I recently got back from the National Train Show where we finally had a public hands on demo of Microsoft Train Simulator 2.

I must say I am completely jazzed by the turnout and the feedback.  Below are a couple of shots from the show taken by Keith Thompson.  He is one of the guys on the team.  You may or may not know him.  He used to be the editor of Model Railroader Magazine.

In the top picture my back is to the camera and the bottom picture I am the one facing the camera talking up a storm.

The pictures were taken during a setup of the booth.  Vendors were coming over because we had the bass speakers cranked and the diesel engines were rumbling.  You could feel the vibration of the engine noise all the way across the hall. 

Soon I should be able to get back to more posts and responding to people in a much more timely manner.  Getting ready for a show is always stressful and busy and we have one more big one coming up.  Hopefully I can get back to doing tutorials and demos soon.

Every once in a great while I get to do my own art.  Being a lead is sometimes frustrating because you spend more time critiquing and less time doing.  I decided to learn ZBrush.  I have always puttered around with sculpting, but I spend so much time at the computer I really didn't have the time or the space in my house to devote to sculpting.  Zbrush is great because it allows you to sculpt digitally and takes up no more room than the computer you already have.

Here are a couple of celebs I decided to sculpt.  See if you can guess who they are.

I had a great time doing these and I think I will be doing more really soon.. when I have spare time.

Thanks for looking

Hope everyone is doing well.  It's been crazy here at work.  I have been crunching to get as much done as possible for the show.  If you are at the show in Anaheim be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth and say hi!

I found this link and wanted to share

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/05/extravagant-designs-by-luigi-colani.html

Take a look at the model of a futuristic coal dust powered steam locomotive.  I wish that thing had been made.  it's a great piece of art.

Hello All,

We are quietly working away at getting ready for some upcoming events.  Sorry for the long delay in posts.  I am sure you would rather see cool stuff than hearing me drone on and on about work.  So here goes.

Here are some pictures from our travels to various locations.

The picture below is from a cab ride on the Horseshoe Curve route in Pennsylvania. Here we are just turning the curve.  As you can see it was a foggy day.  The day before this we walked a portion of this area to get a picture of the greaser units used to keep the wheels rolling smooth.  There is an observation area just to the left of the track and you can see a large black thing near the track.  That's a locomotive on display in the railfan observation area.

Next up is the Stevens Pass route. This picture is looking down from the hillside into one of the yards in Wenatchee.  One side of the Cascades is a nice lush green, with pines and ferns and the other side is high desert with scrub and small trees.  As you can see from the picture below, it's a busy place.  Lots of produce is grown in the Wenatchee area so this place is always bustling.

Here's a picture from Switzerland. This picture was taken from the road next to the station in Spiez.  The BLS facility where we were able to crawl around and on the locomotives is a short distance from this idyllic scenery.  I wouldn't mind working there if I got to see this view all the time.

And the final place we went...

Well you will learn that soon enough. Back to the grindstone!

Just kidding!

For obvious reasons I couldn't show her face, but trust me, not only was she very pretty.. she was very nice to talk to.  She happened to be at one of the stations that I was photographing, and I asked her about a nearby building.  She gave me a little information, I thanked her and went about my business.

This wasn't a unique experience, everyone I talked to were very pleasant and helpful and made my time there so much more enjoyable. 

When people hear that you are going to do research someplace, they automatically think "they are so lucky, they are going to have a great time"  It's true, usually it is an awesome time, but the reality is that you are walking for 12 to 14 hours a day.  You are also carrying around somewhere between 20 and 100lbs of gear and cases to make sure you have what you need.

Below is an image of part of the Horseshoe Curve route in Pennsylvania.  Keep in mind that the team that goes to these things usually sits behind a computer for 12 hours a day.  Rick and I are not what you would call petite. We started off in the parking lot there, then climbed all these stairs and then walked around a mile along the ballast to take a picture of a mechanism that slings grease up under the train to keep it running smoothly. Walking on ballast is like running on loose sand, except it bruises the bottoms of your feet.  Oh, that greasing unit, yeah, we found another one on a flat piece of land, right next to a tower we had to photograph anyway.

Sure, that's not a huge hike, but for fat boys like us, it might as well have been Mt. Everest.  Each time I do one of these things I lose about 10lbs, then swear to myself that I will go to the gym immediately in order to capitalize on the progress.. then I get back to work and sit my butt down for another 12 hours of talking to my square headed girlfriend.  That's what my wife calls my computer.

There ya go, I have shown the good beer and the beautiful women ( at least one ) and now all you have to do is wait for the announcement to see the fast trains.

Good Beer!!

Later, I will post the beautiful women! 

Then eventually you will see the fast trains!

-Porter

Man have I been busy.

I knew that once I got back from the research trip I would have lots of work to do, but I didn't think it would be this much.

It appears that I am not going to get the space I need for the video tutorials, and I haven't been working on them past 3 or 4 I haven't released.  I am formulating another plan, which I hope will be agreeable to everyone.  It will probably take me a while to do what I am wanting to do, but you will be getting the information as soon as I can cement the idea and get the buy off from "upstairs".

