Creation Sharing Oberwesterwaldbahn: Route In Progress

you have to uncheck "Use Instanced Static Meshes" in order to make the thing bend properly.

As for the group, I belive there was a way to turn multiple objects into a single static mesh. Best way I can think of though (since you will need to change the origin) is to select all of them and then go to "File > Export Selected". Then set the origin to somewhere appropriate, import it back and re-apply the original materials.

 

(This time with english commentary explaining spots of the city and talking a bit about my plans what I will potentially take into the project)

In the last two weeks I've build the biggest city of my route, Limburg (Lahn) with basic domestic houses and some commercial/industrial buildings. In the last days I also got to know what splines are and how I can use them to build roads and other custom shaped continued elements. Plus I finally added some basic ground material on the terrain.

I wish I could have done a little bit more today to show you in the video. I'm a bit sad because there is currently an issue with acompiler error of the landscape sculpt mode and although I took some time off today to dedicate myself building and enhancing the route and building details, all this time was lost to find resolutions to this error. I hope that I can find a solution to that and that my route project is not at risk because of that.

It was really tough but finally after two weeks, including personal outtakes, but now I'm happy with the basic building of Limburg.

My next step is probably improving the details and the nearby scenery of the tracks along the route (after such a long time, I'm really excited about to get off the city trouble and onto country again ). I think that's pretty much it to write here for now. All my other concerns you can listen in my video.

Here are pictures of the said spots in real life which I want to create custom assets of at a later moment in time. (By the way, you can click on the names to get directed to the respective Wikipedia entry - even in english for many!)

The "Limburger Dom" (cathedral of Limburg) - a really unique building, I really want to create this asset at a later point because it simply is the most sightseeing spot of the city. A must have.





Limburg (Lahn) main station:



The St. Vincenz hospital at the top of the hill Schafsberg:




The Lahntalbrücke for the A3 motorway:





The next two are not actually planned for now, but maybe could be inspiration for crazy future plans.

The Lahntalbrücke of the Schnellfahrstrecke Rhein-Main (east of Limburg):


Limburg Süd (south) - highspeed ICE only station on the Schnellfahrstrecke Rhein-Main:




And here is also a map to show you where the spots and the railways are:

 

Really cool video!
What a pain that the city is in a valley and you can see every corner of it from the route But well done with all the houses etc, your effort is really paying off.

I think it could make sense to put some tracks on the high speed line. It doesn't need to be detailed with the superelevation etc. Especially if you can see the bridge in the distance from Limburg Central Station (green arrow) - because then at least when you want to add the ICEs you already have tracks for it and they pass over the bridge at Staffel as well. The other reason is you probably want to add the overhead catenary on the bridge at Staffel for a realistic look, and that's much easier if you just use actual tracks and the built in catenary system from TSW.
But I would leave out Limburg South Station even if it is unique, since you can't see it.

 

Thank you very much. Yes, it's a bit of a pain for the complete route that it runs along such an uneven and not plain landscape. Everywhere are hills and valleys, which provide a vision to cities and other special locations in the distance. On the other side, its what gives routes in mountainous landscapes a kind of special touch adds an open world immersion to it. I really like that and as I grew up with it, I can't refrain from not creating it. It simply would miss something to it.

Yes, I already wanted to place some tracks for the SFS Rhein-Main since quite a while ago, but things went a bit different sometimes in the last 2 weeks that I couldn't get into much of the detail work yet other than building the basic city infrastructure. In fact, I rebuilt the bridge and the complete high speed bridge spline yesterday evening just short before I recorded the video, because I wanted to at least have that as a visual guidance in to talk about it.

For your illustration about the green arrow. This was even indeed something I forgot to show in the video yesterday. One can see the bridges from the main station. I actually have doubts that you can see a train being on the outer bridge which is farther away, but at least in real life you can see trucks on the motorway A3 from the station. Drivable car traffic is also a thing I thought about to add to the motorway in Staffel and maybe even for the bridge, but I have no idea how that would work, yet.

I also forgot in the video to say that there is also the railway at the bottom of the 2 bridges towards Eschhofen (which you can see in the maps) with the Regional traffic to Frankfurt, Wiesband and Gießen and Wetzlar.

I didn't even thought about to add the overhead catenary, but you're right this probably should be in as well.

The reasons why I actually mentioned Limburg South, although is theoretically has no sense for the route I planned, was because of a variety of reasons.

First, there has been question before if Limburg has ICE traffic, which is not the case for the main station I built, but indeed true for the dedicated highspeed only station Limburg South.

