Creation Sharing Oberwesterwaldbahn: Route In Progress

Today, I finally reached a point where I feel encouraged enough to set the start point for my project's documentation here in the forum.

My dream it is to give you all the experience of the railway route I grew up on when I was a little child, die Oberwesterwaldbahn (Upper Westerwald railway) from Limburg (Lahn) to [if possible] Au (Sieg).

I initially planned to create the complete route but now with all the work with it already, I shrinked the route to reaching only to Westerburg for now, but with a possible extension later on.

Technically, since I grew up in Westerburg and Berzhahn, the route to there is only really important to me, but I have the intention to provide the full route to Au (Sieg) if I can.

But to honest, I don't know if I even will be able to finish it in its current lenght. It just needs so many time and dedication. I can't make any promises. But at least you will see my progess with it or where I will got stuck in this thread.

Location:
The Westerwald is a agrocultural region between the two big metropoles Cologne (Köln) and Frankfurt am Main. The landscape consists of mid high mountains and mid deep valleys, full of plain never-ending meadows but also deep forest areas. Koblenz is pretty close, which is already in TSW4 with the Linke Rheinstrecke.



Route length:
28,6 km (to Westerburg) - actual target
65,1 km (to Altenkirchen)
78 km (full, up to Au (Sieg))

Stations:
12 (to Westerburg)
22 (to Altenkirchen)
28 (to Au)

Stations by order:
1. Limburg
2. Diez Ost
3. Staffel
4. Elz
5. Niederhadamar
6. Hadamar
7. Niederzeutzheim
8. Frickhofen
9. Wilsenroth
10. Berzhahn
11. Wilmenrod
12. Westerburg
13. Langenhahn
14. Rotenhain
15. Enspel
16. Büdingen
17. Nistertal / Bad Marienberg
18. Unnau-Korb
19. Hachenburg
20. Hattert
21. Ingelbach
22. Altenkirchen
23. Obererbach
24. Seelbach / Kloster Marienthal
25. Breitscheidt
26. Pracht Hohegrete
27. Geilhausen
28. Au (Sieg)

Electried/non-electrified?:

The route is a diesel, non electrified route, but some parts of the map are electrified for other overlapping routes like in Limburg station. I don't plan to implement catenaries and pilars, but let's see what happens. Some of my favorite AI trains, like the BR 143 with Dosto wagons, would need it so I have an interest to do that.

Possible rolling stock as it exists IRL:
1. BR 628 from Niddertalbahn DLC


2. BR 648/640 - main loco of the route nowadays (if it ever will come to TSW, fingers-crossed!)

3. Class 66 for freight stuff

4. Maybe the BR 103 from Linke Rheinstrecke (no promises for that)

5. But apart of that, I want to also try DMU locos on the route which do not drive their in real life.


In this thread, I will only be able to share my progress with it, but if you want to know more detailed information about the route and its rolling stock, you can visit my route proposal for it in the suggestion forum:
https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/oberwesterwaldbahn-rb90-limburg-lahn-au-sieg.75370/


or just check out the Wikipedia pages:
English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburg–Altenkirchen_railway
German (a bit more info): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Limburg–Altenkirchen


My progress so far:

So, I exactly started this project at November 3rd and it took me almost 2 weeks to even get to the track layering stage. I had so many problems with my Lidar data and always try to find way to get it right. Thank you very much especially to Lulon and protonmw for helping me out at some problems at these weeks, where I really was almost before giving up.

Then of course, learning the processes in QGIS and how to deal with the Editor were a major point. I'm happy that I now have at least basic undertanding of the processes to get your landscape and project to a state, in which I can create the route.

So far the last 2 weeks, I only was about to layering tracks. Both for the route itself, but also the big big railway yard/station of Limburg (Lahn). It took me 5 days to only get Limburg with its hugh railway system right, and I'm thankful that this step finally is behind me. You can see Limburg station in the following video and progress on the route map in the picture:



Now for the last week, I tried to lay tracks for the route itself further and finally arrived at Westerburg today, I'm finally at a spot where I want to dive deeper into scenery creation, signals and letting a loco drive on the tracks for tests.


Route up to Westerburg:

Route in full:


Unfortunately, I don't have the route so great finished yet as others have it, but that doesn't mean that I can't provide you an experience of the route, yet.

So, the following video shows my progess with track layering so far. It's the journey of the train from Limburg (Lahn) station all the way over to Westerburg. Please remember again that nothing in this is final and some tracks + lanscape need to be laid down still or massively reworked/adjusted.

This is a fly over to make you feel the route and get to know the scenery a bit better:


There are also some interesting spots of the route, which I still don't know how to create custom assets for yet (a thing I'm really scared of), but I hope we can get some more tutorials about or if you can share your knowledge feel free to help me out on one of these:

- Big train bridge in Westerburg
- Solarpark near Frickhofen
- Prison complex in Diez
- Buderus factory in Staffel
- Motorway A3 over my route in Staffel.
- St. Vincenz Hospital building at the top of the hill in Limburg
- Castle and cathedral builing
(Basically costum building of more complex buildings and strctures.)


But yes, this should mark now step 1 of my route creation documentation. I hope I will reach the end step and can finish the project, but who knows what will happen, if I still have enough time and interest in it after a few months. My level of expactation is also not to high, for me it will be fun enough if I ever will be able to drive on my hometown route even if authentic parts or buildings would be missing. So, don't set your expecatations to high with this project, I don't do so as well.

Just see what happens and how things will come.

Feel free to comment!

Cheers, Robert.

 

Incredible !

 

Happy to see you made it past the starting difficulties and are still enjoying route building. Nice job!
I think at 5:00 in your video you forgot to delete a piece.

 

Yes, correct. Thank you!
Yet, the railways have all over the place these left switch devices, especially in Limburg station as you can see in the other video (All full of red squares). I just found out late how delete those and at a certain point I was interested to get the tracks layered far as possible and clean up + adjusting detailed things like superelevation and even gradients later on.

Especially for the part where I just got no Lidar data left and only used the SRTM height (I think I will let you know more about what I did exactly with the Lidar issue in the other thread at a different day) until the finish lines, almost all curves and gradients are still messed up yet. Need to adjust the landscape and the tracks still.

But I'm happy that at least I got this section so far layed down with tracks. Not sure, which step next to do. I'm interested about to finally get some assets in and enhance the landscape.

