Railworks America

Some information that might be of value to those of you using 3DCanvas:

Over at UKTrainsim, someone has been experimenting with Emissive values to make glowing houses and signs. In 3DCanvas/Crafter, the Emissive value is known as Ambient. In Railworks 2, and without the TSX engine turned on, setting a high Ambient value on your models (5-100) would make your models light up at night. I used this to make windows light up at night without having to use a special shader. Well, as we all so painfully know, lots of things have changed in RW3, and the Ambient setting is one of them. Setting a high ambient value on your models now not only makes them light up at night, it makes them glow like a neon light! This is very useful for neon and street lights, but not so good for a house or a building.

In 3DCrafter, after a bit of experimentation, the optimum values for Diffuse, Ambient, and Speculum are 40,2,0 for non-lit models. You can still use Ambient to make glowing windows, but I wouldn't push it much past 40 or they will start glowing around the edges.

I've stickied this for a while.

We all know now that a high ambient setting creates nicely lit windows in RW3-Legacy Mode, but makes a fuzzy glow in TSX, so it's no longer desirable for that application (use Tex instead). Now i've found another little bug that seems to only affect legacy mode. If you are using 3DCanvas/Crafter and you set your Specular value above 0, your model will light at night as if in full daylight. Normally, I set Specular to 0 on ky models, but some of them were set at 10 and escaped notice. Curiously, they did not light up at night in Railworks 2, so this is another core program change.

Although it may peeve people who are running Legacy Mode, at night, i'm not sure if it's going to be worth the trouble to reset the specular values to zero on these models. Sooner or later, TSX will be the only engine running Railworks, ane since most people are slowly getting used to it, they are not going to see the assets light up anyway.