Building a town. How long is normal?

[SAR704]

There's this town that I've been working on, on and off for over a month now. Going by the amount of saved 3d objects, there's 57 done so far with only a few more objects left. Then I move onto roads, fences and more detailed stuff to finish it off. Building models continuously can be somewhat tiring, and some take up to 4 hours to build and get into TS2016. I modeled the same town in MSTS, and it took me a while, but this was years ago. Modeling it for TS though seems to be an endless task. It's only a small town, about 2-3 square kms big, with parklands etc and open space that occupy the specified dimensions. However, there's a lot of buildings like hotels and other stuff that are distinctive/unique and deserve their own place in the route.

I just don't want to throw it in the bin like I've done with my other projects, as I'll get it done at some time.

Are there any others here who have faced a similar task in regards to the opening stage of building a route?

[artimrj]

That is why I do freeware routes and use freeware assets. I can't model. Maybe instead of making ALL different houses or buildings you can use some of them more than once to fill in spaces?

[SAR704]

Modelling every house in the town? Fat chance. There's far too many .

The buildings that I'm referring to are the ones on the main street, and the one that are visible from the yard on the adjacent street. I've more or less figured out where I'm going to place duplicates of existing models, but I don't want the background to look repetitive.

[Chacal]

Can't speak for others, but I'm only vaguely aware of buildings and other scenery items when I'm playing.
Except when they are relevant to the scenario, such as industries in a local freight scenario.
I'm more conscious of vistas, for example on a boring long run I'm more likely to look around and, for example, marvel at amazing views along a river.

[jpetersjr]

I know exactly how difficult it is, it is tiring building several buildings at once, but the outcome is always rewarding when it's finally finished and you have one of the best routes on RW.

[Bananarama]

I usually spend about 15 to 20-minutes creating the basic shape for a building, add a temporary grey texture and export. Once I get about half a dozen or more, I then export to the game and place about where I want them, than go back later and update/export the individual models as I move along. This keeps me from having to do one, export, load the game (which takes forever), and dink around finding stuff. It probably all evens out in the end though, but it does break up the monotony of doing one thing for too long at one time.

[SAR704]

I think I've finished the last building now, finally. So I guess I need to add street poles, fencing etc now. Are there any of the former that are part of the Kuju assets?

If I design them myself, what is the best way to set them up? I'm thinking of making an invisible loft, which places the dangling wires as an object at a set interval, with the poles attached. Would this work ok, or am I not looking at it correctly?

[Bananarama]

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=12632

[SAR704]

I'm just curious here. How long does it normally take to do 10 miles of scenery with roads, creeks, foliage, fences etc?

In MSTS, I could do this in 4 days (with help of the gantry tool) but with less detail than what would meet TS standards. Roughly how long am I looking at for this section, working on it for approximately 4 hours per day?

[BoostedFridge]

I'm just curious here. How long does it normally take to do 10 miles of scenery with roads, creeks, foliage, fences etc?

In MSTS, I could do this in 4 days (with help of the gantry tool) but with less detail than what would meet TS standards. Roughly how long am I looking at for this section, working on it for approximately 4 hours per day?

There is a lot of variables that make it a difficult question to answer. In a canyon or narrow valley I can knock out up to 1/2 mIle in an hour. On an open plain, where you have to paint and detail a wider distance from the track it can slow down to 1/16 of a mile per hour. Towns and urban areas are even slower for me.

Things such as asset blocks, and copying and pasting trackside assets can really speed things up.

If the scenery is fairly consistent over that 10 miles, then spend the time to figure out the terrain textures and foliage assets you will use. Load up your asset pallets (red, blue, green) with the common assets. Then place your trackside grass or foliage and start copying and pasting. You will figure out pretty quick how fast you can go.

[NorthernWarrior]

This is one of the age old thorny issues when building a route. To some extent it depends what you're setting out to convey, if you're doing a short branch line then there is scope to add more detail within the limitations of your time budget and the tile object count. OTOH, if you're doing a 150 mile mega-route then some compromise is necessary, at which point for me at least the towns start getting reduced to a Railroad Tycoon style representation - a few houses, a church, a pub and maybe a few warehouses on the industrial site. Worth looking at how some of the pro authors approach it - I was quite surprised to see routes which look quite impressive from the cab actually take quite a minimalistic approach to the civilian scenery. The key being though, that it works!

As regards time, it's been a while since I got to that stage with a TS20xx route but my 25 mile Sulitjelma route took around 2 months from start to finish, working around 2 hours a day average. Subtract a week for laying track and a week for placing signals/speeds, testing etc. and that's 6 weeks (42 days) which works out at around one linear km a day. And that was a route passing largely through a wilderness area and not much custom 3D modelling. I reckon if you want to do more than a RRT3 token placement on a town you can triple or even quadruple the time needed to carry out a complex urban modelling exercise.

One reason why I sincerely hope if/when we get a SDK/Route Editor for TSW, it has some sort of autogen feature to create mid-distance scenery quickly and somewhat better copy and paste which includes your terrain painting.