 

I would just do whatever I feel like. From experience, I think it's not a good idea to be too strict about in which order you want to do something or else if it takes too long, you won't have enough motivation anymore. So if you want to place assets, just do it because you'll have to do it anyway.

And if you have any questions you can always ask me.

 

These are the special assets, I could need assitance in the future. I'm still far away from creating custom assets, but I almost reached the point where this becomes more relevant. Unfortunately, DTG didn't provide any information how they create custom assets and custom buildings. I heard some people use Sketchup others Blender. I mean yes, I could look up some tutorials in the internet for each (which I will do) but if someone has experience with building similar assets, I would be very thankful.

The examples I mentioned before.

Motorway:
This is a significant spot of the route. The A3 motorway in Staffel at the top, below the Schnellfahrstrecke Rhein-Main (Köln-Frankfurt) - where technically an ICE could drive - interesting idea. Underneath is the route and even the junction to the Lower Westerwaldbahn towards Siershahn up to the left. I'm also thinking about how to add motorway traffic to it. I never seen a motorway with 3 tracks on each side before in TSW. And also don't know how that would go along with performance. I think if I let ICES drive SFS:Rhine-Main route, the Editor would not only crash itself, but also my complete PC.


Solar park:

Also seen in the video. Someone suggested in another thread that Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Aachen would have some standalone solar panel assets, but I don't know where this should be. Or if anyone knows where I can find such assets it would be very helpful:



JVA (Prison) Diez:
Don't know how to deal with that. I could place some some tall walls etc. but the wrath at the top of the fence? Anyone has an idea to that? It's very close to the the railway and even the station Diez Ost. I only can think of creating it roughly if I really try to recreate this one.


It's also got like a church in the middle:


Ex-Buderus-foundry in Staffel:
It's a pretty large complex as well.


Significant is the tower immediately at the railway (you even can see the level crossing to the left)


If anyone got or knows of a tower asset like this that would be helpful.


The Lahn bridge at Staffel:


The bridge is longer than a usual one just being over the river.
I think I could just use 2 merged bridge asset from Dresden Riesa for this.

Thanks in advance for any tips on that.

 

Oh, and I forgot my personal favorite, the old Hülsbachtalbrücke just behind Westerburg station from the old Westerwald-Querbahn route, which you also can see at the end of the long video. This bridge I really need to bring in as well. It's a sightseeing spot of Westerburg:



Does anyone know a bridge asset like this in the DLCs?

But I guess I have to model it myself.

 

Not an immediate help but if you want I can sit down with you at some point in the next weeks and show you the general workflow of asset creation with blender, I have done that exercise a few times now.

 

That would be fantastic! I guess it also could be helpful for a lot of other people here.

 

I make all my assets with blender and I think you should probably too. But it also has a pretty steep learning curve if you have never worked with a tool like it. But if you are as determined as with QGIS then you should be able to learn it. You can create anything with it. Everything you showed anyway.

The motorway you could make as a spline mesh, which would be the easier and in my opinion the uglier variant. Meanig you could place it the same way as other roads in TSW. Or you could do it like I do it on my route. Making them entirely in blender. The whole thing. This takes significantly more time but is in my opinion much more authentic. But to be honest, I think that's maybe not worth it with a motorway unless it has exits that are very well visible from the roadway. And I'm also disappointed that we have no realistically looking Autobahn in TSW as far as I know. Performance should be no problem if you do it right.

I don't know how realistic you want the assets to look. But if you want it really realistic you need to not only worry about the tools but also about the source material. Going there yourself is pretty time consuming. But fortunately Google Street View nowadays has better coverage in Germany. You might find good photos of your buildings and bridges there. If by any chance you have an Apple device, you can use Apple Look Around, which is like Google Street View but has almost 100% coverage in Germany. Which means you will almost certainly find good images of your buildings.

The next step is how to turn the images into model. I would recommend fSpy. That's what I use. It makes it very easy to model the assets from a few good images as fSpy lets you make measurements from the images.

Bridges are more difficult because Street View only has imagery if it's near roads. But railroad bridges aren't always near roads so you need to either take photos yourself or find photos on the internet. But the photos you found are already really good.

Lastly, you can always use some assets from other routes which look similar to the real objects but you have to decide if you want to put in the extra work to make the route look less than a DTG route. Making custom assets takes some time especially as a beginner.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/lookout-tower-props maybe this one? It's not free tho.

 

Nice to see you finally have a route project as well.

About custom assets being relevant early on, you could make something called a proxy mesh (not to be confused with proxies that TSW uses). It's just a really basic model that has the exact same dimensions as the final assets (this is very important) and represents it in the scene before a proper model is made (so you can build around it in the meantime). Then once the final asset is done, it gets replaced by re-importing the source file with one that has the final geometry and all of the instances that have been placed get automatically updated.

Pretty useful workflow that I used on an ArtStation challenge before. Though I didn't get to use it in TSW yet.

 

And on top of that, Tomas 9970, if you are working on an asset and start feeling burnt out, you can often use what you have made so far as a proxy, with little or no editing, and try moving on to the next step for a bit, whatever it may be for you.

 

what is the VMAX on the route? how many trains are driving per hour and how many cargo trains are driving there daily?

 

The Vmax for the route is 60 km/h, like Niddertalbahn for example. Not a fast route, but it's not meant to be one.

Here is the reallife timetable of the RB90, the Regionalbahn line of the route:
https://www.spnv-nord.de/fileadmin/...ahrplanausblick_2022/Linienfahrplan_RB_90.pdf

Linienfahrplan_RB_90.pdf

There you can see that the RB90 line has 22 services per day each way up and from the current destination Westerburg (44 in total), but the services are not spread equally througout the day and increase traffic in rush hour times, so I wouldn't say it's one service per hour the whole time, although at daytime more or less this roughly could be said so I think.

4 daily services excluded from the count before, are from Limburg to Wilsenroth only and from there to Limburg. (Wilsenroth is 3 stations before Westerburg, Hint: You also can see where is in the Route Map pictures I attached to the OP).

But be aware of two important things with this needed being said.

1. I stopped at Westerburg for now, but initially and maybe even in the future again plan to fulfill the complete route to Au (Sieg). Side note: The route nowadays goes technically even further up to Siegen. But this is not how I knew the route and this extension in particular is not of my interest currently).

