Progress Shot - Autorack

[pwillard]

Now with Paul Charland's Ford Econolines.

[pwillard]

Well, trying to dust this one off. The original vans were too many poly's per van, Paul's vans were just a tiny bit too miserly with poly's so I shot for somewhere in between with a my new van shape. I really do want to finish this one.

[cuontv]

Lookin' good Pete! Not to nitpick too much, but having driven vans for many years the bodies look a little squat on the wheels. Love the front grill and tires!
-Tom

[eric]

Are the individual vans individual FA's, or are they baked into the model itself?

[niknak]

Lookin' good Pete! Not to nitpick too much, but having driven vans for many years the bodies look a little squat on the wheels. Love the front grill and tires!
-Tom

I'm guessing they're heavily loaded

[pwillard]

The plan is to have an EMPTY Rack and a LOADED Rack... But I could certainly do that with an FA... for testing they are baked into the model. I don't think that's a requirement.

Also, I could raise the bodies easy enough so I can try to satisfy that.

[pwillard]

Side Note: With Blender you*can* actually corrupt a BLEND file. I somehow managed it. Blender does have an autosave feature but if you don't catch the problem soon enough, an autosave or other backup copies won't really help. In the end, even with backups, you will likely have some setbacks unless you are diligent about extra saves catching anomalies sooner rather than later.

My corruption issue actually had to do with textures and it was affecting the MSTS EXPORT by saving extra texture references that weren't "real" into the .S file. They were not actually referenced to any part of the model objects (according to Blender) but Blender still refused to remove them using all the normal methods.

Oh well.

[Erick_Cantu]

I have employed a simple method of incremental saves since FS2002. First, I turn off autosave. Second, I never save the file I am working on. I save a new file with an alphabetical suffix. The first save is always "Projectname A". I then increment until I get to Z and start over at A, overwriting again. This ensures I have at least 26 prior saves to go back to, without having to manage a billion different incremental saves. This system has served me well over the years.

[pwillard]

Actually, I have been doing similar steps. Things I learned from my days with Digital's VAX VMS operating system with file journaling. I do save versions each edit session using numbers IE. bi-level_openautorack-1.blend, bilevel_openautorack-2 etc. versus just using SAVE each time, as shown in the attached image. I recommend that everyone do this, btw.

So I do have edits to fall back on... but I also purge out really old versions and it turns out my issue exists in all available saves since the problem seems to have occurred because I use "saved" assets separately to be re-used and imported... Like Brake Piping and fixtures, ladders, etc. It might be related to the fact that some of these imported items are from my days with 3D Crafter.

Note: Nothing older than version 8.

Screenshot 2024-11-08 082904.jpg

[Erick_Cantu]

Ooooof. That's no fun at all - I'm sure you'll figure out a fix soon enough though.

[pwillard]

Honestly, the long term answer is to just redraw all my suspect assets that I think are the root cause. As you can see, I make heavy use of the Asset Browser.

Screenshot 2024-11-08 090132.jpg

[eric]

I find that the second and third time I rebuild an object I've corrupted usually turns out much better....

[ebnertra000]

I actually had to rebuild a Griswold gate mech a couple weeks ago due to corruption (as Eric said, it turned out even better after being rebuilt). I usually only have two files, but I save and reopen the active one before saving as a backup. Hasn't failed me yet

[pwillard]

Yeah, I may, (I'm slapping myself) actually need to start the Auto rack over from the beginning to get it to be *clean* again. I mean, it not hard... and probably will be better.

[superheatedsteam]

Not sure why you are slapping yourself. If I had a great looking model like that I wouldn't go starting again from scratch.

My models are not perfect, but neither are they a complete waste of time. They have the correct scale and proportions using the resources I had available to me at the time. As I get more reference material I can transform and add to existing geometry or replace it as deemed appropriate.

If that was my model and I was happy with the core but suspected it was an asset then I would delete the all assets from the model, export and confirm that the issue with the textures was no longer present which proves an asset is the cause.

If confirmed it is an asset, then delete half the assets from the model and export and check to determine if the texture issue persists. Keep using the delete half of the remaining assets, export and and check method to find and isolate the problem assets. A few hours diagnosing the problem will save you having to redo all your previous hard work, unless that is really what you want to do.