High Heat Coasters - Lazarus

[Coasterkidmwm]

Looks very good so far. Are you going to have the "plz work"-style incredibly short brake run at the end?

[Metazoanhaddock]

I need a mop...
because I'm drooling all over this topic

mkingy, mine are a little lower and I'll look at them and make changes if necessary. I think I'll make little changes like that after I get decent supports up. With copy and paste it's best to get it all perfect right away, but it's not a huge deal to make some mods as necessary.

Coasterkidmwm, my final brakes are indeed fairly short to fit in the style. I haven't tweaked them yet (actually I had some up then made some changes (but not to the spacing for brakes) and didn't add them back. Should feel about right. I'll be checking timing as my train hits the brakes at around the same speed as SFNE's.

Thanks for the thoughts everyone.

mkingy, I was looking for some more references and I came across a picture of Kawasemi that showed the supports exactly as I had them, with the lateral beam starting slightly lower than the connection to the vertical beam. I'll look at more references of SROS SFNE though then make a final decision. Thanks again for the thought.

[mkingy]

Yeah I was checking out this HD video of Bizzaro to get some better angles of those supports and I think your right generally they do have them slightly below, around the 4:04 mark on that video a couple of them are debatable I guess. Might just be the angle that's throwing me off.



Actually thinking about it further I think what I might actually seeing is them not overlapping the two welds as the metal would be weak on the wrong side of the joint if they were (I think)

Sorry for sidetracking you!

Yep that's exactly what I was thinking with the structural integrity of the connection itself. Hard to know, it's always educated guesses unless we hear something from the manufacturers.

Oh dayum this looks good as hell

Made some progress and had some fun with it. I'm maybe 2/3 or 3/4 of the way done supporting, and I've also been slowly adding some details into the terrain. I probably won't be able to work on it in the upcoming week or two because I may not have access to a computer...starting a new job 2 hours away so I'll have to buy my own computer ASAP.

[TTD03]

Those lights doe...
But on a serious note, that drop at the top seems really off and not straight at all.

Oh does it? hehe

(That's a really ugly winky smiley btw lol, noticed after posting)

If it wasn't for the nolimits logo I would have thought that was the real thing honestly

[mkingy]

That is seriously incredible.

[TTD03]

dcs221 wrote:

Oh does it? hehe

(That's a really ugly winky smiley btw lol, noticed after posting)

Another angle for us to see that makes it look better?
Or is it just curved really badly ?

I'd like to stick to what I find are the most interesting angles for now. You can check it out from any angle you want when I release. Trust me though, it's not as "off" as it looks. Part of the intrigue of this angle, though, is the fact that it does look a bit crazier than it actually is, so I don't blame you for thinking that given how I chose to present it.

Anyways, I'm liking how it's coming out thus far. Heads up, there are some roadblocks to keeping the setting at night so while I'm impressed with how awesome it can look in NL at night, I'm not sure if I'll finish and release it that way. First, spotlights turn off after a certain distance, but that distance varies for some reason...it's weird. I'll have 2 adjacent spotlights turn off without being too far away, then I'll have to go way farther for the next adjacent one to turn off, for example. I'd like it if you could set it where the spotlights cast shadows or not after a distance you input...that wouldn't be as jarring of a change, and would allow me to illuminate more of the ride without as big of a hit to fps. Right now, for me, fps aren't too terrible, but it does slow down here and there then speed up when the spotlights are out of view, which makes the ride pacing look off. That all might be something I can do with scripting...though my experience with any kind of programming is fairly limited. Only done a little bit of Matlab and Fortran, a while ago now. I might be able to edit the lighting script, if I can figure out what inputs need changing or need to be inserted. If anyone can help with this information (whether it's possible, how I might go about doing it...or if you want to do it yourself lol) please let me know.

Also, the shadows projected through the volume effect are just a little wonky. I made that volume effect very subtle, but it's still noticeably weird when onride. I don't *think* it looks how it's supposed to look, though honestly I'm not 100% sure. I may have to make it go away altogether, though.

The other thing is I really like the look of the NL water with its transparency and reflections, and you can't see any of that when it's dark out, of course. I also plan to have some scenery in the background that would need lighting at night to make sense, and that would further reduce fps. I can make that lighting not project shadows though, since it'll stay in the background.

Thanks for all the comments!

Georgia Scorcher I think is the best B&M Stand-up around, having been on that, Mantis, Riddler's Revenge, and Chang/Green Lantern.

Good news! Just got my new computer assembled and I'm set up with NL2/SketchUp - finally - did some work on the scene for my Intamin wooden coaster Lazarus this weekend, and no promises but I'm looking to have a couple screenies ready for screenshot Saturday. I redid the background wooden coaster I may have shown here, both to improve the layout a bit and to make it an actual coaster instead of 3ds like it was in NL1. It just needs banking now.