2. The operator of the route today, die Hessische Landesbahn GmbH, split the complete route from Limburg (Lahn) to Au (Sieg) (as I knew when I traveled on it) several times by different services (as you can see in the timetable).

There are some services going from Westerburg to Altenkirchen, Westerburg to Au (Sieg) or even just Altenkirchen to Au (Sieg) and thus drive only for a portion of the route.

Additionally, there is also secondary (possible AI) services from Limburg up to the third station Staffel (double track until there) and of course in Limburg with various routes to Koblenz, Gießen and the Dostos towards Frankfurt.

I don't know. It might be embarrassing to say, I don't even know if there are regular daily-based timetable freight services on any route, I always thought they either have the tracks reserved for night time and on day time they got planned through the passenger services timetable.

But maybe you ask for a rough estimation (like more or less), but even then my answer is: I have not the slightest bit of idea.

When I lived at the route, I didn't see freight trains that often and rather drive occacionally (maybe one or two per day). The region is has natural reserve of basalt, iron ore and clay and most freight traffic is because of the transport of this.

As far as I can see, there is also no information in the internet for that.

But yeah, since TSW however is not real life, I could create a freight timetable which gets along well with a passenger timetable in almost any way I want, I guess.


Speaking for both passenger and freight services, I would like to create a short timetable as well. But premise is of couse, that I will ever get that far with my route creation to come to a point where this becomes relevant.

 

So, after 2 long and messy weeks in my personal life (1 person of my family went on emergency station at the night to December 1st and I was sick as well for a week) where I couldn't dedicate some time to the project, I am happy to share some minor progress with it again which I just achieved today.

I started with rudimental platform ground creation already yesterday, but there was a problem with that which still persists, but I could at least get the best out of the situation for now and proceeded the platform creation anyways, although I have to come back at a later point to edit the platform to not only get to a certain custom shape but also even out some mistakes of detail.

However, this is what I could do so far. I used the Offset Loft tool and the platform edge blueprint BPC_PlatformSpline_GER_550_01_C to most of the platforms of the route with it (because I saw from video footage this might be the best one fitting the real look with just one white security stripe - but in real life the stripes are way more faded ). The main issue why it's not all platforms of the route, is because the platforms of most smaller stations are also way smaller than the 5 Meter broadth platform available. However, although technically the 380 version of this platform edge should be smaller, but anyhow it isn't. If anyone knows where to find a platform edge asset or blueprint for the Offset Loft tool of less broadth and can give me this tip, I would be very thankful.

Well, that's for the technical clutter today. Let's look at some pictures

Again, nothing really fency to expect, just plain platfrom grounds yet. But I want to give you the best look at it as possible,

So these first here the three main platform for Limburg (Lahn) station. The station has 3 base platforms with 6 platform tracks used for the Regionalbahn and Regionalexpress connections. ICEs do not come through here, they use the dedicated high speed station Limburg Süd (which is on the connection Köln-Frankfurt / Schnellfahrstrecke Rhein-Main) around 2 km eastwards. Therefore the platforms are a bit smaller, reaching from 150 to 240 meters.

The big trainyard you see in the background is not used for passenger services and as far as I know only used for freight (more as a temporary station for the region on the journey to other destinations) and the outermost "north wing" is for train repairs I think. I thought that it could be used for freight but the railwards towards there does not give me believe that this can be true (it's too difficult and narrow to navigate to there).

The track platform used for my route (Gleis 8 - technically Gleis 6) here is the the outermost one to the plain side (right on the first 4 pics/ right on the 5th pic).

The second track on the side of this platform (actually the most bottom right one) is used by the BR 143/Dosto line towards Frankfurt. I definitely want to add this as AI traffic.








I can only upload 5 pictures per post so I will write create another for more pictures of the platforms of the smaller stations of the route.

 

So, this is the first station after Limburg, Diez Ost (km 2,7). You can see that the station platforms are pretty irregular in length to each other. I don't know why this is the case. As I remember, I wondered about this already 20 years ago. But something like this also happens a few times more along the route I think, not so extreme but just as a strange example. I have no clue how to correctly drive on the smaller platform with a 2 wagon loco, but I guess it's doable when you just park with the 1st wagon at the start point of the platform.




This is Westerburg station (the end station after my actual set target). You maybe can see that there should be smaller platform to the right. As I said before I'm looking for smaller platform edge blueprints to fit that size as you might can imagine that the left platform does not match there. If I would place it there, the 1st track would be occupied by left part of the second platform.

 

Here are another few examples of a too broad platform edge. And yes, I know people might say I should create a custom platform asset on my own with the correct size, but anyhow I feel that it would be way too much work for me now to not only get the platfrom top but also the security stripe and the shaped edge to a level of detail as DTG already provided with its blueprints (material but also mesh wise). Therefore, I unlikely want to create a custom platform asset, at least at this moment of time.

If I really don't find another useable asset for the Offset Loft tool (not all can be used here), I guess I will go with the broader platforms for now and maybe replace them later when I have better alternative or just let them as they are.

 

There are also start and end blueprints which create the end sides of a platform.

 

So, I've looked up all folders because I was very very interested about finding these start and end blueprints you talk about, but I couldn't find them. All what I do find is these 8 platform blueprints from the S-Bahn Vorarlberg folders. And I used the third bottom right for my platform creation.


After that I found some SM assets in the DRA folders but these assets are no blueprints, which means I can't use them in the Offset Loft tool (look at the prohibited sign when dragging one of these into the Offset spline menu, but also independent of that they still all are still way too broad for the small platforms I need on my route:




So, could you say me where these blueprints are you talked about? I can't find them.

 

So, I would like to share you some new progress with station building. I actually build up Limburg (Lahn) rudimentary with some canopies and assets on the platform.

The funny thing is that the canopies are not an exact replication (they do not have these glasses every once and a while and also have only 1 pilar in the middle for the first two platforms), but I took the assets which fit the real buildings the most and actually used the one pilar assets because the platforms are not that broad and the 2 pilar canopies would be too broad to fit my platforms.

The third and second platforms are not really done yet, but I just had the feeling to share now my progress with it instead of to wait when it's completely done.

Platform 3 is not really edited and it has a different canopy than platform 1 and 2. This is so also in real life.

Platform 1 with the tracks 1 and 8 (the one used for my route) is pretty much okay for now.

