Don't look back! - The Legend
I actually tried to make a custom support tunnel for you.
You said that was not needed. Thats ok.
That's correct. I appreciate the effort but I'll be making the tunnels out of 3D to look more like the cedar tunnels the real ride has.
Yay! Freddie! Can't wait to see the finished project. I assume it'll have your standard custom supports? Also, sounds like you'll finally be releasing Boulder Dash! So yay!
I love Legend and look forward to your release.
So for the past two days I've been listening to Fugazi on repeat and banging out a good amount of support work. I've decided 3D supports aren't practical for now, I'll be revisiting that on a smaller ride in the works later. There are a few things that bother me about NL supports that I'll be trying to figure out how to work around but for the time being I've used my 3D support templates to start laying down bents. I have a good deal of the heart of the ride (lifthill and everything that stems off it) set in place. Some of the ride still doesn't have banking so I need to finish that before I can start supports in those areas.
A few new pictures:
Thanks for checking it out!
I always loved the shaping of Legend's drop and yours looks pretty darn close. Great progress!
^ Thanks! It's one of my favorite first drops of any coaster. I think it's as about as close as I can get. Here's a POV shot:
Why would you torture yourself with custom supports for the entire ride? Just do custom lateral supports.
boulderdashcci posted on June 5th, 2020
^ Thanks! It's one of my favorite first drops of any coaster.
Mine too. Wish I liked the rest of the ride just as much.
raptoralex posted on June 5th, 2020
Why would you torture yourself with custom supports for the entire ride? Just do custom lateral supports.
To get proper bent spacing and ledger placements. I actually kind of enjoy it, and it's not my first go around with wood coaster supports so I know what I'm getting into. I've actually made a lot of progress for basically a day and a half of work.
Today's update:
Slight computer issue/dumbness set me back, but I finished all of curve 3, 4, and I'm about to start 5. Or more simply, I'm into Splashin Safari and almost to the big spiral turn. I also worked on the mated structure behind this section (double up/waterslide hills) as well as framed the first drop tunnel. Not as much as I was hoping to get done today but still solid progress.
The two big hard parts will be the helix (probably comparable to the first drop) and the spiral curve, which I have yet to attempt anything similar for supports in a very long time. Each bent turns at a different rate so that will probably take some figuring out. These two sections are also the last ones that need finalized banking.
Spent some time on the lifthill tower batters today. I didn't get the turns I wanted to finished but I did (start to) tackle some of the most complex supports on the ride. A big step was setting the height of the chords which will give me a baseline for the entire rest of the ride, so getting this right is critical. I unfortunately lost a lot of work due to a screw up and not being able to salvage it but it came out a lot cleaner the second time. I also spent some time experimenting on ways to do diagonal chords as I hate the way these look in NL. I have some ideas but they aren't easy to pull off. Anyway, progress:
I haven't been able to work on this as much as I was due to some personal stuff going on as well as going back to work full time. I have laid down mostly final banking and stood the bents on the big spiral curve, leaving the only sections unsupported being the crossover before the spiral and the helix. I did just realize my profile going into the helix was kind of harsh and I couldn't figure out why....turns out I didn't take into account Jeff Hammersley's infamous reprofile back in 2002 (all the talk on RRC back in the day) which made the helix and finale run much faster. I don't really like manually moving vertices in NL2 but I got lucky and was able to fix that up to where I'm happy with it. I did encounter a major support oversight which is going to be kind of time consuming to fix...but I think I have a plan.
I was hoping for some help with 3D waterslides if anyone is willing. There are three or four slide complexes that directly interact with the far end of the ride, and I think they're beyond what I'm capable of doing. If anyone is willing to help with that it would be appreciated.
Old helix entrance
New helix entrance. Took me a while to figure out what was done, but finally came across a video that made it obvious. It rides much better both in real life and in my recreation.
Support progress
Experimenting with catwalks. The handrail placement is the big issue, which will take a bit of effort to fix.
New structure behind the lifthill. This stretch always fascinated me, it's basically a completely unbanked curve taken at ~45mph. CCI at their best here.
Thanks for looking!