Second, I think Limburg is actually a pretty good spot in Germany for the topic trains. It offers a very big railyard for the city it is, it has several regional connections to other cities closeby such as Koblenz, Siegen (which the RB90 on my route is ending today), Gießen, Wetzlar, Wiesbaden, Köln and infact 2 connections to Frankfurt am Main, a S-Bahn connection with the BR 143 and the Dostos wagons from Limburg main station and the ICE connection from Limburg South. It has a lot of relevant spots to offer for a (in comparison to other metropoles) smaller city.

And the third reason is that I'm not actually sure what I could do with the highspeed line if I can finish my project and I'm at the end of it. I already have like a weird plan in my head for a potential extension of my current route. I can't say more to that now and of course everything is just a thought and imagination at this moment of time, but just saying that a variety of possibilities what I could do are definitely provided.

But one topic of that is still a bit unclear to me and I didn't saw many people here in the forum discuss about it yet. How does one actually builld a tunnel which goes below the terrrain (for example like the Limburger Tunnel from the bridge on the eastside to the north part of the city depicted in light red in the above picture)?

I guess it's also a spline to be used, but I'm thinking about how do I make this hole in the terrain for the tunnel entries. If anyone here on the forum could do a tutorial about that topic, it would be very helpful to me in this regard.

 

In your landscape material, make sure the "Blend Mode" property is set to "Masked", and then connect the Landscape Visibility Mask to the Opacity Mask input of the material node like this:

Then you can go into Landscape mode -> Sculpt -> Visibility and paint a hole in your landscape Then you just lay your tracks as normal and use some sort of tunnel spline around it.

 

Thank you very much!

I've set up my landscape material a bit different than you I think. I used to check the option "Use Material Attributes" to feed the final landscape node with the LayerBlend node. This actually shapes the landscape node so that it only has one inlet to receive the layer input and no inlet for the 'Opacity Mask' entry.

I can make set "Blend Mode" property to "Masked" but still no inlet for the Opacity Mask.



Or is this setup okay to input the layers from the LayerBlend into the 'Base color' inlet of the final landscape node when unchecking "Use Material Attributes"? It seems to be okay as the materials seem to spawn correctly onto the terrain.

 

I think that the latter should be fine, at least it's how my materials are working so far. I've never used Material Attributes so i can't help you with that unfortunately

 

Nope. Puting the Layer Blend output into the Base Color is not the way to go. Instead, you should use the "Set Material Attributes" node to add the Landscape Mask information.


Also there are two materials that the landscape can have. One is the regular landscape material with opaque blend mode. The other one is the Landscape Hole Material, which is exactly the same except for having masked blend mode and added visibility mask.

Then every time you paint a hole somewhere, the cheaper opaque material gets replaced with the more expenisve masked one just for that little area.

 

So, this works pretty well with setting up a hole material and using it. Thank you for that tip, Thomas! However there is a problem when I do so. The hole itself is cut out as wanted, but the landscape streaming proxy tile in which the hole is gets colored in the material set in the hole material (In my case, I set the base color to 1.0, so I get it white). The set layer material of the general landscape material seems to be masked with that, but the hole is transparent.

I tried several options (changing the Material domain, Blend modes, shading model and much more which even should not have a relation to materials) but none of the ways I tried so far did work to get the material underneath back. Even repainting the landscape did not work.

How do I get to only having the hole transparent but not the surrounding area altered?

 

Well, I actually came up with the idea to just simply use the grass texture as base color for the Hole material. This masks the otherwise different colored landscape proxy tile. However, this has the downside that I can't paint some different spots on the tile in any different material, which would work for distance scenery but never can if it were close by.

 

The hole material has to be a copy of your entire landscape material plus the hole feature (masked blend mode and the Landscape Visibility Mask). Then is will look exactly the same.

As I said, the engine uses the original landscape material in places where you don't have a hole and replaces it with the more expensive masked one in tiles where you do.

 

Oh, I've misunderstood this one then from before:

Hmm, Probably you remember my last thread about the concern how many material layers within a landscape material I can have that it so doesn’t affect performance too much.

Right now after doing all these tests with the landscape material and my 39 material layers in it, I already have more than 1000 shaders to compile.

I don't know if it makes sense in such case to duplicate and having 2 parallel instances of it for my project.

Maybe I just should go with the way fceschmidt suggested above and find a way to use my final landscape node with all of these layers but without the "Use Material Attributes" option instead of using a Hole material...