Also be aware that I need to create some custom platforms assets still, these are not the final platforms. It needs to be broader on some place to set stairs to the tunnel which connects the platforms underneath. But at least, I want to give you a look at how Limburg (Lahn) station could look like more or less when it's ready.

Speaking about all the placed assets, it's also important to mention that Limburg station does not like that in reality. In reality there are just plain platforms with less things on it. But I just had the feeling to "decorate" them after my personal taste.

So here is the video of my progress with Limburg (Lahn) station:

 

Yes of course, her we go:

1. place track as usual
2. select "create loft" tool and drop a blueprint with desired platform height in (according to Lukas video)
   
3. ensure all x and y offset are zero!
   
4. create the platform
5. switch to "route building mode" and select the created platform
6. change spline meshes according to your wishes (search in meshes folders for _start / _mid /_end)
   

 

Thank you very much for helping me out and the tips with the start end creation, protonmw!

However, I have a few problems with that and I think my issue isn't solved with the solution you proposed unfortunately.

1. I guess you create your route with the platform assets for Vorarlberg, right? The first problem is that I don't. I used the platform assets from DRA and infact there is nothing like a separated start and end asset in the station folder of Dresden-Riesa.

Just a huge selection of middle parts. This is something I wonder about as well since a time.



2. I even created a weird start middle end mesh construction with the middle platform asset I used and the start and end points from platforms assets of the Vorarlberg route, here:



Now the issue is that the settings do not correctly have an option for the thing that I want -> cutting the left outermost part of the platform, so that I have the right part with the white stripe on the correct point and only cutting away from the left part of the platform (maybe you have misunderstood what I meant with that in the first place, but it's okay). The only thing that I can do in the details settings is "scaling" the mesh construct itself, but this results in also shrinking the right (white stripe part) of the platform with it, which is not what I want to do. All I need is smaller version of the my platform asset, but with the white stripe in the correct size and shape at the correct place.

 

The bridge over the Lahn river short before Staffel station is ready. It's just rudimentary and it looks a bit different than in real life (only straight side parts, no arrows). I might change it later but I'm very happy that I found a bridge asset which is not only pretty close to it and but also fits the weird extended length of the bridge perfectly. Also it was way easier to make it than it looks like since I used a bridge asset already created by DTG.

I used the asset "SM_KillianIconicBridge_01" from the "EuropeanContentPack" folder and duplicated it 2 times, placing the other 2 instances horizontally aligned and then I needed to ensure the position, angle and height is correct for the railway.

As a stand, I used the "SM_BridgeAbutment_06" asset from the Dresden-Riesa folder.

For the river part, I used the "SM_RiverPlane_01" tile asset from Dresden-Riesa as well and just scaled the tile so much that it covers the complete part. I guess this is the easiest way to create rivers and seas. I might upload a short tutorial video on how I did that, if anyone is interested in.

Here are some pictures of the real life counterpart.

I don't know yet if I will take the passenger bridge part at north side with it or not. Could also make it look weird with the bridge assets I used.

But again, further developement and adjustments of the bridge might follow. For now, it's fine for me.

 

First ride with the 4024 from Limburg to Staffel:


After a lot of trouble with an error regarding the Formsignale in the EuropeanContent folder, I could find a way to make it work with the Formsignale from the Left Rhine DLC. Thanks to the tip by pilot21 .

I think I speeded a little here and there.

Stopping at the first station Diez Ost is way more difficult than I thought, because it the gradient goes down, plus the station is located in a curve. This is a real challenge just at the start of the service!

I braked a little too soon in this run because I didn't played TSW a lot in the last 3 months and this literally was the first time after a long time of just caring about my project and being in the forum only after I actually did a little service. I also missed the stop point 3 or 4 times before and had to restart the service always again to record this video.

I'm sorry.

P.S. I don't know why the Formsignale do not work properly. But for the moment, I'm just happy that I could do my first runned service on the route.

 

I spent the last 3 days building Staffel roughly.

I mainly used assets from Niddertalbahn and DresdenRiesa.

I'm not so sure about the trees and vegetation at the moment. I tried several ones but was not that happy with each. I might change it later. Also bare in mind that this counts also for every other assets you see around the station and railways -> It might be subject to change.

I tried to make the city and the station roughly, placed the two crossovers at the Koblenzer and Elzer Straße, created a little construction site at the other side of the station and roughly built the Ex-Buderus foundry.

Still have to create the highway A3 and the short part of the Schnellfahrstrecke Frankfurt-Köln at the south end of Staffel, above the railways.

The most painful work is placing all the domestic house assets again and again. I didn't use prebuilt patterns (splines) or something like that, which means I placed a house asset everywhere where house in real life in Staffel is. Also it was important for me to recreate the whole city, not just the houses close the to the railway because the authentic distance look at Staffel when you come from Diez was a very important for me and I got to the point where I think this crucial important for all cities. Of course, you can't replicate many houses and I came to understand that we simply can't construct an exact copy of the city, but at least I try to place similar houses at the position of their real counterparts.

And I think although this is painful, I think this is the only way to create at least a half decent replication of the real cities.

The problem is that I'm absolutely freighted by this work currently, because the cities of the next stations around even are bigger than Staffel to recreate.

I have no idea at the moment how on earth I will survive this project and I think I set goals very very high, but I really want the route at least up to Westerburg created. I don't know if I can to be honest, because with the work behind me, I already can assume and guess how much will come.

Wish me luck and strength!

P.S.: What do you think about the trees? I don't know why the leaves are orange. I guess it's season dependent and I have it set to "autumn". Usually assets are shown with green leaves in the preview in the folders.

 

Your trees are all birches and all have the exact same scale, which doesn't really exist in the real world and that's why it looks weird. I would try painting wih multiple tree types at a time and even add some conifers into the mix if they are there in the real world. Also adjusting the minimum and maximum scale in the foliage settings can help with adding a bit of variety.


Also having large bushes under the trees can help create the impression of dense, unmaintained foliage if that's what you are after. It's not very good for a forest but it works for small clusters of trees.


Pretty sure this is just art principles 101 (being able to break things down) though I'm not exactly sure how one should get this mindset.

edit: Also I'm getting the exact same feeling as you do. That the scenery development is going to be endless.

 

Thank you for the tips again, Thomas. Your guides are always very appreciated by me and helpful.

