper widget and the whole process was a breeze! I'll be going back through old posts and adding tags to them so that you can easily find them from the Tags section in the sidebar.

I'll be in Japan at the beginning of February, but hopefully I'll post a few more updates before then. Among other things, we will be buying a 7 day Rail Pass, and catching the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) from Fukuoka to Tokyo. we plan to take our time and stop at Osaka, Kyoto and Mt Fuji along the way.