 

A 1000 shaders? Damn that's a lot. How does it look in the Shader Complexity view mode?

About having two huge materials, are you concerned about maintaing parity between two huge graphs? In that case, you could hide the visiblity mask behind a static switch (disabled by default) and then make a Material Instance from the landscape material, which will have it enabled and the blend mode changed to masked. That way, all of the changes that you make to the original landscape material will transfer to the hole material.

 

So, thanks to your help fceschmidt and Tomas9970 I could create the 'Limburger Tunnel' of the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln/Frankfurt. The tracks have been laid and the OHLE masts have been placed as well today.

Don't know what I want to do with it, but I hope that I can use some of the ICE through Portals here, maybe even make a little timetable for them.

By the way, if you wonder why the start is so long and I occasionally point at some things in the distance. I tried to record this with commentary, but unfortunately my video record program didn't captured the speech. Since I don't have the time to rerecord, I just left the record as it is.

Basically what I talked about was that I started where the Limburg South station is (that the rides begins there) and some minor important things throughout the ride while I drive towards direction Köln and end the little service short after Staffel and Elz.

I didn't drive a ICE for months, so sorry for my strange moves.

 

Nice work! I can send you my Feste Fahrbahn Tracks if you like

 

That would be fantastic, yes.

But it's nice that you replied, because I wanted to ask or talk about a thing which came into my mind after placing a few kilometers of the SFS Rhine-Main.

While this thinking is a bit of exaggeration and just imagination for this moment in time (and completely goes off the project I'm currently working on), but I maybe would be interested in building a little bit more of the high speed connection between Frankfurt and Cologne at a later point of time.

The assets for Köln Hbf we already have within the DLC SFS Köln-Aachen in TSW. Only issue is Frankfurt.

But since you're building Frankfurt, maybe I could use your scenery or better maybe we even could team up at a later point (when we have our recent projects finished) to build the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Frankfurt.

For now, I just tried to build this section of it for the purpose of having some AI ICEs driving on it as a nice effect when driving through its tunnel/bridge below or seeing it on the Lahntalbrücke in the distance from the main station.

But actually driving on it now seems to be a nice experience as well.

Yes, I planned that I didn't want to talk about that topic yet (as it would put a lot pressure on me). And I know that I usually should care about making the details on my 27 km route as the next step and complete this before continueing forward, but I'm thinking alot about possible extensions or branches to my route in the last days and weeks.

While I think I should focus on the getting the full route I planned done before, die Oberwesterwaldbahn (Upper Westerwald railway) with its 78 km, I thought about the creation of the 21 km branch of the Unterwesterwaldbahn (Lower Westerwald railway) to Montabaur at a later point of time.

Montabaur station, in contrary to Limburg's main station, has both regional traffic but also the ICEs of the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Frankfurt which have one of their few stops on the complete SFS there.

Now my thought was, if I ever would extend my project to include the Lower Westerwald railway to Montabaur and I would build the station there (and maybe even have the AI ICE traffic there as well), it could be a hard but just possible challenge to go ahead and replicate the 20 km section of the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Frankfurt connecting Limburg Süd and Montabaur, and thus adding a high speed section to my otherwise small branch line. Just as a fun gimmick.

And if you would be interested in creating the Schnellfahrstrecke on your own, I would be willing to provide you "my portion" of it from Limburg Süd to Montabaur, including the built cities of Limburg and Montabaur.

I mean this is all is just mind trickery for now and nothing like this is even close to be started and I guess we want to both finish the projects we have more planned first (if this even is possible), but just raising this thought as a potential plan for the future of mine or yours (or even both of us).

What do you think about that?

 

i think that he said he wanted to build that route but there been some places with no Lidar data or something.

 

Yes, I forgot to say that. And I know exactly why this is a problem.

The problem is the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which only offers low resolution 25 meter Lidar data. This circumstance is in fact a major problem for my whole project as around 60 to 70%, it's on the territory of Rhineland-Palatinate.

It's much grosser and more inprecise than the Lidar data from Hessen (which you can see now for Limburg).

But that's not enough of bad news.

In my case, I even wanted use this Lidar data from Rhineland-Palatinate, but they were faulty (I couldn't get them together with the Lidar data from Hessen in QGIS) and I ended up with only using SRTM data for the RLP parts of my project (which quite is the majority unfortunately).

Hessen and Nordrhine-Westfalia offer high-quality 1 meter resolution, but not Rhineland-Palatinate.