This looks amazing. I look forward on riding that helix <3 Gosh, I love it's insanity <3
Ton of progress this weekend. I've started on the station for real, added the spur track, started some of the surrounding park like the flume's pathway as well as the pool, and detailed some lifthill bents. Still some trackwork to do in the helix but it's really starting to pull together. Crustin on Discord is also working some magic to make it ride like a real wood coaster. Super excited about all of this.
boulderdashcci posted on June 21st, 2020
I wonder how wooden coasters who use any such similar storage configuration get the train back out of the storage section and back onto the main track.
The real thing has a set of drive wheels, but it wouldn't get the train all the way to the station. More likely 6-8 guys just push the train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNHdZmWYSLY
Legend like many CCIs originally opened with a 54' section of straight track after the station to add a full transfer table if the park were to add a second train. The park ultimately did add the second train, but they switched to heavier PTCs from the single Gerstlauer, so the station was extended 36' to add overshoot brakes at the end of the final brakes leaving only enough room for the spur instead of a full table.
The last few days have seen a lot of structure work on the first drop as well as curve 11 through 12. The first drop now has it's tower batters on both sides, and barring some detail I've yet to add I think they look real good. C11-12 got structure and their 5 million bridges for all the flume stuff. It's starting to look like a real wood coaster instead of just sticks randomly placed everywhere. Some pretty sunset shots:
(I'm still up in the air as to whether the lanterns are corny? The real ride has those battleship lights like NL uses on steel coaster catwalks, but I'm not a good enough modeler to make those. I think the lanterns kind of fit the sleepy hollow thing too)
Still putting off doing the helix, blah.
I love the attention to detail you are adding to this ride. Supporting this by hand is a huge task, but the result will look so good. How do you work like this in the editor though? Did you cut up the supporting job in several rides or is it one big bowl of supports?
It's all one ride but I work in sections. I usually prebuild a bent mockup, and then copy and paste to fit it in after. Then once I'm happy with it I'll copy that over to the like bents nearby. I'm working with offsets a lot. There are a lot of dimensionally correct things that most people probably won't notice, like in the first picture where the 18' chord spans two bents wide and the adjacent ribbon board does not intersect it. I'm trying my best to be as close to how a real ride is built though.
NL2 does this thing that I hate with diagonals and it's very small to the point where when I asked discord, some people didn't even notice it. But it bothers me to the point that I have a fairly tedious plan to fix it. I'm on break at work right now in autocad trying to come up with a solution lol.
kill me
That part of the supports is my favorite. I love looking at it from the line and seeing them bunched up like that. But yes, it is extremely tedious and bonkers to do it this way.
Some stuff I did today
Used bestdani's attachment tool to make the whole table slide
Hi. Lots of stuff done and redone and redone and redone. But I just solved some major issues I've had figuring this out and it's resparked my interest in it. I don't have much time to work these days but its gotten a lot better since I last posted.
I've been working on a recreation of nobody's favorite coaster at Holiday World for the last few weeks. Based on some help from a friend and watching the same two videos over and over, I think I have a pretty accurate, well put together representation of the real ride. Before I started adding banking, which affects length due to the kick out offset, I was within 1.5' of the listed track length. This is the old profile with the four corners of death. I haven't ridden the new GCI iteration, so this is what I decided to go for.
I've shared some of this on the Discord, but I thought maybe a thread would keep me motivated to keep going. I've got banking laid down on about half the track, and I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to tackle supports. I'd like a 100% custom structure, likely in 3D (which I already started the lifthill for to see how viable this is), but I have this problem where I still use Tia's old Object Creator which is like a bad abusive self hatred thing for working on this scale. I keep trying to go to a more thorough program like Max or Blender....but I keep going back. But anyway, I have most of the bents for the ride staked out (I think everything except the spiral and helix) and started the station and plaza.
I have half a Raven put together so that might make an appearance. No Voyage except probably the lifthill in the background. Just a forewarning, I tend to start projects and never finish them. My last finished ride was for a contest in like 2010. I'm challenging myself to finish three rides this year, this and two other recreations, the third of which is something I've been trying to do since I got into NoLimits. I'll post about those as they get closer to being real things, but for now I'm having a lot of fun with this ride.