Side Projects
In my spare time, I have been working on creating assets for personal use in a simulator called Trainz (by N3V/Auran). I have posted a few times before with the progress of the NSWGR 70 class locomotive, but this time I will focus on the smaller assets I have been making. To start with, my main interest is with Australian New South Wales content, so most of my work focuses around assets localised to New South Wales. Below I will talk about some of these assets their implementation into the above mentioned simulator. I have also experimented with using these assets in other game engines as well (e.g. Unreal 4 and Unity 5), in an attempt to replicate the features across multiple platforms, I may post more on this another time.
Custom Signs
My main goal with the signs I was creating was that I could make them as customisable as I could, with out haveing to many different versions. The best example of this is the speed sign. When I textured the sign, I left the area where the speed would go blank. In its place I put a placeholder that would allow me to change the speed in-game. This meant that instead of having a seperate sign, all with seperate textures (ranging from 5km/h to 110km/h) I can just have one asset that can be changed to what ever speed I wish, including those not commonly seen.
The collection of speed, street and warning signs.
I have also employed the same principle to the warning signs I have made, allowing the distance or speed to be changed in-game. The warning signs however still need a bit more work, as they are not as modular as I would like.
Road Splines
I have also experimented with making some road splines. Again, there are plenty out there but none had the look or dimensions I wanted. So far I have created two versions. One has a dashed center line and the other has a double un-broken line.
The two sections of raod, connected together.
The two sections of road spline shown together, and seperately.
One of the issues I have run into with the road splines is their interaction with railway crossing assets. I will need to make my own custom crossing that matches the texture and also shape of the road.
Thats all for now. I will post more as I progress. I may even post up a tutorial going through how I created the customisable speed signs in UE4 (an perhpas Unity).