Anyway, I didn't want that to stop building my home town route and I went as far being able to work with the 30 meter SRTM for now. It's really not the best option and requires loads of work and reshaping the landscape to make it fit to the railway. But I do it. I have to, because I got no other option.

 

Yes this is a good idea to build the SFS KRM together, but the problem is the missing lidar data. And it is nearly impossible to get the correct gradients for the route without the lidar data. But if they make it free one day I would be happy to build KRM with you.

 

I'm currently working only with the SRTM data for Rheinland-Pfalz as I had errors with the low quality Lidar data RLP provides for free. It's almost no difference from the 25 meter Lidar to the 30 meter SRTM data, so I decided to go just with the SRTM data.

Yes, if you want to replicate everything as it is in real life there, the gradients are indeed a big problem if we do not have high quality Lidar available. For me personally, and since I got no other option left, I lowered my expectations because of these circumstances and I'm fine with just creating the route I dream of, not exactly replicating every gradient 1 to 1.

As I said the Lidar is free, but not of any use in its quality, so that SRTM is the better/only option (for now).

 

Did you try checking the Infrastrukturregister from DB? Just as an example, here are the gradients between Limburg and Breckenheim (a stretch of about 41km), substracted as raw data directly from there (just as an example to showcase whats on there):

+2.0(+110.406); +0.5(+111.074); -10.2(+112.674); +11.0(+113.288); -35.9(+114.588); +36.9(+115.68); -11.0(+117.573); +12.7(+118.553); +19.9(+118.904); +24.5(+119.021); +27.3(+119.111); +38.5(+119.272); +5.8(+120.291); -2.5(+121.88); +24.6(+123.117); -14.4(+124.172); -8.9(+124.744); +1.5(+124.922); +10.1(+125.133); +21.0(+125.355); -4.0(+125.788); -23.8(+126.609); -10.0(+128.004); +26.0(+129.583); +32.7(+130.329); +23.5(+131.317); +2.0(+132.247); +25.0(+133.924); -2.5(+134.912); +2.5(+135.954); -27.0(+137.753); +6.0(+138.828); -25.0(+142.599); -38.5(+144.02); -8.8(+146.193); -4.0(+148.381); -38.5(+150.276); +6.3(+151.567)

With this plus the publically avalable data you may be able to get pretty close to reallity?!

 

Yeah this is also possible, but with lidar data it is waaayyy more easy

 

Yes, thank you for that information. I wanted to place the argument of the Infrastrukturregister as well as fceschmidt already mentioned it somewhere else in the forum, but forget the name of it.

I know that a lot of creators (even Lukas from DTG - he said it in the livestream) actually use the data from this registry to either shape their terrain or in case of stations the ramps of their models in Blender according to the informations there.

So far, I did not gained any experience with the DB infrastructure registry to use that data. The way how I like to work with my terrain to create smooth ramps or (in the case of the low resolution SRTM data) to even the terrain to place tracks is somehow different. I just use the landscape tools I have available in the Editor and then shape my landscape to a form that A. permits that the trains can drive on it (need to take care of upwards knits between two pieces of track or the curves aren't too sharp/narrow) and B. it doesn't look too surrealistic/ not according to its real life counterpart.

In the end as a summary, working with the 1 meter high resolution Lidar like Nordrhein-Westphalen and Hessen do offer is a lot better than using SRTM. Another example is let's say also a river along the tracks or a bridge over said river. If I only would had SRTM available for Limburg, one probably wouldn't even notice where the river Lahn is at the terrain. I would need to craft it in by myself just by using the Google Maps Overlay as a reference.

However, the state of Rheinland-Pfalz literally bends my/our hands with the low resolution they have for free. I wanted to create this route very much so I didn't cared of that restriction and took the challenge to shape the landscape of the low resolution SRTM terrain to my needs.

It's a hell lot of work more, especially for a mountainous and hilly region like the Westerwald, which the Schnellfahrstrecke runs through. But as I said before, Lowering the expectations to match its real life counterpart and just finding any solution is my way to go for now to work with it.

I don't know if it actually makes a lot of difference but as far as I understand and I think is a general rule of thumb, highspeed lines should be way more even than other railway lines. Thus, If I would create the Schnellfahrstrecke at least for the part I have in mind to potentially create (maybe the RLP part between the borders of Hessen (around Limburg actually) and the border of NRW), I theoretically should not have as much trouble as I have with my single branch line here which constantly runs through valleys and hills.

So I maybe would change my thinking to be willing to do so (shaping the landscape of the SRTM data) for a way longer distance, than I'm willing to do for my current route project.