The placement of the birches is actually quite basic, I know that. Although I knew of the tricks with the scale options and mixing different tree types to get a more realistic vegetation already before, I decided to not go so deep into the creation of vegetation at the current moment of time and just placed some trees to get the feeling of how it roughly may look like with the look to change it later on if I want to.

Reasons are that:
1. I had some problems with my choice of the tree types which fit best to a certain location. I don't know much of tree types unfortunately (when this topic was in the 4th class in school I moved with my family and missed the lessons about it), so my mind is a bit off on that topic. Plus the english words for the trees are completely new for me. Embarassing! But I can differentiate a conifer and deciduous tree! But I have problems detected what the trees in real life are. Here is a backlink to post 24 where I posted some pictures of the place in reality. Do you know what the bigger and medium size trees are? I think I see no conifers at this spot.

2. Adding to reason 1., my mindset changed a little in the last days while trying to find and place matching assets on the landscape and building the scenery regarding the amount of detail I will be able to achieve in TSW in comparison to real life, not only with the aspect of the amount of work it will need but also the level of detail a landscape in TSW can or can't achieve.

I mean many assets are very good. The vegetation assets are usually one of the most detailed asset types in terms of variety and quality. But especially the Niddertalbahn DLC has a special award for quality regarding vegetation. I really love the moveable trees where the branches and leaves are moving like there were wind. That's super cool! Huge respect for the creators for that, Maik Goltz !

However, Other asset types do not offer that much of variety, unfortunately. For example, the domestic city house assets for germany are roughly about 12 to 14, and this even only with the high quality Niddertalbahn DLC.

Thus in the last days I understood the following principle and premise of working on my route project: A developer/creator simply can't fully recreate a scenery in relation 1 to 1. It's simply not possible with the assets that we have available.

And yes, I could use either free or paid third party assets, but even with this idea are several problems connected, the biggest one is that I don't really want to pay for assets I can use in my project anymore that I already have. I mean in preparation for my route project I acquired the DLCs Linke Rheinstrecke, Niddertalbahn and Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Aachen just to get some assets from them -> I didn't even played these DLCs a single time yet!!! Just for the assets! No joke.


3.
I have a few problems with the Foliage tool.

A. One issue is that when I want to paint several tree types at once and select them in the foliage menu only one type is painted. I don't what I'm doing wrong of whether this is a bug. Here is a screenshot:



B. Another problem is that we only can use assets of the type "Static Mesh Foliage" for the Foliage tool. However, many (if not the majority of) vegetation assets in the DLC folders do not have such a file, means I cannot include them in the selection and can only place them on my landscape if done so in Select Mode, each one separately for its instance. Annoying!


4. Also performacne might be an issue. I can guess that the wind moving trees might consume much of it. Therefore, I maybe need to do readjustments and even deleting and replace many of those.

Really depends on what I performance I will achieve when testing in the next weeks/months.

Thank you for the tip again.

Yes, I really planned to do so and really want to implement ground level bushes, flowers, grass and even little rocks below the trees. But as I mentioned above not at the current moment of time. My first goal now is creating more of my overall route and scenery first, then if I got this ready, I'll go back into the details of each separate location. And this means for the vegetation as well as the city or railway scenery in general.

By the way, is that a current image from your route? Looks very impressing! Well done!

I think that is a feeling all of creators can relate to coming at a point where we realize that the work with such a project will be way more than we initially thought or if we did to at least get it done quicker or in a more efficient way than we thought when starting. Now realizing and facing all the issues with route creation, plus coming only slowly forward and achieving almost no "milestones" which satisfy you, frustration and despair kicks in easily.

I really do believe that about 80 to 90% of the showcased projects in the PC Editor Forum here will either get abandoned at some point and not finished at all or at least not finished in the way it was intented/planned.

For example me, I already planned to build the complete 70 km route, but after having placed all rail tracks, I quickly needed to reset and get my aims lower. Now knowing how hard it is and how much time and effort it needs to even just create simple sections of the route, I even doubt got to them now.

It's really a tough process and it requires a lot from you. Time, nerves, strength. And all of this with the question mark associated whether all of this makes sense in the end. I mean we do have no financial benefit from that and for a freeware project, I'm currently thinking about whether anyone else is really interested in the route I create or if ever really can be released at some point dependent upon the technical requirements with the Editor. I mean I'm the captian which steers this ship and has the will to go the place I want to be in, but driven by the will to create my hometown route I ask myself now if I maybe overlook the sense in it all.

All we have is limited time on this planet. Not sure yet, whether this project is worth it to continue.

Also I'm missing a bit of interest from Dovetail Games regarding the Editor regarding improvements, fixes and tutorials nowadays. When TSW4 came out, the developers regularly helped and provided tutorials. Now for more almost 3 months not a single masterclass or tutorial here in the forum has been provided anymore. I asked several times for it on the Roadmap Q&A threads, but all what happens is excuses and delays (Sorry Alex, if you read this - I know it's not your fault) and the roadmap shows improvements to the Editor only in far distance.

I have to say that I really would wish for a more healthy relation between the community creators and Dovetail Games to make all that happen what we initially planned. I don't want to sit there in 4 months, saying that I "wasted" all my of time and capacities for this project, just to get the experience and information that the developer is not interested in this part of their game anymore and only does promises for the future and schedules improvements and fixes at the end to a never-reaching date.

 

So you are purposefully making the trees wrong and then wondering why it looks bland? That doesn't seem wrong at all

To be fair, I don't know much about specific trees and their use either. I just roughly know what is loaded into my foliage painter and randomly pick four of them to get some variety. Individual asset quality also doesn't seem to matter compared to how they are used as the trees I'm using are from the Training Center (Vorarlberg ones have an undesirable feature where they turn white at high altitude).

As for getting things done within a sensible timeframe, I think it's going to be mainly about deciding what's important. Like not adding detail to things that are too far away from the track for people to notice or not making random distant structures that would only get noticed if you know it's there based on some sort of reference. In other words, a professional-sized project is going to require somewhat professional development techniques, which I don't exactly have either.

I'm tempted to just screw this (by that I mean the Rosentalbahn of course) and do some kind of other, private UE4 project that would be managable from start to finish. On that note though, I'm not exactly motivated by the final result or by driving a finished route. I just enjoy the subject of art and everything that comes with it, which might not be true (and almost certainly isn't true) for others.

As for the practical questions:
Static Meshes can be dragged into the foliage painter, however it will ask you to create a foilage asset to just set it's location somewhere within your route's directory.

