Railworks America

There are occasions where I am exporting a shape with the Blueprint Editor and I will receive the Error Message: "Too Many Nodes." I am presuming that it means there is too much detail in the model that I am trying to export. Would this be a reasonable assumption? If that is the issue, how might I be able to reduce the number of nodes (whatever a node may be) to a level acceptable to the Blueprint Editor?

This problem comes and goes. It means you have to many individual parts in your model. Most of the time, 255 individual parts is the max limit. 256 will cause the blueprint editor to throw the to many nodes error. As I said, it comes and goes. I have in the past exported 315 with no discernable difference from any other model i've done.

To get around this, you join non-animated parts together, taking into account your LODing to combine parts according to viewing distance. Another way is if your model is complicated split it into child parts. For example, if you are making a locomotive cab, your control surfaces could be the Cab model, while your static surfaces (cab walls, windows, flooring, cabinets, etc) could be a separate child model.

Thank you, Jerry, for the guidance on the nodes thing. For the record, I'm using 3ds Max 2016. I have tried grouping items together and I found that they export just fine now, except to say that the objects I grouped in the model don't show up when I place the model into RailWorks. It would seem that grouping objects in the model has adverse affects in the end. Is there some trick to grouping these objects so that I can reduce the number of nodes to 255 (or less) and still they would all appear in the sim?

I use Blender, so any advice I could give about 3DSMax would only be speculative. As far as Groups go, they are not the same as Joining. Grouping simply means that you can have a parent object and several children beneath it. In your modelling program, that means you could move the parent and the children will follow, or have the children inherit the parent properties. Grouping has no bearing on the final export from the Blueprint Editor in Railworks, and it does not reduce the number of nodes. Joining, on the other hand, will take a number of objects and weld them together to make on object, which will make a difference in Railworks.

I totally understand why you would not want to join a large number of objects, as it is easier to deal with each part separately in your modelling program. I try to keep as many parts separate as possible.

As for your disappearances, if you have group or part name that is similar or the same as another, those parts will not show up in the Editor/Game, so check your naming. In a perfect world you modellng program should automatically change like-names, but sometimes it does slip through. 3DCrapter was very annoying in this respect.

JerryC wrote: 3DCrapter was very annoying in this respect.

In 3DC, just do this:

Plug-Ins > Create Unique Names

Problem solved.

That works only some of the time, and when it does, it takes so long to parse the node and group names that in that amount of time I could have found and renamed the parts manually.

Switched to Blender. Problem solved!

Well that just answered a question I had about grouping verses joining in Blender. Thank you!!

JerryC wrote:That works only some of the time, and when it does, it takes so long to parse the node and group names that in that amount of time I could have found and renamed the parts manually.

It's always worked flawlessly and instantaneously for me. Different version of 3DC perhaps?

JerryC wrote:Switched to Blender. Problem solved!

I might have a look at Blender next year, after I finish the current project. The crashes that 3DC suffers several times a day are what annoy me the most.

3DC 9.1, with all of the enhancement add-ons, is the highest I could use. 9.2 and then the later betas were grossly unstable.

>>>I might have a look at Blender next year, after I finish the current project. The crashes that 3DC suffers several times a day are what annoy me the most.<<<

Hitting Blender or 3DSMax from scratch would be bewildering, but with your extensive experience with 3DC, switching will be a breeze.

cnwfan wrote:Well that just answered a question I had about grouping verses joining in Blender. Thank you!!

I've tried the Grouping feature in Blender, but I never found it to be all that useful.

I made the jump from 3DC to Blender earlier this year... and I'm glad I did. I'm nowhere near the level of modeling skills of Jerry or Mike, but with what 3DC skills I had, the jump to Blender wasn't that bad. It was mainly getting use to the user interface, and learning the key shortcuts to do the standard operations you would do on an object in 3DC. Plus, there are a whole lot of Blender tutorials on the web covering modeling, texturing, and rendering.