Model railroading

[Ben]

Hi all!

I will chase down thes links you posted latter but want to comment on Walemar's posting.

I want to thank you for this discription of the files used becuase this is very timely.

I had alluded to (in an earlier posting) to using the CW 3-d graph.

When you mentioned that the RGB format of the color was flip-floped from the native LV format a light went on.

The CW 3-d graph has the nature. So let me share my idea and then latter I will post the code I develop to illustrate this.

It is possible to map custom colors onto the points plotted using the 3-d graph. I plan to take a series of photos of the layout that I can peice together to get an arial view. Before doing so, I will temporarily place a bunch of "X"'s using masking tape at all of the high, low and ridges of the layout. I can then take measurements of the physical locations of all of the X's.

Once I assemble the images using the X's to allign things, I should then be able to scale the image using the X's. Using the measurements, I should then be able to do a spline fit of and plot a parametric surface of the terain. The next step would be to use the color info from the bitmap images to control the point color of the surface.

When I am done I hope to be able to produce a 3-d plot that can be manipulated as desired.

The next step (if I ever actually find the time to do this) would be to manually mark all of the track routing and buid a database of the lengths and grades of each block. The track can then be plotted over top of my 3d map. Since I am already tracking movement of trains from block to block, I should be able to enunciate the trains location on the 3d image.

The biggest problem I see in brining this to fruition is two-fold but these two factors may cancel each other.

Issues;
1) The graphic rendering will be CPU intensive. If I try to plot a point at every pixel from the images, the machine will crawl while changing views.

2) I can only do this in my spare time (i.e. after work and after my remodeling for my wife) so this may not come very soon.

But if I take enough time devloping this idea, technology may improve to the point where the CPU's of that day can keep up with the graphic demands.

I will try to get something posted as soon as I can.

Thank you for reading!

Ben

[Ben]

One more quick note.

Please take a close look at the attached jpg.

If you follow the stream to the back-drop you will see where we used a mirror to make the sream look like it flows from deeper in the layout that it actually does.

The trick here was to make sure the mirror was perpendicular to the streams path but NOT perpendicular to the viewing angle. I accomplished this by putting a small bend in the stream.

I am pointing this out in the event you would like to perform a similar trick.

Ben

[waldemar.hersacher]

Hi Ben,

have you ever read the book "Model railroading with John Allen"? Or some of his articles in a magazine? He descibed the trick using a mirror to extend scenery. In one of them he mirrored a passenger station which was at the other side of the room. The original was called Akin and the mirrored one Nika. Another was the subway station. He positioned two mirrors reflecting to each other. This way you get an infinite length station if the light wouldn't degrease which each reflection.

Your mirror is also positioned good. It took me some time to detect where it is located.

[Ben]

Hi Waldemar,

I am quickly falling behind on my reading as a result of your postings.

I hope to spend some time this week-end working on my "training". I will try to chase down some of your links then.

The art of using mirrors is of great interest to me. I have been trying to figure out how to set up mirrors to make the blast furnace look like it is just one of pair.

Ben

[Ben]

I experimented with 3d graph and the results are attached.

Ben

[waldemar.hersacher]

Dear Ben,

very interesting. I tried it first on my home machine but it chrashed when it tries to display the surface. My machine at work was able to handle it (same LV 7.1.1, different OS, different CPU speed).

I never used the 3D-Graph control but it seems to have some nice features.

What's going on by now?

I discontinued the layout which I started first (the one with the passenger station and the two trains) for testing the railroad program.

I started a new one (the one with the two bridges) but it is a factor 2.5 too wide since the "New layout" dialog won't let me enter a smaller one. This one will be continued for playing purposes.

I started a second one after I found out how the data is hold in the various files. This has the size of the room (3.13 X 2.64 m; 10.27 X 8.66 ft) I will build my layout. I use Excel and an editor to calculate the position and direction of the tracks and take it into the XML-File. Now I have layed 30 tracks and I have seen that it will become more work with the editor to enter all values in the right lines. I think of building a track laying program in LV for the XML-File.

Message Edited by waldemar.hersacher on 04-25-2005 01:50 PM

[Ben]

WHat I posted previously was just a first go. Wait until I post the new version.

I spent a good bit of the week-end carving the landscape.

I now have a semi-useful tool that lets me edit the landscape. I was planning on cleaning it up a bit and maybe posting it here with notes of some of the adventures I had while developing it. I will do that before adding any tracks and the train animations.

If time permits, I will try to get something posted this evening.

Maybe we can get some of the non-model railroaders to help out, after all this could be useful stuff in mapping caves and creating video game landscapes.

Ben

[chilly_charly]

---

@Ben wrote:
...after all this could be useful stuff in mapping caves...

Ben

---

Let's have a look !

CC

[Ben]

I am not ready to post yet but I am working on this.

The VI with the 3d graph expldoes to over 4Meg once it is run.

I do not know of any way to programatically reset this but I did find a work-around. If I replace the 3-d graph with a fresh one off of the pallette, the VI is only 440K. BUt these means I loose all of my manually applied graph settings. I started going through and coding up the graph set-up stuff so it will look right when run. I have to hide planes, create a cursor, turn off auto-scaling etc. I drew the line with setting the viewing angle. I think it is ready to go now.

In order to try to get the max learning potential out of this, I am going to post the elements in the order I encountered them and try to share my challenges. This evening looks like the night I will be able to start the adventure, but we will see.

I would really like to turn this into a group project by which we could learn as a group. My code has a number of short comings that I hope others can help improve.

Please stay tuned!

Ben

[chilly_charly]

---

Ben wrote : ...The VI with the 3d graph explodes to over 4Meg once it is run.

I do not know of any way to programatically reset this but I did find a work-around.

Ben, I had a similar problem, and I found that passing empty arrays to the 3D graph, as last operation, reduced dramatically the memory used.

CC