In the mean time I am busy getting stuff ready for the sim and making sure everything looks great!

We should be putting more renders up soon, I hope anyway.  I have a few more renders to do so that they have many images to pull from.

The other thing I have been doing is helping out with the scenery assets while my counterpart in the scenery area is out on vacation.  I have to say, the scenery is going to be amazing.  I am surprised by the detail that we are able to accomplish for the high detail routes.

Once we get this bad boy in the can, I plan on completing what I set out to accomplish, the 3 locs in 3 separate modeling packages.

I will have more updates soon. 

Thanks for sticking with me!

-Porter

One of my co-workers pointed out this new feature in Photoshop CS3.  There are two new tools called Auto-Align images and Auto-Blend images.  These functions lie in the Edit menu.

These two tools take images that are placed in a .PSD as separate layers and does some sort of voodoo to get them to align together.. Then if that wasn't enough, it does some other sort of voodoo to blend them together.. The result??

MathMagic!

Ok, here are the images I used:

Here is the result of Auto_Align:

Here is the result of Auto_Blend after I used the Auto_Align function:

That's it.  I put all of these pictures into one .PSD file with each picture became a layer in the file.  Select all the layers, hit the Auto_Align button and it will have several options.  I picked the first option which was Auto.

Once I hit this button it takes care of the calculations and repositioning of the layers into a stitched picture.  The blend function doesn't have any menu for previews, however I don't think it really needs it.

This is really helping me out right now.

Hey all,

I have been super busy with getting content into the simulation.  Everything is looking really good and coming together nicely. Except for server space.  Here is what I think is going on, but I am still in the dark about.

I think they are getting ready to do a be push on the TS Insider and want to make sure they all their attention is devoted to that.  If that is the case, then my stuff can wait.  We want to make sure you guys get the best information in the quickest time frame.  That being said, I am frustrated, but I think now that I have figured out the problem, I am less frustrated than before.

I have several other tutorials that I could possibly add to the site.  Currently they are in One Note which is a great Microsoft product by the way.  It allows me to quickly put together visual documents, much easier than word.  Think of it as a scratch pad with pictures.

Once I get these files converted over into a format that is web friendly I will put them here.

Again my apologies but now you know what I know.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hello all,

Still no word on when we are going to post the video.  I am a little frustrated, I don't like leaving people hanging.  The minute I can get this resolved I will make sure and post the videos.

My task list has grown quite a bit.  Previously I had help working on the vehicle assets.  There is so much stuff to check and look into and resolve, the vehicle lead position was being handled by two people.  Well, my help has taken a different job within the Aces group, so I am going at it alone.

I am not going to complain, this gives me more control over what is released, and that's fine by me. Recently I have been creating more renders so that we will have more to post on the TSInsider soon. The work on the vehicles is just outstanding and I feel honored to be part of the process.  I have no doubt that people will be amazed at the visuals we are creating for TS.

At home I have been playing around with the source engine quite a bit.  I used to be a level designer at a previous company and I feel like I need to keep my hand in there for some reason.  I would really like to spend some time with the Sandbox editor for Crysis.  This would be loads of fun.  They have done some amazing work in their tools department and I want to create some levels if I ever have time.

I just started trying to sculpt again. I haven't done this for a few years.  Once I have something worth showing I will put a photo up here.

Well, I need to get back to work.. as I said I am doing renders and they allow me a little time to type some stuff up.

I have been trying to think of other small tips to write up.  I either have medium or long tutorials to get out, but the little tricks seem to have dried up.. If anyone is having difficulty with something, send me a message and maybe I will answer it here.  At the very least I will find the answer and point you in the right direction.

Have a good rest of the week.

Well here it is, the start of another new year.  I still don't have any idea how long it will take to get my videos posted.  We are planning some activities on TSInsider, so maybe they are waiting to get that going before I get the videos posted.  I apologize for the delays.

We recently had another research trip and will probably have a couple more in the next month or two.  I am excited to finally get some of the research done, and once we finish up the rest of the trips we will have everything we need to keep the wheels rolling.

While on break I found a new art forum called Game Artisans here http://www.gameartisans.org/ 

Lots of really great artists and discussions about game art.  One of the things I see all the time is people asking the best way to render stuff out to make it look as good as possible.  I usually use Mental Ray in max.  I use Skylights and sometimes Omni lights to get the look I want.  Here's how I went about setting up this render.

The fist thing I did was to build a virtual set for my object to sit in.  I wanted it to be a very simple space that didn't have edges.  I used the top of a cylinder and I deleted the rest of the faces.

I used a cylinder that had 30 sides and 12 cap segments.  I remove the bottom and the sides as I am only going to use the top.

I convert to an editable poly and then I select the side and bottom quads and delete those.  Then I get edge mode and grab the outside edge loop.  After I have those selected I use soft selection to get a good portion of the quads toward the inner ring.

Once I have these selected I move the edges up in the Z direction.  This will give me a bowl shape in which to use as my virtual set.  I don't assign a texture to this, however I make the diffuse color white.