I don't know why the foliage painter is refusing to paint multiple types at once as it never did this to me. Are you sure the density for some of the assets isn't 0?

 

Not purposefully, but I would call it just experimenting with simplicity and see how it looks like and other people think of it. With that said I don't have necessarily the need to completely recreate the exact tree types like in reality on that certain place for 100%. I just go by what matches the most for a location to create a beautiful and somehow individiual authentic scenery.

So if a tree which in real life is at that point, but absolutely does not convince me in my project, I'm about to swap it for the sake of beauty for sure.

BTW: I made a mistake yesterday evening and had to recreate the trees from ground up. I ensured they have different sizes now, so that it looks more natural. But as a side note, looking up the video another time I think they already had different sizes as the scale settings for the min and max value are spread by default.

Interesting to know both. The snowy trees of Vorarlberg which become white with altitude and that you can also use assets from the Training center. I didn't thought about that. This is especially cool for some (smaller) route projects which should be provided free for as much people as possible because it doesn't require one to have a dedicated DLC I guess. Clever, I might use that in the future or other projects I have in mind - premise I will have the time and will to get to that point.

But for now I'm pretty fascinated about the wind moving trees from Niddertalbahn. Only problem is performance. I will choose a different type of trees for forests in the distance I guess.

I also share the opinion (and I think everyone else does) that the scenery around the tracks is the most important and needs the most dedication. However after my experience of the last days I came to understanding that the scenery in the distance also can be very important, mainly because of two reasons which go hand in hand with each other.

The render distance in Unreal Engine (at least for the TSW Editor and TSW in general), I experienced to be pretty high in comparison to other games I've played. You can see mountains and hills from a far far away distance, which I wasn't able to when playing GTA for example. I don't know yet if there is a setting anywhere to decrease it but just speaking for itself, I like if I can see things are viewable from far away (just like in reality) - huge open world fan here.

However, when it comes to building a world scenery this is rather unfortunate, because for a realistic scenery you have to also build the scenery in the distance to be authentic enough I think.

Another relative issue is that not only the landscape itself is viewable from far distance but also the assets themselves (higher assets are maybe even clearer to see from a distance than in real life I feel because in real life certain physical factors come to mind which "blur" the vision like weather conditions, heat or air humidity), but this is not the case in Unreal Engine.

Houses and trees are be able to see from kilometers away, and relatively clear.

I actually build my first town Staffel completely even though the most parts of it are completely irrelevant for the route. But the problem is said render distance and if I look at the city from a distance (from one angle it's especially bad because my route "comes" almost from another side of the city in comparison of where I drive into it with the train).

Or you go in the third person camera while being at the station is another good example.

Seeing then a half finished city is really annoying. Therefore I think I want to go the extra miles and incorporate the "distance scenery" also pretty well or let's say as good as it gets. But I might finish the more important parts of the cities around the railway first and later come back to fulfill their distance scenery.

At the moment my mindset is better a smaller route with more detailed landscape than a longer route with smaller details. But right after saying that I'm not sure if I won't break that rule just in couple more weeks.

That is really cool as well to use the project for art purposes. It doesn't have to be the route per se.

My motivation is I guess seeking and finding childhood memories with the route back and the ability to drive at the route I once grow up on when times in my life where it was a lot better. Nostalgia can be a big motivator (and might even be able to knock out your logical thinking).

You know what, I was just dumb. I saw that dialogue appear and clicked on it, but I thought the asset couldn't be used because they were greyed out in comparison to the other Static Mesh Foliage types I dragged. Also in combination with the issue of only being able to paint one type of vegetation type (more to that in a second) I thought it wouldn't be possible.

Yes, that was it, too! I set the density to low because I had a problem with some flowers and bushes spawn too dense. So I put the density to 0.120. But I thought that multiple selected trees would be painted nonetheless, just not so often. However, the density seemed to have an unequal spreading between each trees, so I thought it wouldn't spawn.

Also noticed the "Density / 1Kuu" and "Radius" parameter for each vegetation type in the detail settings, which also have an influence to the painting density for one place.

Long talk, short: Both problems are solved. Thanks to you. Yay!

 

So technically I didn't want to give an update about every so little process anymore and wanted to summarize my progress with several cities once I got them completed but the work to build the cities with houses is really a lot and I since it turned out that I need more time to create Niederhadamar (which you by the way already can see in the distance in the video) and Hadamar, here my progress with the fourth city of the route Elz.

It took me 3 hours to create Elz just with its houses, so that a house asset is placed everywhere where a house in reality is, also facing the right direction and moreover of the same shape as its real counterpart. It's still missing a part between Elz and Staffel (around the motorway) but for now I better proceed with the other cities and come to this detail back later.

Another thing to note is that I roughly could create the Autobahn A3 and the let's say "bridges" for the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Frankfurt besides of it between Staffel and Elz.

For the highway A3 I used the asset "SM_Road_US_Highway_8L_01" from Dresden Riesa folder. No, despite the name this is not meant only for US routes. I think it even is the only highway/motorway asset in the the DLC folders and I'm thankful that I have at least that. Rebuilding a motorway wouldn't be that easy!

By the way, does anyone know I can perfectly create costumized curves for roads just like we can do for the tracks in Network Edit mode? Funny enough, I tried this tool to create a perfect curved road but - surprise - it did not work.

I also used the respective blueprint for the asset "BPC_Road_US_Highway_8L_01" but couldn't "bend" the full scaled mesh yet, just scale and rotate.

Anyways, I'm currently working on Niederhadamar and Hadamar. These share together a big "housescape" if you understand what I mean, so that it'll take some time still to build them and proceed to Niederzeutzheim.



This is how it looks like in real life (from direction Staffel). At the bottom you can see the Autobahn A3. At the right side of the picture you can see the railways I'm building running also towards Nidederhadamar and Hadamar in the background. The railway which runs from bottom right towards left mid is the lower Westerwald railway to Siershahn (over Montabaur):

 

15 minutes to watch, but 11 hours to create:



In the first half of the video I'm showing you what I did in the last week. Thereafter, I enable the Google Maps Overlay to let you see how I used that as reference to place the houses.

Short:
The cities I essentially builded with domestic houses in the last 7 days are:

• Niederhadamar (5.)
  
• Hadamar (6.)
  
