Here is a mini tutorial originally posted by Rick Hargraves at Elvastower
Hi all,
I've discovered a way to get a hi-ploy model into Open Rails that can't even be placed on a route with the MSTS Route Editor. It's very simple to do so don't go racking your brain to add anything to this. It's just a little basic understanding of how things work so, here goes. This whole project started out when I got the idea of replacing that funny looking vegetation that MSTS uses with a better and more realistic looking vegetation model. I said to myself, "Self, let's make some 'real' grass. The 3D kind." So, I did. I made a bunch of two-faced leaves then turned them on their axis points at 15 degree increments around a center point giving the plant a good visual appearance from any angle. Once I had one plant made to my liking, I then duplicated it a bazillion times to create a patch.
Problem was, after making this stuff, I couldn't put it on a MSTS route. The poly count was threw the roof! MSTS wouldn't let me and, told me so... CRASH!
Here's my work-a-round to do it. Let's say you've created this super duper model and the Route Editor won't let you place it on a route and will most likely crash on you when trying. In my case, it happened to be this patch of hi-poly 3D grass. A section 4 feet wide by 50 feet long containing over 20,500 polygons. Far far too many for MSTS, btw. (See pic below of the 3D Canvas grass model.)
So, what I did was create a 'dummy' model with the same dimensions which was nothing more then a cube resized to 4'x50' to help in aligning things up in the RE. I then placed 20 of these 'dummy' models on the route in the positions I wanted the grass to be.Nothing fancy here. Just drop the .s and .sd files into the routes SHAPES folder then drop the textures into the routes TEXTURE folder. (See pic below of MSTS 'dummy' placement models.)
The trick was to get these patches of grass in/on the route, now. So, I exported it from 3D Canvas using the same name as my 'dummy' model then dropped those exports into the route's SHAPES & TEXTURE folders overwriting the same name as my 'dummy's' were.Although, I couldn't open MSTS to look around, I now had to fire up Open Rails to view my results. (See pic below in Open Rails of the 20 grass models, now.) You can do the math but that grass is well over 400,000 polygons! MSTS won't let you do it but Open Rails will. Much much higher detailed models can now be created for Open Rails that MSTS could never even think of loading.Upon further testing, with a couple of different locos at high speed through the grassy area, FPS never flinched or flickered. It should be noted that you can no longer open or run that route in MSTS again without reversing the process by replacing the grass model with the 'dummy' model. Hope this helps.