But an important thing needed to be said again here is that all of this trouble is only for the part of the highspeed line which is in Rheinland-Pfalz and should be around 40 to 45% of it (roughly estimated). Nordrhein-Westphalen and Hessen do indeed offer high resolution 1 meter Lidar information, where all of this does not count and creating the parts of it there is way easier.

Sometimes I'm wondering how Lukas could create the Linke Rheinstrecke with that issue of the low quality and IMHO even faulty Lidar data for Rheinland-Pfalz. But as we all know, in the end it did work.

 

Maybe I should add that people are saying, Lidar should be available for free for the majority (if not all) german states at the second half of 2024.

So, if this is true maybe Rheinland-Pfalz will provide its high quality 1m resolution Lidar data for free then.

The only hope left then is that it's not wrong coded again and I can finally prepare it for the Editor without any problems in QGIS.

Anyways, I can't wait until this moment of time to develop my route further, even if it would cost me some precision points. It's simply too much time left without even the official confirmation of the government that it indeed will happen.

I'll build my route with the SRTM landscape further and maybe will do readjustments when I got the 1 meter resolution Lidar for the Rhineland-Palatinate part of my project.

 

So more than a week after my last update, I am still not ready for the next. However, I can reveal that I've laid tracks for the last week and there are some things I came across that I wanted to explain on my way to work with the terrain and especially problems with the precision to match the real life counterpart.

In the following video I talk about problems with the terrain and suggestions to DTG to improve the tools that we can use, including adding the OpenRailwayMap layer as an alternative to the Google Maps overlay and an enhancement to the laying track tool for laying long straight tracks.

I thought about creating a separate thread for that to share your thoughts on it, but however decided to put it to my route project. I probably will put this into a post in the suggestion forum as well in the next days. So, if you want to add your input you can either do that here or then there (I guess I will post the link to it here, when I got it ready).

 

1 hour fly over the section Westerburg - Altenkirchen - Au(Sieg) with german commentary:


Short:

After 2 painful weeks, I'm done with laying the rest of around 50 km of tracks for the full 78 km route.

This is how the map is looking now. The section between Westerburg and Au (Sieg) is the one I've added.



Bridge of the Oberwesterwaldbahn (Upper Westerwald Railway) short before Au over the river Sieg:


Au (Sieg) and station (aerial view) from southeast. At the right bottom the bridges towards Siegen.


Bridges in Au towards Siegen (not part of the Oberwesterwaldbahn actually) but will be included at border part of Au:



Long:

So, the last two weeks have been very busy. Although I didn't uploaded any new in 2 weeks, I worked on the route almost every day for a couple of hours. And even though the change doesn't look that astonishing and for the majority of the route, the tracks are either not done or final, it was very tough to build the tracks for the distance of more than 50 kilometers.

Due to the fact that I didn't know this piece of the route well before, some very interesting surprises have been occured to me while building the routes.

A few notable locations:
1. Tank ramp hidden in the forest before Langenhahn
2. huge trainyard of Nistertal-Bad Marienberg station
3. 1050 meter tunnel of Marienthal (very long for a small branch line)
4. Valley of Geilhausen and short before its station
5. bridge over the river Sieg (never thought it were that big and remarkable).
6. Au (Sieg)'s huge station

In the video I attached, I only talk in german because for the sake of simplicity and speed I just had the feeling that it would fit better. But it's nothing too much important to talk about. Mainly I speak about the locations of the route and characteristic of the route. And the end, I added a few personal feelings about how I perceived the last weeks.

The reason why I did the track laying of the full route instead of enhancing my already laid part was to get an overview of the work I need to do for the complete project. For another hobby of mine, I learnt that building a base construct first is very important because otherwise you'll lose yourself in the detail and forget other necessary parts of the process. And the experience and knowledge I gained with laying tracks in the last 2 weeks is important to work the further progress on my route (how much time I can spent on what and where I should not go too much into detail, not risking abandoning the aim I had in my mind from day 1).

Major problem with layering tracks in the very mountainous region of the northern part of the Upper Westerwald Railway was that the SRTM landscape in 30 meter grid resolution is so gross that I barely could lay tracks on sometimes. I hope that I maybe can use the Lidar high resolution landscape profile in the second half of 2024, when Rhineland-Palatinate is making their data for free. This is not officially announced yet, but people are saying that for the majority (if not all) states in Germany, Lidar should become free. I really hope that this is happening, because then I really can provide you the best realstic landscape with the route. But until then, I have to work with the gross SRTM landscape still.