• Niederzeuzheim (7.)
  
• Frickhofen (8.)
• Begin to create the solarpark near Frickhofen (it's just too large, I'll definitely need a couple of hours on that alone).
  
• Wilsenroth (9.) (plus completing the Wilsenroth railyard with 5 tracks, ideally could be used later for waiting freight trains).
  
• Berzhahn (10.)
• Wilmenrod (11.)
• Wengenroth (no station, the tracks just get along there)
• Westerburg (12.) (1st half)

Important to note that:
A. I didn't build the stations for these cities yet, I just wanted to come along with city building of the cities which remain first and don't lose any time.
B. These cities still miss commercial and industrial buildings and other things to make the cities whole. But details like that I'm going to add later as all what counts at the moment for me is get these cities created first.

Long:
Some time passed since I last posted exactly one week ago. I thought I would give you an update sooner but time just went by and I had the feeling to go beyond my limits with city creation, focusing me on that as rather giving you more updates.

For this reason, I couldn't stop at completing Niederhadamar, Hadamar and Niederzeuzheim and just got to Frickhofen. Once I was in Frickhofen, I felt why not continuing with Wilsenroth and so on and on, and today I even completed the first half of Westerburg. I can't really believe that!

I don't even know what to do next.

I guess I will come back to the start and create Limburg, the big city I'm afraid of creating it in detail, Diez Ost and the part of Limburg north to Staffel (south of the Lahn bridge).

However, the amount of timetable projects currently running are very astounding and motivated me to maybe join myself in this process by creating a basic timetable for the route. The moment of time now seems very good for it to seek for help if I need it.

Another topic is the use of the material a.k.a. painting the terrain/landscape, once I got Limburg roughly builded I think.
And of cousre vegetation will come. But as I read in another thread, vegetation/foliage can be very performance-hungry dependent upon a few factors which are not that good for a long route as I aim it for, so for the moment I think I want to see how the Editor and my project behaves with the amount of houses and the lenght of the route and adding some trains first, and then experiment with either more or less performance consuming vegetation assets.

Anyways I will update you with what I'm currently working on and I I hope my next update will not take a week.

 

wow, more German stuff, which is good by me... keeping fingers crossed for successful creation of this route ))

 

Awesome! Keep rocking. It's great to see that all the houses match the places where in reality houses are. Even in the distant scenery.

 

It takes a lot more effort to do so and I know others (probably even DTG) do/does it differently only recreating the nearby scenery, but since I know the scenery very well, it is important for me to recreate it as much as it's in reality. Otherwise, it wouldn't be enough authentic for me, I think.


And this is also important for the railway itself because for example where the route does some slopes after Berzhahn (the place where I lived once) you have a very long distance view up to Wengenroth and Westerburg in the background (where the route actually again slopes back to), which is cool that I can replicate that in TSW because of Unreal Engines very high render distance.

Also it actually gives me a 3D imprint of the location because Google Earth (the 3D projection) is not available. So, I have a nice 3D map of it, which otherwise I wouldn't have (I really like discovering maps and 3D maps). This even is a big motivation for the project on its own for me, independent of the railway aspect only.

I still have a few cities to create which are only in the distance (per se don't even have the slightest bit of importance for the railway itself) like Gemünden (at the other side of the valley to Berzahn) and Langendernbach (in the vallay under Wilsenroth), but they still are in a distance to the railway where I simply can't "ignore" them and it's important for me to get them into the map.

I hope performance does not suffer too much from it.

 

I love the progress and also envy the confidence with which you are adding new things.

May I suggest something that might save time? Pick a random house with a garden near the tracks and do a bit of an art study (if I can call it as such). Try to detail it and note what specific steps are needed to make it look acceptable. Then do the same thing for a house that is further away and look at it from the tracks (with reasonable zoom). That will let you know what is worth doing and what isn't.

 

Thank you Thomas, I appreciate the same on your route, too! Especially the scenery and artistic eye on the scenery is important for you, I see. I love that.

Yes, that's a good tip. Thank you for that!


What I had in mind when I get to the detail part of route creation, is doing vegetation and the placement of other detailed assets for the domestic houses pretty much only for the houses which are close to the railway (let's say 50 meter or so) and leave out all irrellevant stuff, which you never would look at or simply can't see from the tracks/cab, out of the game for the houses more in the distance, with the exception of houses and gardens above 50 meters that you clearly have an eye on when driving.

The idea and use behind placing all of these houses is basically to provide the real and authentic vision for these cities from the tracks which in more clear words means seeing house shapes and a collection of roofs in different shape, color and angle from the distance. That's their purpose.

I think I'm not doing much further detail work, might that be some domestic elements, a garden for the houses or even streets between the rows of them because of two reasons (except maybe some trees but also then in regard to point 2.):

1. It simply would be way too much work to do so. Even creating the nearby scenery for the dream of the full route (78km) I'm still aiming for is insane, and I'm not sure whether I even can and will to do that. Every project has its limits.

2. But another very important thing and problem, we all shall take into account when doing the plans for our projects is what actually is technically possible with Unreal Engine and the game's performance. What is the purpose of the best detailed world we could create if noone will ever be able to play on it?

I already heard in the livestreams so many times, Matt (executive producer of TSW) responding to suggestions and game improvements and generally one of the most given answers is: "It's not possible to do that in Unreal Engine".

Then I looked several threads here up in the forum and in this thread I found this information by Maik Goltz, the creator by Niddertalbahn, and his statement is actually very important for me because A. my route is very similar to his [in fact the Niddertalbahn is not that far away - 53 km air distance to the southeast from Limburg to Bad Vilbel], but with the exception of that I'm aiming for it to be even much longer LOL (this is important for the quote I post below) but also B. all of my house assets I used so far are from his Niddertalbahn DLC, plus I'm aiming for using his textures and materials for my landscape:

So, in the end I'm happy if Unreal Engine and TSW "allows" me to have some villages and the accompanied forrests in the distant scenery + more details at the nearby scenery for a route of the measurement I had in mind. This is all what I'm aiming for at the moment and hope it can be done in anyway.

 

Thanks and yeah, I indeed love doing the art on that thing.

That's something I can certainly get behind. Just houses and tall trees as smaller stuff like roads and fences will just get obstructed when watching from an angle.