This is the result of my soft selection move.

As you can see from this image I have a bowl with two sky lights and an omni light way down in the bowl.  The skylights give me the nice soft lighting and the omni supplies a kicker color, in this case a slight yellow tint.

Here are the settings for my skylights and my omni.

Now I have mental ray set as my renderer.  This is under the common tab under rendering options.

The other options I want to set are under Indirect Illumination.  You want to set Enable Final Gather  and Global Illumination. Once you have these set up, there are numerous settings to play with, but I went with the default settings and had good results.

That's it.  Hit render and take a look at the results.  The best part of this is you will get some of the benefits of radiosity without the extremely long render times. In the render below I have my omni fairly far away and I turned off Shadows on my omni.  Here are the results on a box with default diffuse color on a white diffuse set that I showed above.

Hope every has a happy year ahead.

http://www.tsinsider.com/en-US/product/Pages/Renders.aspx

Here are some renders of a small sample of the rolling stock that we are working on.

Soon we will have some EU stuff to show and that will be posted at http://www.tsinsider.com as soon as we can get it in a presentable position.

We are SLOWLY working through the server issue.  I will absolutely be hosted through TSInsider, but like any giant beast, it takes a while to turn it.. no matter how hard you pull on the reigns.

I hope everyone feels it was worth the wait once I am able to get this video series posted.

Thanks again for the patience.

-Porter

I am trying to be patient and wait for space, because I want to be able to give you people a great tutorial.  I appear to be in terminal holding pattern until something can be done about server space. Until that time I am working on getting the rest of the tutorials together.  The holidays are coming up and service will be just as spotty as it has been recently and I have a huge trip coming up soon that I will probably be gone for a few weeks. 

Here's a little tip on getting max to be a little more easy on the eyes.

If you go to Customize on the top row of menu items you can find Customize User Interface.  This dialog has a few tabs, these tabs hold information that you can customize.  The last tab is Colors.  The top portion says elements and has a drop down menu. This allows you to pick specific portions of the viewport or tools colors or whatever.  The bottom part has Scheme and allows you to pick some pre-defined schemes.  Once you have all your colors the way you want them, you can save them as a new preset custom color.

Hope that helps

Things have been pretty hectic here.  Thanksgiving is coming up and many people are out of town or busy trying to get things done before taking a holiday.

Once I get back on Monday I am going to try and resolve the server issue.  I hate leaving people hanging, however there are some things that have to be done that are beyond my control.

Hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

-Porter

Hello all,

Still trying to work out the issue of server space for hosting my video tutorials.  I should be able to get my content hosted on TSInsider, just have to go through some setting up and permissions and things of that nature.  Once that is done I will be able to update a little more regularly.

I went on a photoshoot yesterday gathering content for the game.  I was lucky enough to actually get into an SW1500 and get some cab shots.  This was the one area that I was lacking the most detail on.

I am excited!

The thing that really surprised me was how tiny those interiors are.  I am a pretty big guy, but I really had to suck in the gut and squeeze past some of the levers to take my shots.  I am hoping that I was able to get enough coverage to really do a good job on that interior.

I had some difficulty getting everything that I needed because of the space in the cab and the fact that I was using a point an shoot, I wasn't able to get a flat enough lens to get some information in the frame.

I have lots of little detail pieces which I think will add tons of character to this piece.

Here's one of the cab shots.

If you are like me and 99.9% of the rest of America and aren't up to snuff on your metric conversions or if you are someone from the rest of the globe and wonder what us crazy Yankees are on about when we say 50 yards away.. then this is the tool for you.

http://joshmadison.com/software/convert/

Not only does it convert obvious things like distance it also converts units of mass, power, pressure, speed.. etc.

It may save me hours of converting feet to metric.

Get it now!!!

I wanted to point everyone to two different blogs.  The cool thing about these blogs is that they are following my tutorials.  This isn't the great news, the great news is that they are doing it in a different package other than Max.

In this blog the user (I don't know his/her name yet) Is making an engine in XSI Mod tool.

http://adventuresinmodelling.spaces.live.com

In the blog below Paul Gausden, whom I met at DevCon, is following the tutorial in 3D Canvas!

http://decapod-3d.spaces.live.com

Thanks to both of them for helping others in the community that don't have access to Max!

Ok, I am still looking into a host for the video tutorials.  Once I figure that out I will be submitting those fairly frequently.  In the hopes of getting back into the tip of the day habit, I am submitting this post.

Everyone should get their hands on CrazyBump!.

http://www.crazybump.com/

This is an amazing tool that allows you to take images and make normal, displacement and occlusion maps.

I don't recommend just using photographs when making normals, instead you need gray scale heightmaps.  This tool will allow you to take that grayscale image and make it into a normal.

Usually when creating normals I work in grayscale and my images usually end up more like the displacement map than the source image they show on the front page at the CrazyBump site.

Building your height information using black as the lowest point in your image and white as the highest, you will get better normals.

Use CrazyBump, you will be glad you did.