One important thing I would like to point at is that I didn't feel very well with the route building and continue building the route to a point where I can share information with you at speed. I also felt a bit intimidated by the amount and quality of other third party and community projects to be honest. For months, we almost had no bigger news on the route project table and now within a few days so many great third party projects have been revealed in the February roadmap/Spring Direct and simultaneously many new projects have been revealed in the last 7 days.

I think it's super that TSW will get so many new content. But on the other side, I felt I'm a bit on pressure to deliver you some "qualitative" progress of mine too, which parts of the time just couldn't. Maybe it's a misunderstanding and confusion on my part, but this is just the way how I felt and dealt with it during the last week.

In the future, I want to have more fun with the project again and not only spend hours with it everyday because I have to or have to finish a certain step of the progress. Please also a reminder: Construtive critic is more than welcome but please keep your expectations low. I don't want to compete with anyone else in here and thinking in a kind of "competetion" mindset is absolutely demotivating for me personally.

I'm fine with a lower quality of the end product even if it doesn't is like a DTG route or the project of anyone else. All what I want is mainly a nice drivable route. Nothing more, nothing less. Every work of detail is not necessarily of elemantory importance to me (at least not at the moment).

I'll see what I can do achieve and what not and want to provide the best route. Everything is open and dependent upon future motivation, bugs I encounter and the steadily gained knowledge whether a particular detail is worth it or not.

Also bear in mind, that my knowledge about certain professional track aspect is not very well. I learn every day something new about it and the route.

Feel free to hint me on issues what would apply in real life, but at the same time please remember to lower expectations as this is a single person's project, time is limited and might can't fulfill every little detail which is provided in the reality.

Thanks for reading!

 

More map pictures...
Westerburg

Langenhahn

Nistertal-Bad Marienberg

Altenkirchen

Au (Sieg)

 

That's okay! Just two things to always keep in mind:

1. Don't compare yourself to others. You have your style. And if you see other projects, use them as inspriation and motivation and not as a pressure point.

2. Take all the time you need. Do it in your way. There is no rush, no deadline.

 

So, as I said in the video , I want to provide more information about the route.

As a nice side effect, it also helps me to have a collection of reference material I can use for building the route (scenery but also railway infrastructure wise).

I already created a bookmark folder with all the links in my browser, however being able to sort it here with a few words explanation helps a lot already. I hope you don't mind it if I'll paste it here. If you feel boring and have nothing better to do, here a few documentaries

Have Fun.

(BTW Limited to 5 medias only per post, need three posts to add all links):


1. Au to Altenkirchen, back in the Vectus era (green-white livery LINT 27s). In the video you can see lots of the 13 km branch between Au and Altenkirchen, including the station Au (Sieg), the bridge/ viaduct over the river Sieg, the station "Kloster Marienthal" in the middle of the forest, the tunnel Marienthal (1050 Meter), station Obererbach, station Altenkirchen, station "Pracht / Hohe Grete".


2. Eisenbahnromantik "Westerwälder Visionen" - die Westerburger Eisenbahnfreunde mit dem Ostersonntagsfest im Westerburger Erlebnisbahnhof + Berichte über die Westerwald-Querbahn (Herborn-Montabaur) und die Hülsbachtalbrücke.


3. Dieselbrummen im Westerwald (including scenery of Westerburg and Langenhahn, DB VT 98 + DB BR 218:


4. station Westerburg with HLB rolling stock (Lint 41, BR 628):


5. Erlebnisbahnhof Westerburg (less, but with images of the Hülsbachtalbrücke):

 

6. Erlebnisbahnhof Westerburg 2:


7. Level crossing Wilmenrod (scenery):


8. Level crossing Rotenhain (scenery):


9. Level crossing Obererbach (scenery):


10. Plan.D im Westerwald (scenery elements + vintage locos):

 

11. Freight train needs to be splitted because of the gradient Au-Altenkirchen (scenery):


12. Short video cuts (Erlebnisbahnhof Westerburg, but also snippets of scenery of the whole railway including Nistertal/Bad Marienberg):


13. Drone view Hülsbachtalbrücke:

 

I feel like this is relevant not just for TSW route building but any art in general. Prettymuch anyone can share his art on the internet and whether you like it or not, the higher quality stuff will always become more popular. This is great for people who just want to look at cool stuff but it's also pretty demoralizing for any artist who isn't at that level and who doesn't get to see the "mixed bag" as a result.

