Tangara Progress

Here is a bit of a close up showing some of the internal detail. Ignore the colours, I havnt textured it yet. I also havnt done the windows or handrails. This week, Ive been working on the bogie.

Thanks to David who gave me the proper wheel measurement, Ive now got the diameter right. I also found a few other dimensions in the OSC spec... tread width, back to back distance, etc.

I made a completely new axle/wheel model and imported it into the Tangara. The bogie required a lot of fiddling about with verticies, which took a lot of time - part of the problem was that Im working from photohraphs and as I discovered new things, I had to move some of the older bits that I had built. It includes the frame, the axle boxes and the axles and wheels. I wanted to get the frame looking right, which is what took most of the time. It also absorbed a lot of polys, so I didnt get around to adding things like brakes and other running gear. I may revise it later as it does look a little bare. Ive built a trailer bogie, and I will decide later if I am going to use that one for the motor car, or build a seperate motor bogie. I may end up just using the same bogie for both, given its already high poly count. At the moment the whole bogie package is about 2400 polys.

In the picture you can see one of the upstairs seats, and the vestibule panel that I did a week or so ago. Not a lot has changed on the interior recently. I want to tweak the seats a bit more at some stage.

Yesterday was the Sydney Goods Yard tour. Not being a morning person I was a little worried that I would not make the 7:50am departure from Central (despite living only 10 mins away). I was right. I went to bed earlier than usual and set my alarm for 6:30am. I woke up at around 5:30am and couldnt sleep. The next thing I knew was when I woke up again at 10:15am. The alarm didnt go off and I have no idea why - it was still set and ready to go when I woke up. I have been known to sleep through it, but my wife would definately have woken up if it had sounded.

Oh well. In not worried about the money that I paid, as far as Im concerned its a donation to a good cause. Im more annoyed with myself for not waking up earlier. I had thought about getting up at 5:30am when I couldnt sleep, but figured I would try to get the extra hour if I could.

It works out better for you, because I spent all of Sunday working on the bogie :)

Polly Count: 6400
File Version: 198

Lots of extra saves to get around a particular Gmax bugs saw the file count shoot way up. 

Dont be evil Google

Last week I found a funny rail related article on a news site and thought readers of this blog might also appreciate it. It was about 5km of disused rail track being stolen, somewhere in Germany. It would have appeared just below the previous post. Yesterday, I realised it was missing.

Have Google censored my blog? What other explanation is there for the missing article. It has clearly been removed, yet I got no notification, or even a courtesy email, despite having registered my email address with this account.

Admitedly I posted the full text of the news article, but it was very short - it would have been hard not to. I fully credited Reuters, and linked to the original article on their web site. I consider this fair use, since it is a tiny part of what Reuters publish on a daily basis. Its not like I scrape every single news story from hundreds of news services using an automated process and then database all of the stories and post them all over my own home page, while at the same time offering my own RSS or ATOM feeds to further distribute the articles, and rewriting the original article links in order to redirect all clicks through my own site for tracking purposes, or anything... Oh wait... that would be Google News.

Let me get this straight... Its ok for Google to aggregate news from all over the place, redistribute it, and track your clicks, but its not ok for me to post ONE article, properly linked and credited?

Google you should listen to your own words: "Dont be evil"!

The worst part is that Google are not accountable for anything. As a Google user, there is no support desk that you can email with a problem, and get a response. (If there is, please let me know because I certainly cant find it). All you have is their help pages, with a list of pre-defined newbie problems, like a FAQ. If your question is a little more technical, you have to click on the link at the bottom, saying "My problem is not listed here". You click on that, and get a form where you can describe the problem, but they never respond. I have sent them specific issues and specific questions about my Google account - some of them more policy related than technical, and nothing... no response. There is no way, that I am aware of, to ask them about my missing article, and get an answer from them.

I used to be Google's biggest fan. They have certainly revolutionised the web by being innovative, but the shine is beginning to come off, and they have grown to become a huge monolithic corporation that is no different from any other large corporate entity... Cold, impersonal, and according to the criteria normally applied to humans, psychopathic.

You're beginning to lose it Google. Pay attention before it too late.

PS: The missing post was MUCH smaller than this one. Personally, I saw more value in the earlier post.

