I have just managed to resolve a problem a guy from Finland has been having with following one of my tutorials. It appears that 3D Canvas Pro uses the Windows Locale setup to decide how to output numbers when exporting to the .s file. All the numbers had commas instead of decimal points in them (ie. the European way). The result of this was an odd collection of wierd shapes rolling around the countryside following the train.

I used WORDPAD on the .s file produced by 3D Canvas to Replace All , with . and, as if by magic, a wagon appeared.

Darn it! I forgot about that. It appears that file formats are always "English Only" where "," is reserved as a delimiter. I use standard functions for exporting the numeric information which of course exports differently depending on the Windows Locale.

I guess there will be a 4.23.

Richard

I know that you have a tutorial on making a 4-wheel wagon. Are you going to do a tutorial on making a 8-wheel wagon? Jeffrey.

I was not planning one, as I thought it pretty easy to work out what would be needed, i.e. a frame called Bogie2 and two wheelsets in frames called Wheels21 and Wheels22. The rest of the tutorial would be pretty much the same as for the 4 wheel wagon, but with longer z measurements.

If/when I do the next tutorial, it will be for a steam loco. Here the new topics will be the animation of driving wheels and coupling rods, lathing to create the chimney and dome, and the extra work involved on the .eng file. Everything else is the same as for building a wagon, just more of it.

Here is what I have spent the weekend working on:

If I want to create a wagon with two bogies and four wheelsets, where should I put the pivot points for the bogies so that the bogies turn with the track and the wheelsets turn with the bogies as the wagon goes over the track? I thought that the pivot points should be at the top center of the bogies but how do I make sure that the pivot axis is pointing the right way. In your tutorial on making the 4-wheel wagon, I had to follow the instructions while creating the wheelsets so that the pivot axis is in the right place and is facing in the right direction. Jeffrey.

Make the wheels exactly the same as in the wagon tutorial, with pivot point (frame axis) the same (better still, grab them ready made from your object library).

The bogies should have their pivot points (frame axis) oriented the same way as the wheelsets, and somewhere on the vertical centre line for the bogie (I don't think the height is important). The pivot point (frame axis) of the 'Main' object should also be oriented the same way as the wheelsets and be central to the overall wagon, and at rail level (or just below).

Hope this suffices.

Hi Ian,

Cool engine!

The fix for this particular problem (non-english numbering) will be in the next version of 3D Canvas which will be available in September.

I'm going to have a look at your tutotial for the wagon to see if there is anything that you are doing that I can automate. I was thinking about creating a script that would provide dimensions, relative positions etc.

Richard

In the wagon tutorial, I merge everything together. I no longer do this, I keep most objects separate and just drag them into the Main frame. This makes it easier to drag them out again later to do things to them. I have to grab a box primitive first to have a frame to drag them into, then delete the box. It could be handy to be able to, say, right click on the object and select 'bring out into new frame'.

Also, did you get the new version of the wagon tutorial, as the one you had on your site had a missing texture file.

Ian.

If you want to move an object to its own frame just right-click on it and select "make child". This will do the trick I think.

I updated the download for the tutorial yesterday (or the day before-I forget).

Richard