I'm building a switch for my new tracks. And suddenly I've got a big problem with the animation of the rails: the part of the rail that has to be moved seems to 'remember' from somehow a certain position and it snaps to that position every time I try to animate it. It doesn't help to reset all the animation positions and orientations neither for the special part alone nor for the whole bunch. Even reloading and beginning from scratch didn't help the part stubbornly seems to 'remember' something that never was. Any ideas?

An addition: the animation orientations differ only about -0,17 °. Is 3DC not capable of animating such low values? It seems to me that the animation is simply put to 0° every time I change to the next step.

Hi Hannes,
never had such thing. I have some expirience in building rails and switches and think your problem might depend on the way you build the modell. Did you follow the suggestions in the xtracks developer readme?

adition to hannes' addition: 3DC is capable of doing a small angle. How many frames do you want to build? In my expirience MSTS will only proper animate with 2 ( starting-position, end-position) this is in contradiction to okrasa's suggestions in his readme

I followed most of the suggestions and built some switches before quite successfully. I didn't check the angles though and therefore I thought as this particular switch is quite different in dimensions with smaller angles this might be the cause. Animation worked with all my switches without a hitch but now I'm without a clue.
I tried positioning a simple cube on the track an animated it in two steps with the same angle of 0,17° and it fell back to the zero position too. There must be something in the whole construction that does this. Maybe hierarchy but I checked everything there and it seems to be o.k.

Snap to grid?
Try to do the switch with scripting. The blades will work and align an order of magnitude better :-) With scripting you can simulate 'Federschienenzunge' without visible gaps and much more...

No snap to grid and scripting is not really my thing; would have to learn it from scratch.

Look for your settings

iviewcapture_date_22_10_2004_time_22_44_21.jpg (20 Kb, 153 downloads) Settings

Have the settings just like this.
With experimenting I discovered that in animation mode I can change the angle to -,17 ° but when I got to the next step that angle is immediatly set to 0. It should be -.17 with step 0, 0° with step 1 and -,17° with step 2 but the program reverts them all to zero.

After some experiments with completly new scenes I'm quite convinced that 3DC animation doesn't accept a lower value than 0.26° for rotating an object. All lower values are reduced to 0°. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Hannes44,

You are not wrong, I see the same results when I try to animate objects with less than .26° rotation.

However, you should be able to get realistic movement even with this limitation. It could be that you are trying to rotate points that are too long. I've been able to get realistic movement by splitting each point into two pieces. A static piece at the frog end and a moving piece with its pivot at the end of the static portion.

For example, the points on my clones of the stock 10° switches are 44m from point end to frog. I split that into a 29m static portion and a 15m moving portion. With the shorter moving piece I can get the point end to move a realistic amount with a .4° rotation. With a solid 44m point length the rotation for the same point movement would have been about .14°, below the critical value.

Hannes44,

crosstested your desired angle of .17° with scripting, works fine.

@deanville: Thanks, I did exactly what you suggest and now it works with 0,28° rotation.

@Roman: I'll have to learn scripting!

Just as a teaser.
German switch 190 1-9lft build with scripting

ew190-1-9lft.jpg (58 Kb, 118 downloads) Left switch