Tangara Progress

Here is the latest screenshot. Ive added the seats on both decks, done a little more detailing in the vestibule, and started on the bogies. You may just notice the wheels peeping out at the rear.

One thing I havnt done is textured any of this, so I may redo the seating to make things easier on myself (ie: texture one seat and replicate it). Its not that hard. Once I had the first row of seats, the rest took about 15 minutes to get into the right places.

The vestibule now has the dividing panels between the seating and the doors. You can see it in the picture (if only I knew how to get blogger to not shrink the image so much when posting with picassa... I may fiddle with that later). I still have to add the glass to the panels, but that will come when I do all of the windows. Since I have been avoiding texturing, and need to texture the glass to make it transparent, I will probably be doing that last.

The wheels that you can see are temporary, and are only there so that I can scale the bogie visually. Im not quite sure of the Tangara's wheel diameter. I do know that an 86 class loco has a wheel diameter of 1250mm, but some quick math and the knowledge that the floor level above the wheels is at 1.2m, tells me that this is way too big for the Tangara. the wheels in the picture have a diameter of 914mm and I will probably be using those in the finished model, since they look about right.

As per the prototype, the bogies are hidden away under the skirt. If you want to see them, you're just going to have to wait until I release it, and set yourself up to have a derailment - thats fair, because thats pretty much the only way I have been able to see them too. If Tangaras didnt derail, I wouldnt have any reference material. I found several photographs on the net of the Concord and Kingsgrove derailments, including a few close up pictures of the bogies as the carriages were being loaded on to low-loaders to be removed by road.

Which reminds me... I may be able to get some specs, such as wheel diameter from the Waterfall Inquiry report. If anyone knows where I can find a copy of the Interim report, please let me know. I have the final report, but it lacks some earlier detail which was in the interim report. Unfortunately the Inquiry web site seems to be gone, and the links on the Cityrail pages lead to a 404 error. Ive been looking for the Interim report for some time.

Other News

I have been having a little bit of success with the development of a new Redfern Workshopz web site. There is still a long way to go, and some modules dont work properly yet, but should be working soon. Ive tried three different versions of the software so far, and currently the latest bleeding edge code from the CVS repository seems to be the only version giving me any joy. I wonder how long that will last, before someone breaks it (as often happens with development code).

As usual, Ive been quiet lately, but Ive been busy. Ive been evaluating CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, and think I have found one that is suitable for my needs. I hope to use it to create detailed drawings of various NSW Rail related things (locomotives, EMUs, Buildings), specifically for 3D modellers (if I can find the time). I know that sources already exist for these kind of drawings, but so far I have found many of them lacking a few critical dimensions. I hope to go into a bit more detail. The drawings would be for sale on the new web site (at a small cost to cover my time) along with any payware models that I might create in the future.

This Sunday, (the 12th) Im catching the special 3801 Limited tour train (diesel hauled) which will be visiting a lot of sidings and goods yards around Sydney. Ive already been through Enfield, but Im looking forward to visiting Rozelle Yard, Lavender Bay (behind Luna Park) and Port Botany Yard. W00t! I just hope I can get up early enough!

The following Sunday, (19th) there is another tour which is being hauled by an 86 class electric locomotive. I wont be catching that one, but I will be out to photograph it. You'll probably find me at Milsons Point station in the middle of the day since the train will be crossing the bridge on its way from Kiama to Newcastle. Later I'll be at Central when it arrives at the end of the tour.

Lets se what kind of trouble the rent-a-cops can give me on that day :)

Current Tangara Stats:
File version: 167
Poly Count: 5100

Tangara Progress

Ive gotten back into the Tangara, as well as spending some time on evaluating web site CMS tools, for a future Redfern Workshopz web site.

First the Tangara. Essentially all I have done this weekend is to finish the floor of the upper deck, including the ceiling and light fittings of the lower deck, and integrated it all into the stairwells, so that I can easily hide the stairs and upper deck while working on the lower deck. Its not a lot of progress since the last report, but it is progress.

The light fittings are also in place for the upper deck, but not complete yet. There is an upper ceiling, but you cant see it in the picture. This angle also shows the work I recently did on the interior portion of the gangway. I started on the gangway exterior, but deleted it again, as I am not quite sure how to implement it. I have an idea for something cool, so Im going to think about it some more, and will probably do that last.