As for performance considerations, I'm fully aware that there are engine limits regarding large-scale terrain that I can't even comprehend. Right now as I'm doing nearby foliage, the performance is acceptable at 1080p but the moment I set the scaling to 200%, it just tanks to 30fps on my RX 6700xt and that's pretty bad.

I wish I could run it in standalone but that's not going ot happen unless the front-end starts recognizing custom content.

 

Short:
In the linked video I show you my progress with modelling (my interpretation of) the JVA (Justizvollzugsanstalt) Diez (Diez prison).
The JVA Diez is one of 8 prisons in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and one of those where usually only inmates with hard penalities (from 8 years to livelong sentences) are kept in.

Characteristally is the church near the entry (which in fact looks a bit different in reality but is okay for me now), but also its location at the railways of the Ober-and Unterwesterwaldbahn (Lower and Upper Wester forest railway) at the east but also the connection from Limburg to Koblenz (1. section Lahntalbahn) on the south side.

Also another time note that I won't replicate the JVA completely 1-to-1 as IRL. For example, the blue and yellow painting of the buildings, I don't necessarily insist to replicate.


Trivia:
I found many useful assets in the DLCs folders which I could use for the prison (maybe you can even see my easteregg).

Funny is also that I used signal boxes as watch towers. They actually fit very well, so I even could not refrain from placing much of those along the walls.

I had an issue with finding a solution for the characteristic curled wrath upon the outer walls (which I could not find), but the solution I ended up with is using the top wrath of the toplink fence - asset "SM_TopChainLink_Fence01" in the Niddertalbahn folder and kinda of mix it with a double sized "SM_WallRetaining_07" asset (one at top of the other) from Dresden Riesa, because I found this wall type the most matching and suiting in size, color and shape and as it actually is not only a 2D blueprint of a wall (in comparison to many other wall assets in Dresden Riesa).



Long:
So in the last week I didn't work much for the project because my dog was very sick and needed much care. After a long disease and reaching a fabolous age of 16 years (accompanying me more than 15 years), he died at Monday evening. In fact, he sat beside me the whole time when I worked for the project and released my latest videos. Because of this, I needed a break from the project and did not work on it for a single time from Sunday to Thursday.

So, I have been working very much on rebuilding Limburg (Lahn) in the time I was working on my project at Saturday, yesterday and today Friday. I finished around the first half of Limburg, but I don't feel as happy with it to show you my progress just yet. It's just a little bit too early and I want to recreate it fully, so that I can show you it completely (BTW, in the video you maybe can see a little bit from it in the distance).

In my last post, I said I wanted to make it sooner and provide you an update before Friday, but due to current circumstances this was not possible for me. In fact, I even hurried for the last time I had to give you an update now on Friday. By the way, I think a weekly update is a good thing, and I think I want to keep it like that (unless I make an important step forward I want to show you).

I wish I can give you an update about the completion (roughly) of Limburg in the days of next week before Friday.

 

Thanks for the extensive updates! Looks super cool what you did with the prison Also, what is a curled wrath?

 

Thank you very much. Modelling a prison in a train simulator isn't a task many people could see a logical sense behind, but here it simply makes sense because it's so close to the railways and an interesting spot at the route actually. I expect the many lamp posts to make the prison shine like the sun at midnight, giving you like a star to orientate to from the distance.

Opps, my brain confused "wrath" with "wire" . What I meant is the spiral "curled" wire (I found out "barbed wire is the correct translation) on top of the fence like this:


In the DLCs of Dresden Riesa and Niddertalbahn I couldn't found an asset like this. The only one I could found is the upper part of the top link fence asset in the Niddertalbahn DLC which I also used as a substitution for that.

Even if I would intend to make a custom asset, I think creating a complex shape like this is a pro challenge for someone who knows his tools in 3D modelling very well, not for me.

I also think this kind of barbed wires are used only for prisons, so I don't know if I even have a chance to find it in any other DLC. But for me, it's okay now.

 

I don't know whether you can technically use that nor if you're able to pay for assets, but in case you can answer both of these with "yes", maybe these assets might be usefull:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/concrete-and-metallic-fence-pack
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/fence-chainlink-pack

 

I think that barber wire is actually really easy as it took me about 25 minutes to make one.

It's just a circle mesh that's offset and tiled into a spiral. Then there's another one with the faces rotated 90 degrees. Once that's done, you can make a UV map and add a tiled "wire" texture to both of them.

LOD1 is basically the same thing but with one of the spirals deleted and the other one rotated 45 degrees (just so it looks full from most angles). I also removed some edge loops but that's not entirely necessary.

 

Then you can turn it into a spline mesh to use it productively but that's also pretty easy I think

 

Thank you very much, Matin.

To answer the first question: I guess it will, but we only see that after we purchased it. I think a few people already had issues with importing some third party assets or blueprints to the Editor, so I would need to make the purchase to see it.

To the second question: It really depends on how much I want a certain asset. In this case, it would be nice to have it, but it's not a must. I really like the second pack. I don't know the complete scenery of the full route yet but if there would be more industrial or commercial places with fences or walls like these, it certainly is a good option.

But generally, I just want to build the route with DTG or custom assets as far as possible. I already invested in some TSW DLCs to have assets, don't necessarily want to invest more, if not urgently needed. Also the copyright of third party content is a big concern to me.

But a good option nonetheless.

 

Thank you very much for the guide, Thomas.

I didn’t know a spiral is that easy to create from a circle. And the rough spikes also seem very good.

I guess I will give this a try when I experienced a little more with Blender later on in the project.

 

I have a problem with using splines in the way you described in another thread, actually.

If I press CTRL and click on the white cubes, nothing happens. Even so in spline Mode.

But anyways, this isn't so much of an issue as I got used to the way of just duplicating the static mesh a few times and use the Gizmo tools to form straight rows of objects.

 

Ah I may have made a mistake, you have to hold the Alt key and drag one of the red/green/blue arrows, not Ctrl to create another spline point

 

I got it know! The issue was that I didn't clicked correctly on this cube. Need to drag the spline a bit up before to make it selectable.

But Huh, you can get pretty funky results with that quickly!

The only thing is as you said, only spline mesh blueprints can be used and thus you need to create one out of the static mesh before. Question: Does that also with a bunch of static meshes I grouped together like here?

 

Maybe with a custom blueprint for it, but not by default. I think the easiest is to export the group somehow as fbx, merge that in blender and reimport it as a single mesh. I think it must be a single static mesh