Do we need more random scenery or no?

[yellowdog]

It's parsley 😂
I appreciate your efforts, Pete

[pwillard]

I know right... it looks like it belongs on a plate

[pwillard]

More Random Scenery: Commercial Solar Panel

[EldoradoRailroad]

Hi Pete,

I saw this post, months ago, but I did not realize that I had waited way too long before replying!

Maybe a year ago, I was looking into more trees, of the 3D kind. In my personal collection, which means cannot be shared due to onerous copyright booby traps, I have trees of the billboard kind that look quite nice that were created from 3D model images off the internet. On further research, it is possible to purchase fully textured 3D trees for a modest price, such that they are royalty free. This means buy once and it is yours to do what you would like with it. These trees/vegetation are so full of polygons that it would be impractical to use in the sim. BUT.......... it would be possible to render these in Blender and create both the mattes and billboard shapes from them. The added benefit is that the 3D model could be "abused" any way you like...which means..size..shape..etc. It is even possible to consider billboard trees/etc such that a diff perspective is created for each part of the billboard shape. This opens interesting possibilities and what is provided for public consumption would not be breaking any onerous copyright rules.

On a different note, any time I drive by open fields with bushes in them I still cannot figure out what we can do with ground level vegetation that avoids that awful right angle cutoff with with ground. The idea is in not creating 1000s of polygons for a realistic looking blade of grass! I have tried creating shapes such that they are slightly ABOVE the ground to avoid the cutoff, but it still looks wrong to me. I think I am going to have to rely less on memory and take some real photos to see what exactly the real thing should look like, both in shape and shading/coloring. So often, many of our scenery shapes do not appear to be "connected" with the ground they are on. This bothers me a lot, since 2009, only!

Thanks for allowing me to rant here,
Steve

[pwillard]

No worries, I really get your point as I have see it so often as well. One issue is that we just cannot apply an Alpha texture to a PLANE for grasses and then have it follow the contours of the ground. Splines might be what we need... but its something that we may never see in Open Rails...

Trees are tricky... as they almost never look right unless you have dozens of image planes involved. I'm still figuring out how I want mine to look. (And I'm not quite happy with the "TREE IT" application.)

Note: Items I create that are semi-finished are located at https://github.com/pwillard/MSTS-replacement

See readme for details

[EldoradoRailroad]

Pete,

Thanks for the link on github.

This https://free3d.com/3d-model/tree-6794.html is an example of what my idea is. Create billboards from renders in blender (etc), with controlled lighting to create the textures for billboards. The nasty work was already done for you, at a modest price of course (IMO).

Steve

[pwillard]

These are sort of like what you get from the Application called "Tree-It." As far as I know, it's a free app, but sadly, it's been abandoned.

[pwillard]

Another Building in the works. This one is based on a "Mainline Modeler" article from December 2000.

Finishing touches (aka tiny details) still left to do...

[CSRX]

That's a nice little building! Looks like something you'd see at a siding that takes in steel for fabrication production.

[pwillard]

According to the magazine article, it was for the transfer of bulk Corn Syrup from rail tank cars to tank trucks. While I haven't modeled it, there are obviously car unloading and truck filling fixtures as well as a truck scale related to this facility.

I kept it generic, though.

[qballbandit]

Very nice work, Pete!

[frliss]

Great work Pete,

Cargill has a similar facility in Worcester MA, on the P&W. It has four overhead doors on one side, two for rail tank cars and two for Tractor Trailer tanks. The rail tank cars can exit through a second set of doors on the other side It's much larger but has the same steel construction and is painted white.

Fred

[pwillard]

The design seems pretty straightforward. This building is used by trucks only... apparently they would pump the commodity out underground to unloading areas by the rails.

[TrainSimJack]

These are sort of like what you get from the Application called "Tree-It." As far as I know, it's a free app, but sadly, it's been abandoned.

Hi Pete

Tree It's last update was 11/29/2024, I don't think it's been abandoned. (Pulling this info from the steam release of Tree it)

I've also had an interest in Trees and here are a few things I've found:

Similar to Tree it:
Plant Factory and Plant Catalog are both free now.
Download e-on Software Products for Free | Bentley Systems
Documentation seems sparse on these though what I could find, they appeared to be well respected.

Another source of Trees is BlenderMarket.
There's a bunch of them there, and while I suspect even the "Low poly" ones are too many polygons for inclusion in a train sim, They could be worth a look.

[pwillard]

Yeah, at the time I posted that ... updates to tree-it were stagnant.