Also made some improvements to the scenery to take advantage of some features in NL2...really excited about that. Nothing too crazy, just a clever way to play with lighting that I learned from someone's construction thread. He didn't really flesh the idea out for the final release, but I will be and it should have a nice, unique effect.

The wooden coasters are autosupported for now as it's still a work in progress. Looking forward to showing you guys

Can't wait to see it!

[TTD03]

Can't wait!

Hey guys, Lazarus is still coming along. I've been working on it steadily since I said I was a bit over a month ago. I haven't posted pictures because it seems the interesting angles in my interior give a lot away, and the exterior isn't ready for primetime yet because the track is default (not the best for Intamin Plug in Play at the moment), supports are default, and most importantly my foliage still isn't in place at all. Been after a certain someone about the foliage with no luck lol but hopefully that'll pan out soon. In the meantime I've made the main area of my interior go from looking blah to AWESOME without a terrible amount of effort, I've done a bit of optimizing including deleting unnecessary faces and running it through a texture and geometry cleanup plugin that took the filesize down by about 25% (pretty significant difference). I've done some work on a transfer area, a "centerpiece" set of objects, killed some z-fighting, and made a tunnel that needs some fleshing out, plus some misc. little improvements here and there.

A couple questions:

I'd like to export my exterior as .dae, and it works fine except for the textures not showing. I read in a thread somewhere that the file name and textures can't include spaces or numbers. My textures are all included in the SketchUp file, I mostly worked on this project on a different computer and I had downloaded them there. Also I've used a few SketchUp Warehouse objects for details here and there, and those textures are included in the objects too. Thus I'm not sure how to fix the filenames before exporting. I tried opening the files up in an exterior editor under the edit tab of the material window, but I don't think that worked out...maybe I should go that route again. I also tried fixing the filenames after export, but as expected that didn't work either because the file names would be different than the model asks for so I'd lose my connection there. I know at least one person has gotten it to work. Anyone have some insight?

Second question: my tunnel is pretty standard in the way it enters and exits the ground. It's on a curved piece of track and as such it most closely resembles the style of the second tunnel on Bizarro at SFNE. If I were to make it like that ride, I could just surround it with scenery so the cutout of the NL terrain wouldn't have to be perfect, but my tunnel is more isolated at the moment. Now that I think about it, I may be able to integrate the tunnel into a nearby pathway (again similar to Bizarro). I still have the problem that my tunnel is bigger than even the dummy dive machine cutout I used, and the cutout isn't particularly accurate to my opening. I guess I have to maybe offset a few dive machine virtual tunnels to achieve a good opening size, then cover up the imperfections with 3ds...? Assuming there's no way to change the size of a virtual tunnel. I didn't see any. Maybe in the future, NL2 should have an option to cut openings to specified pieces of scenery.

Thanks for any insight you guys might have. I'm still learning the new parts of the software and I'm trying to avoid getting too caught up on little things so I can keep progressing with the important stuff.

[mkingy]

Glad to hear its still steadily moving along!

Texture-wise I have had a little experience so I here's a few thoughts that may or may not help!

If you went through the method of editing the textures within the 3DS file you'd need to have correct filename versions of the textures saved (in the same place would make things much easier) I think. To do this I'd copy the original texture and remove the illegal characters within your copy - then change the texture reference to that within the exterior 3DS modelling tools.

Alternatively have you looked at using NLMAT textures to fix the issue? From what I can tell it creates a new texture from the 3DS file and that might fix your problem!

I'll mess around with it. Thanks for the thoughts!

Someone suggested trying a 4D tunnel, and that worked perfectly. Didn't even have to mess around with several sections of track. I also got the texturing to work. Turns out when exporting scenery from SketchUp it's a good idea to have "export materials" checked in the options window. Hmmm...

Question for something I'll get into a bit later: I haven't downloaded many rides using custom trains, so I'd like some opinions. To me it seems the pros and cons are as follows:

Pros:
Offride views look authentic
Onride the pieces of the train you can see look authentic

Cons:
No camera shake
No look ahead
Anything else?

Basically I was thinking about it and it seems to me the negatives might outweigh the positives because they take away from the realism of the riding experience, which is most important. Are my cons accurate? What do you guys think?

I think you hit the nail on the head, custom trains are awesome, and even just the fact that its a possibility is awesome to me, but it just doesn't work as well as the in game trains, especially for people like me who like to ride in random spots.

Thanks for the thoughts. Based on feedback I'm leaning toward making the default trains work with textures and maybe a couple addons, not sure yet. That'll come later though. For now here's a picture I thought was pretty cool without giving too much away

[Coasterkidmwm]

Well the tunnel looks interesting and so does the upcharge in the back.