I mean just take a quick look at Artstation and compare community or trending feed with the latest stuff. You will find that the first two have insanely high quality stuff in them while the last one (which is unfiltered) has artworks from prettymuch all skill levels.

 

Art is a pretty special topic.

For a long time of my life I've followed the aim/dream to become an artist (but not actually at painting, it was music). Now after a few years of amateur experience (but still experience), I can say it's pretty strange and hard relating art of any kind to work (in the business and economic kind of sense) and/or competition.

One thing I don't about being an artist, doesn't matter how hard you work to achieve what you've aimed for (independent upon whether you really reached this point), all what you did, all what you made, is still only subjective matter of the opinion of the audience/listener/viewer.

You could work 2 years for a project or simple 2 minutes and in the end, some people would describe the result as trash, others maybe worship it. Now comes your own opinion at the end, to which category of those you would personally see it to be in. And once you're left the project for a couple of months, you maybe see that it really wasn't worth it in relation to the time you spent, and pain went through to create it.

And that's really what I hate about being an artist or "producing art". There is no objective relation to the work you did, to what it really was worth it and whether it makes sense or not. I prefer if I work for something, I can clearly see a result out of it, which noone also can't deny or blame.

This is even on of the reason why stepped away from "creative working" and now come to a project like this. And now the art and especially art expectation factor with the route scenery suddenly becomes relevant for me again.

I mean it might be generally acknowledged that the more amount, variety and even the individual placement/composition of elements makes a better scenery, but in the end it's art again and all subjective. Some people might prefer less and do not agree with that "more in this way = better".

Therefore art is a very difficult topic and in real life I probably would prefer not to ever make my living with it. Simply because of the reason that everything you do can be received so differently and subjectively, which not only makes it hard to find an audience but also in the end finding or being yourself.

And I don't want to get broken by losing myself into hilarious mindsets and aims I never can achieve again. If I would come to art again, I simply would prefer the "minimalistic style" and just do something (I always like to say "just paint the LOVE*** picture" when doing work) and be happy with doing so and the result you achieved. Because this in the end is the most important thing and even purpose about doing art and my opinion I now gained after a couple of years: Simply having fun with it. If you don't have fun with it, then art is not worth it and let it go.

This is the best for oneself. Don't be too hard to yourself to struggle for illusive dreams and start to realize that all of that in the end isn't worth it. Have fun with it, that's its purpose, nothing else.

 

Moo

 

Perspective from Staffel towards Limburg (northside of the Lahn river bridge):

 

Wow that looks very good! continue that work

 

Wow, that looks very impressive!

 

Elz (Eisenbahnstraße 22-26) towards Staffel and Limburg. The bridge where the tracks go to is the A3 motorway.

 

Childhood memories slowly become true again...

The BR 628 as the RB90 of my route on platform 8 (Gleis 8). Closeby a BR 143 with 3 Dosto coaches, the RB22/RE20 to Frankfurt (Main) - aka the Main-Lahn-Bahn - on platform 1 (Gleis 1) in Limburg. I wasn't at that place in almost 20 years, but now I'm there again.

 

Hi,
your Train Stations look awsome! I was wondering how you added the station roofs and other objects. Did you also use the offset loft tool for that? Also earlier, you had these other platform types on screenshots, I was wondering if they are usable with the offset loft tool.

Thanks!

Trainspotting Norddeutschland

 

Thank you very much!

No, I only used the Offset Loft tool for the platforms. All other objects I placed manually. For the canopies (the station roofs) I used the manual technique, too. Since I didn't know at that point of time what blueprint splines are, I placed every spline and alike things in the technique to place a static mesh at the world, then duplicate the static mesh and drag the duplicate(s) along the horizontal axis, so that they form a manual constructed spline (Still use this technique sometimes because it can be faster than using a spline blueprint).

Then because canopies have a start and end static mesh, I placed these on the respective start or end of the formation.

It's quite a long while ago where did that, but I think the main reason why (and this is important for the second point also) was that the Offset Loft tool only allowed certain types of blueprints to work with it and somehow I couldn't find another way to do that job at the moment.

Important to note is that while platfroms look pretty nice in the pictures I might need to serious readjustments in the future. I still need to build the station building in Blender and probably have to do so for the three platforms because they have kind of a custom shape and need to have some special stairways to the underpass which connects them.

Also the platforms generated by the Offset loft tool A. do not perfectly align in the middle of the platform with their ground textures when placed of both sides of a platform (when you have 1 platform but create 2 platfrom tracks from both sides) and somehow have missing back and side part which need to be filled/covered.

