Plant City

I guess I found new faith in doing up Central Florida. All the rail lines in the area have round-the clock trains, coal to manifest to rock to intermodal to autoracks, it's got it all, sun up to sundown.

The Miami Sub which I also focused on had flawed DEM joints, but this section, with the kind invaluable help from Allen (backyard on the forums) is flawless. I felt that with this fresh addition twice the real estate of the Lakeland Area, I feel that area needs to be redone to new modeling standards. When I did the miami sub, the area around Lakeland looked cartoonish and I knew for sure some trees were improvised and not realistically laid. Now, replacing textures to match new standards and other crap like that, is a huge project so I thought do it from scratch and the touch of originality and flow will be there.

I am also enjoying the SP 4 (build 44653) which is much like TRS 2010. It's nice of Auran not to make the "world builder" have to buy the "engineer" edition just to enjoy features like LAYERS that are a must for routebuilders.

Remember that this interim progress shot is only the beginning. I need a big hand getting Plant city's depot modeled but I hope we Trainzers can all work together to complete the route.

This route will be updated to TS 2012 once the game is released, especially with the help of assets from the Mojave Sub to which I value, i.e. the Bungalow and the signals.

Tampa-Winston-Bone Valley v. 2.0

And so I finally got contracted, so to say, by my friend Allen, to be in charge of the coveted west section from west of Winston all the way to the Port Tampa area, including the Brooksville Sub.

There are a few technical difficulties but all looks a lot like my contribution of Lakeland is going to be started from scratch... Why? I want to have a monotonous standard of textures, all of which advanced since I got the first piece.

The whole Tampa terminal network excluding the west Clearwater Sub will finally see the light

Starting soon, as it looks, and my impending purchase of a HD5770 graphics card and RAM, a solid, well clad, Tampa - Bone Valley - Vitis - Auburndale route will be reborn, version 2.0. Featuring the detail and texturing like god intended.

Included will be:
Brooksville
Drew Park
Uceta
Port Tampa YL
Conagra's plant
Transflo
Yeoman
Port Sutton
Big Bend
Rockport
Vitis
Plant City
Lakeland
Winston
Mulberry
Auburndale
Winter Haven
Bartow
and all the places Bone Valley railfanning is deeply rooted in!

YouTube: The CSX Miami Sub Seeing Intermodal

It has been stated that intermodal service could be back on the Miami Sub before you know it, here's a little what if of that. Mind you there will be a changeover of the container configurations in the near future.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHYopC4J38

Well Cars

I must say I am amazed with Jointed Rail's latest release.

First they came out with the well cars and an overall limited selection of 53' Jindo containers. Then the line of those broadened to a campy "containers for the masses" ;)

The new pack, at least in the case of the 53 footers, contains How Tomorrow Moves, UMAX, JB Hunt, Schneider, EMP, and HUB group liveries. The ultimate pack!

Now, for a Miami Sub routebuilder or one of the central-Florida A-line, one cannot have all of them together in one piece.

Hence I came up with this plan that will sort cars out to different assets, consider this a how-to, where the instructions are within the context:

For personal use only, pending any consideration from the JR team.

1. TTX Maxi-Stack "General"

• This would be the intact, out-of-the-box asset.

• Untouched

2. TTX Maxi-Stack "CSX"

• The config would be altered to which the 53' containers tag in the Dependency Table will be changed to the corresponding CSX pack.
• The CSX containers pack will only have seven meshes in the mesh-table: CSX, CSX HTM, UMAX, UMAX gray, STAX red, CSX (ex.STAX) and I think Schneider may be considered.

3. TTX Maxi-Stack "NS"

• The config would be altered to which the 53' containers tag in the Dependency Table will be changed to the corresponding NS pack.
• The NS containers pack will include five meshes: Swift, Hub Red, Hub Green, EMP green, and JB Hunt Intermodal

4.  TTX Maxi-Stack "Reduced"

• The config of the pack corresponding to this asset would be reduced to which any other container not in the above, but including Schneider, would be put in this dependency table.
• The Reduced container pack includes Pacer, APL, Crowley, and Schneider.

5. TTX Maxi-Stack "Hardcore CSX"

• Only two containers would form a mini-pack for this one: CSX white and CSX HTM
• For uniformity

6. TTX Maxi-Stack "Hardcore UMAX"

• Only the two UMAX container liveries would be forming a mini-pack for this one.
• For uniformity

7. TTX Maxi-Stack "Hardcore EMP"

• Only the EMP container will be the dependency here.
• For uniformity

Once done, these will jive VERY well with FEC trains, CSX IM, and NS IM. I would like to remind the reader that this is for personal use, but the strategy is there for any curious Trainzer to try out. Look for my CSX Intermodal on the Miami Sub vision of the future video on YouTube later today (March 10) which will show the effect of the variety on CSX trains. This stratagem is designed to improve aesthetics when Trainzing the Intermodal of your choice.

Potential Trip to Central Florida

I may be headed to the Orlando Sub area as well as the Lakeland and Tampa Terminal Subs to railfan on March 18-19. The main event is actually the World's Greatest Hobby on Tour show in Tampa. LEGO and multi-scale layouts will have displays at the show.

To Shadow Or Not...

...That is the question.

Trainz ingame has an option that you could tick to enable shadows. Many people do that thinking it will make everything look 1000% more realistic.

Well, not all the time.

I for one have the option disabled, because as they say, you might as well. It does bog down frame rates and sometimes the shadows act really skippy, looking like rays pointing into oblivion.

But there is a nifty little trick to have shadows appear under a given asset. Rain or shine it is effective.

So what I do is when I landscape a given area, I seem to pick my textures from a family of grass colors. In that assortment there are light ones, and dark ones; I very well appreciate the presence of such a variety. Here is a photo comparing two ways I have landscaped the undersides of trees to.

The left was what appeared in many of my routes, even including the 2009-10 non-dem attempt at the Miami Sub. See how subtle and very bland it looks, with a constant shade of grass; it's like it's a tree of glass. (I no longer put my trees up this way)


The right is current, and in my current routes. As the Sanford Sub, Carters Sub, and FEC routes have been plagued by the left, they are getting updated with dark textures beneath trees.

The texture scheme works well for:

• Bridges
• Trees
• Culverts
• Conveyors
• Water Towers
• Tall supported platforms
• Billboards
• Sheds
• Covered areas (ie. Drive-thru banking lanes)
• Substations (dark sand or gravel)
• Plane displays

You can simply see the difference in the dimension, the right looks very three dimensional while the left looks flat!


The route this was shot on was a very short-lived CSX Freelance route from 2009 btw, couldn't get past 1 mile of track-laying due to boredom.....

Homestead Sub (Video)

In 2010 I began the Homestead to West Palm route which encompasses 140 miles of mainline and doable service to the quarries and other places.

Here's a video sample from the Homestead Sub, with O721. You can see the aspects of details I've been going after, which detail by detail will be discussed as tips on this blog.

There are animated people, birds, and gizmos all over.

Also if you look carefully note the evident presence of darker grass textures under trees and bridges.