I had thought of that and reset the Scenario to Summer fine weather. This photo shows the result. The whole cab now has a blue cast so the green walls looks the same as the grey metal parts and this also includes the loco dome outside the window and even the distant Goods Shed building. This may be related to Unreal engine handling of sRGB textures so I also tried turning the sRGB off on the Base Colour texture (making it Linear Colour) and the next photo shows the result.(In the rain) Although quite bright the colours are closer to the original with clear separation between the green walls and the metal parts and even differences between the cast valves and the lighter coloured steel parts. The main problem with this version is that the green walls have large areas of "oil stain" colours which I guess are due to noise masks which I applied in Armor Paint (to get the colour variation) being too low resolution for the 8 bit 4K texture to handle . I saved a 16 bit .exr version of the texture but this was 95Mb compared to 6.5Mb for the 8 bit. I'm not sure if I need to have a Post Processing Volume (or Lightmass) in the Cab but the DTG models I'm copying don't seem to have them. I 'll leave it as it is at the moment and concentrate on trying to get the controls working.
Thanks to you and star#5823 for your encouragement. I'm not sure I'm really third party partner material and for the moment I'll just carry on trying to sort things out for myself. Thanks again for your support.
Thanks for your encouragement. Sorry for the delay in responding but I have been very busy trying to set up the loco in the editor. Please see my other thread (Setting up RVV for steam loco) for latest updates.
Thanks for your encouragement. Unfortunately not much progress to report this week. I have managed to get the cab controls animated and feeding into the Simugraph so I can now drive the train from the cab. At the moment the reverser is jumping back to the centre position when I let go of the VHID but I think this is because I'm using a rotary control in the RVM which doesn't rally understand the Lever reverse. The main problem (which I've struggled for over a week to fix) is that the coupling rods still rotate around with the wheels instead of staying horizontal. The nearest I've come to solving this problem is to attach separate coupling rods to a spring arm. The Coupling Rod then rotates correctly but refuses to line up with the loco and maintains a World Rotation sticking out at an angle. If I adjust the angle that works OK until the loco goes round a corner and then the rod moves again. If I set the spring arm to inherit Z Axis rotation everything is fine but when the rod reaches the centre of the wheel it flips "inside out" on the Z axis and doesn't line up correctly. This is apparently the famous Gimbal Lock. As the loco uses a TSW Rail Vehicle Animation Blueprint (which drives the wheels automatically from the Simugraph) it is difficult to use any of Unreal 's recommended methods. Again, this problem only affects Steam locos as the wheels themselves are working fine. I will have to spend some time on other things (steam effects and sounds) and take a break from the coupling rods for a while. On a brighter note I have realised that I can reuse most of the work so far (with a little modification) to make the Class 48xx/14xx Auto tank engine and here is photo of the "Test bed" loco with the smaller trailing wheels at the back in the Editor !!
Thanks for another update, keep at it and at this rate this locomotive would be better than 90% of the locomotive packs
Just a quick thought, but the DTG Simugraph driving the wheel animation is almost certainly doing so by updating the axle bone's rotation. My first thought is that you should be able to get a reference to the bone in your rvv blueprint, and then get the rotation from that to work out the appropriate offset mathematically. I expect that's one of the first things you tried, though. Edited to add: if you can get a position using that or another method, you could copy the orientation for the beam from the main rvv component, or root bone for instance. You'd want to have it update per tick, of course.
Thanks to you both (star#5823 and pwilson79) for your encouragement. Today I tried a simple method of sending a Variable (Default 0) from the RVV on Event Tick to the main loco Animation Blueprint and using that with Transform Bone Node to set the Y axis rotation of the Coupling Rod to zero. Nothing happened so I put an Additive Node between the transform and the Output Pose. When I loaded the scenario the Cab seemed to be underground and when I looked out of the window I could see giant wheels and realised my cab was in one corner of a 100 times full size loco !!. I can happily manipulate bones in the Cab ABP but trying to alter or add to the Rail Vehicle one (which moves the wheels) is not working for me. I have been continuing with getting all the (Driver's) Controls animating and am currently downloading the free upgrade of TSW6 (with minimum additional DLC'S) in the hope that I will then be able to get the "new" Editor ? from Epic Games. I'll do another update if and when I make any positive progress.
This looks fantastic! Can't wait to see what comes of it. The only thing I've noticed that doesn't look right on the model is that you have the whistles the wrong way round. The low tone (larger one) should be on the right hand side and the high tone (smaller one) on the left/fireman's side. Other than that this is coming together rather nicely Hopefully this and other similar projects show DTG that there is still a demand for steam and that they should pick up the development of the steam side of TSW again. Build it and they will come as the saying goes.
Thanks for your encouragement. I stand corrected on the subject of the whistles. For these details on I was relying on F.W. Roche book of loco drawings in 4mm scale and he gives the dimensions of the whistles but draws them one behind the other so I wasn't clear about which side they were on. I need to reload the mesh to correct an error where the Reverser Lever Pivot Pins are being left behind when the lever moves so I will correct the Whistles at the same time. If I can correct the Coupling Rods I hope to do a You Tube video showing the loco being driven in a test scenario. I have almost finished the cab control animations (not the Fireman's) and it now looks Ok from in the cab (apart from the conn rods coming up through the floor every so often.) I still need to sort out the Brake System (Steam Brake with vacuum train pipe control ) in the Simugraph and also how to link up the two steam cylinders. Currently with one of the cylinders offset by 90 degrees the loco runs OK in Reverse but gets stuck in Forward with the driven wheels rocking backwards and forwards. The same happens with the corresponding valve gear offset at 90 degrees either with or without the cylinder offset the same amount. For interest the attached photo shows my current Simugraph arrangement for the cylinders. (I realise the _R cylinder is connected to the _L valve gear ) but the names don't seem to have any connection with the Simugraph Logic. The pink lines represent Steam and the yellow lines Torque. The red "cut off" pins on the valve gear are fed with the current Reverser setting from the event Graph of the RVM (in the range -1 to+1 with zero as the "Mid Gear" value. The connections to the axle are a bit confusing because the valve gears need a link to the axle (to feed the cylinder correctly) and the torque output from the cylinders (and brake shoes) also has to be attached to the axles - all seemingly at the same pin on the axle node. I suspect this is where the problem is occurring. Clearly I still have much to learn about Simugraph !