So, Readjustments need to be done. But I guess it all depends on how much time I can spent on this detail. My most important step for the moment is getting the scenery along the route finished. Thereafter, I guess I'll spent more time on creating own 3D assets in Blender for the stations, platforms and station buildings along the route.

I think you mean this post of mine, right?

In the post I think it's described best already. I couldn't use them with the Offset Loft tool because the field for Offset Spline did not allow to drag them inside of there and give them as entry there. Don't know why. Didn't experiemented much on that topic, tough, but I guess you have to look at the dropdown menu of the Offset Spline entry and then maybe find it through there.

Another problem I had and still have is that for my route many platforms of stations are actually very very small in its broadth, so I guess I have to create custom platforms for these or either keep the broader platform types I can use with the Offset Loft tool in.

As you can see, I still need to work a lot on the platform topic, too.

But yeah, all depends on how much time I can and want to spent with it as single person in this already very ambitious project.

 

Section between Niederhadamar and Elz, street name "Mainzer Landstraße/Hadamarer Straße"

(Question: I got some spawning problems in PIE with the voltage pilar splines because the start/end points are spread abroad many landscape tiles. Anyone has a clue to spawn them (a spline blueprint) static/permanently in the world without level streaming?)

 

I think you should try to split them up so that each spline is spred between at most 2 landscape tiles. Like if you place a pillar and it's in a different tile than the actor's origin, then you should make it a new actor instead.

As for having these loaded all the time, you can probably just do the classic "Right Click > Level > Move to Persistent Level" but I wouldn't recommend doing that as having things permanently loaded even on a 30 km route can add up pretty quickly.

 

I already tried the method to place individual shorter splines over the distance. However, getting the effect that the separate splines would be naturally together and that it is not looking weird and surrealistic is a big problem. Unfortunately in my situation, the voltage connections follow along the route for quite a while in noticable distance, so it's not even a thing for a few scenery tiles when they would go in 90 degree angle to the tracks only.

1. Way: Place the start node of the second spline at the same location the end node of the first spline has.
Result: It could work with spots that are very far away, but at a medium distance to the tracks (let's say 800 meters) you already can see that there is something wrong and I placed two of them together.

2. Way: Place the start node of the second spline at the next location and independent of the end node of the first spline.
Result: There are of course no cables between the respective pilars of first and second spline, which one also can see in the distance, and I doesn't feel like this is a good solution, either.

I guess since there is no way that individual nodes of a spline can be attached to the respective streamed tile and if this really works, this would be the better option in my case, even if the spline is several kilometer long. Thank you for the tip with the persistent level!

 

The scenery of your route looks great! Are you using the default DTG vegetation assets?

 

Thank you. Yes, I use the stock DTG vegetation. Not quite sure if I'll keep all like that. Niddertalbahn has better quality assets, which offer more variety and even functionality like the wind moving vegetation. I might want to add or mix some of these in at a later point.

Also not one single time discovered if there is something good to find at Unreal Marketplace. I expect there are a lot good things there as well. But for now, placing the basic scenery and vegetation for most of the route to see how it's look like is the thing I'm currently working at.

Did you used DTG default vegetation too or do you used the better Niddertalbahn vegetation from the start up?

 

No I used the Niddertahlbahn vegetation from the start but I was impressed on how good the default vegetation looks on the screenshots.

 

Hi, very quick question. Where did you find all the Objects for the Train Station? I mean where in what folder are they located?

How did you add text to the custom Train Station Signs?

Thanks! I hope you have a good day

Trainspotting Norddeutschland

 

"DLC Content Plugin -> Scenery -> Stations -> StationClutter"

"DLC Content Plugin -> Scenery -> Stations -> Signage -> Blueprints"

There are dedicated blueprints for the station signage boards, which have a Text Render child. You can select this child in the Details panel and then add the text of choice to it, change font and font size.

In case, it's a double sign with one sign at the front and one at the back, you have two of these Text Render childs, which you need to setup individually each.




However, for some spline blueprints or for other reasons, you find sometimes a blank sign board without a Text Render child to it. Then you can use a separate Text Render actor (from the "Place Actors" menu to the left side of the screen) and either connect it to the blueprint (if that works) or if all else fails, place this Text Render Actor upon the signage board.

 

Thank you very much! I am very close to finishing the part Hannover Hbf - Lehrte, of my route (Hauptstrecke Hannover- Hamburg)

Thanks for your support! I hope you have a good day

LG Trainspotting Norddeutschland