Sapling in Blender? It works for Railworks?

[wacampbell]

It works ... but ...

The main problem is triangle count. In Railworks, for secondary objects like a tree, we aim for a triangle count of a few hundred to a few thousand triangles at most. We want to reserve our triangle budget for the heroes in the scene - the trains.

Sapling creates very high detail trees, typically a hundred thousand to a million triangles. Its algorithm creates four or more triangles per leaf.

Its possible in sapling to thin out the number of leaves, and reduce detail settings to get into the tens of thousands range and then the tree might load into Railworks for a demo scene. But still, it doesn't make a good model for use on a real route because its hogging too much of the GPU.

I had a bit of success with a method where I replaced the leaf texture with a full branch texture. And then turned the leaf density way down. That may be worth experimenting with.

Wayne

[wacampbell]

> We are only allowed 1 texture per object in Blender for RW export to work correctly?

Not at all. You can have multiple textures on an object, and of course multiple objects in a model.

Use the '+' button to add materials to an object, and then the 'Assign' button to assign faces of the object to that material.

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[wacampbell]

It seems you are making progress and having fun which is good.

But I think you are not putting the shader name in the right place. If you are using 'Dom's exporter, take a look at section 5.1 in the manual. The shader name, eg TrDiff, goes in the first texture slot of the material, its not the material name. The material names can be anything, eg Material, Material.001, Material.002 etc, and as I explained you can have multiple materials on an object. And each one can have the same slot 1 shader name eg TrDiff.

[wacampbell]

I see where you are struggling. When you add the shader name into the second material's top texture slot, pick it from the drop down list of existing shaders, rather than creating a new one like this.

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