Making Progress

In the last couple of days, made good progress on the Longfellow Bridge and it is almost done. I have to do the end sections which have smaller octagonal towers. The one on the Boston end also needs to have the track bed continue almost level whereas the roadway starts sloping down so that it will be at ground level for the rotary under Charles station. Didn't get much done last night but got this section roughly sketched out on paper.

I also still need to do some tweaking of the position, the last over-water section came out too far east so I have to slide the entire bridge to the west about 20m, plus some sections don't line up perfectly yet. Spent about 2 hours Sunday night aligning, it is tricky where each section has to be aligned in its 6 degrees of freedom (3 axes of translation + 3 axes of rotation). Especially when it is so difficult to rotate accurately in the RE, using end key plus cursor is way too slow, in the end I find using the mouse to do most adjusting then finish off with the keys if needed works the best.

I forgot to mention that I had solved the problem of the missing railings - I had used a bitmap of 257 x 257 instead of 256 x 256, as MSTS requires power of 2 square textures. I also found out that whereas texturing one side of the fence with a transparent texture is good enough in Sketchup but in the game only one side shows up so you have to texture both sides.

Last night I was away from the computer most of the evening as I had to go pick up my son who was getting back from a round trip to Chicago via Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited. He has inherited enough of the train gene that he is interested in train travel, not as much into the rivet counting as I am, but another plus is that he is into MSTS, even installed BIN for me on my system and some other odds and ends. He will probably be the first beta tester when this route is ready.