From here the next steps are seating and handrails, and then the interior is just about done (other than texturing). Theres still a few glitches on the exterior that I need to look at, so Im not quite finished with the base model yet.

I have decided to set up a website for Redfern Workshopz. Im a PHP geek, and have my own web server and hosting etc, so thats not a problem. The problem is software. I could write it from scratch, but I really dont want to spend that much time on it. Over the last 5 or so years I have looked at various CMS packages, for various projects, and they have all come up lacking in some area.

Unfortunately, 5 years on, nothing much has changed. The Nuke variants still rely on an undiciplined rag-tag collection of user contributed modules for features that should be standard, and the lack a centralised download site makes it almost impossible to find the module you need. some quite basic CMS features are still completely missing.

Other CMS tools also lack many of the nescessary features. Its not that hard. All I want are the following: News, Blog, Gallery, Downloads, Project Manager (including Issue or bug tracking), Wiki and a Paypal IPN enabled shopping cart, for payware items, if I choose to go in that direction. Of course the ability to add static display pages to show off my creations would be nice too.

Having stumbled on the CMS Matrix, and compared features of various CMS packages (uh... all of them) I finally settled on Drupal, and have spent a bit of time setting up a site to evaluate it. I will still have to write some modules myself, but at least the basic framework is there (partly as user contributed modules) for all of the features I need. Ive found that the latest beta breaks some of the contributed modules, so Im about to start over with the latest stable release, which has wider support.

Current Poly Count: 2460
File Version: 151

Well, its about time!

I spent yesterday on Sydney Harbour, celebrating Australia Day. I even got a bit of a tan. Last week, I attended a friends wedding, and entertained some other friends that my wife invited over for dinner. It would have been rude of me to sit at the computer and ignore them. I have also been working late at my real job to catch up on some things that are a bit behind, and will still need to work late from time to time over the next couple of months, but hopefully the weddings and national holidays are over, for a while anyway.

Over the last couple of weeks, besides all of the other things that have distracted me, I have been doing a bit of research, and finishing up the Train Stop. I uploaded it to the DLS last night, but am just waiting on some last minute formalities before I release it from the preview area so that you can download it. I was so excited that I uploaded it before I had checked it properly, and ended up having to upload it again after removing some debugging code that I had left in the script.

I also realised that I should probably ask permission to modify one of Natvander's scripts. I had not thought about it since there was nothing in the license or in the script itself that said I couldn't, so I just presumed that it was ok. Then, after had I uploaded the Train Stop, my better judgement convinced me that I should at least ask, out of courtesy. I will be delaying the release. until I get this cleared up.

Last week, I also had an idea for a really quick and small model... the NSW Track Flag. It took me just a few hours to knock it out, and script it (ok... it took about 8 hours - but that included 4 hours of tearing out my hair trying to figure out TrainzScript :) The flag was uploaded a few days ago, but I currently have an update awaiting Auran approval, so if you havnt downloaded it already, you should probably wait until mid next week. If you have, download it again once the update is available.

Recently I signed up with HET (Historic Electric Traction) - probably the first of many organisations I will be supporting. They are a group of volunteers who contract their services to Railcorp, to restore and maintain Railcorp's historic fleet of electric passenger trains. They work out of the old Redfern Workshops, which is just a few blocks from here, and I hope to go down there occasionally and help them maintain the red rattlers and other historic trains that they have there. I have a bit of an alterior motive as well - I hope to get some photographs of the buildings and particularly Traverser No 1, and model them for Trainz.

A couple of other Trainz projects have shown up on the horizon. Im very interested in the Cityrail project (recreating the Sydney Cityrail network in Trainz) and have offered to help build any models that the guys might need to support that. Naturally the Tangara is going to be a part of it, but I have my eye on a few stations and buildings around the place as well.

Next week, I plan to work on the Tangara some more. I havnt done much over the last 2 weeks, and hope to make that up next week. I spotted a few glitches that will need looking at, but nothing major. I should have the gangway finished very soon, and will probably then work on the glitches. Now that the Train Stop is out of the way, I hope to finish the buffer, and start on the catenary splines and related static bits and pieces.

Oh, and my other task for this weekend, is to set up a website for Redfern Workshopz to allow me to add a few features that cant be done on this blog. More on that, as it progresses.