I thought this would be interesting, since there is emphasis on accurate shaping using FVD, why not one for hand-building? (mostly because I can't use FVD, but I thought this would be fun :P)

Also wanna say how awesome NLC is turning out, RWN you've seriously done an amazing job!!

Yes hand building FTW! Also good to share tips and practice hand building for the next 5HOP contest.

-Ride_Op

I mostly built from the top view first. Then I move the vertices up and down to the shape I want.
One exception to this is vertical elements like loops, immelmans, etc. In those cases, I built vertically first and then offset the vertices along the axis I want. Then I rotate it into place.

I would like to know how other people hand-build. Maybe there's something I or others can do to improve my/their workflow?

i will make a detailed post on here in the future about how i go about hand building a coaster from scratch, its stupidly over-complicated and requires a bit of patience but you get some pretty great looking results. Great idea for a thread too, cant believe NLE never had one.

P.S Merry Christmas everyone!

I don't know why, but the depumper can't get rid of these inconsistent radii. Is there something I can do?

The simplest way to reduce the pumping is to insert more vertices then depump a few more times.

You can take it further by exporting the track spline if you have the pro version of nl2, then importing it with 0.5m spacing and depumping that. (only do this when you have finished one section of track between two flat points such as lifts and mcbrs, ill explain more in my future post about this method)

here are the results:

Element 115s Guide to smooth handbuilding

Episode one: the curse of the banking wobble

Im sure everybody has encountered this issue before, some of you may already know how to deal with it but for those who do not here is a rundown on the problem and its solution.

Our situation

As you can see below we have an overbanked turn into a shallow dive, followed by a pullout. From an off ride perspective it looks perfectly fine.

As you can see, on the exit of the drop i have positioned two nodes, these nodes are set to zero degrees banking to flatten out the track before the next element. By riding the coaster in editor track view, we can notice the wobble immediately.

What causes it?

Nolimits 2 uses continuous rolling in its banking, therefore there is often some overcompensation when banking to zero with a fairly high roll rate. Now i could just set the first roll node to strict 0 degrees and delete the second one entirely, this would eliminate the wobble but bring in a whole new issue. Your lovely transition now rides like a knock off Pinfari, if you happen to be creating an actual knock off Pinfari then you can leave now and i wish you good luck, but for those of us who are not lets continue.

Eliminating the wobble

Lets start by looking at our transition from the top view with the view mode set to "Spline" from the drop down box.

By following the lower spine of the track, we can see that it it crosses over the yellow coaster spline once, then returns to the centre and continues. This is the source of our wobble.

To fix the wobble we will bank the roll node before the final roll node by one degree at a time, until the spine of the wireframe track aligns perfectly with the yellow coaster spline and does not cross over it, the process is shown below.

You can check the wobble has been removed by re riding your coaster in track view.

As you can see, there is now no wobble at all and the transition flows smoothly to flat track, you are on your way to a lovely flowing layout free of strict banking and overcompensating rolls.

I know most people here already know how to stop this issue, this is meant more for people fairly new to Nolimits 2 that have encountered this problem. I will move on to more advanced stuff in future posts.

Nicely explained! Its amazing how much better coasters are if the banking is nice, which seems to be a issue with beginners' tracks.

You should make this a seperate thread, actually. The quality of your explanation is really good!

i am debating starting my own thread, but i feel it will just end up sinking to the bottom after a while and the info will be lost.

^Well, that's true. But that could also happen to this thread.
The FVD thread on NLE was also just occasionally used. Plus, a helpful hand-building thread could be pinned so that everyone can see it all the time.

Ok, all in favour of a dedicated thread say i

i

We need a new stickied reference guide for this stuff.

I actually use the G force comb to get the exaggerated roll in just the right place. I do a couple other special things when handbuilding to make my rides smoother (all my rides were handbuilt)

^I use this too, but I've found both methods to work. The way Calvin is talking about works the same as Element's, but it's focused on the G-Force comb and it works in any view. You tick the roll over slowly until all of the lateral Gs are uniformly low and on the same side of the comb.

^^ This is also a great way of doing things and can be easier when dealing with complex inversions at different orientations.

newest forum now