Rotary Dumper Help

[OTTODAD]

Im fairly sure I can get it to do what I want, but the car falling off is my real fear. That may not be an issue who knows. Ill have to start testing and see.

Rotating a wagons on it's longitudinal axis is going to break the couplers connecting it with the wagons fore and aft and will cause a derailment alert.

O t t o

[sniper297]

There are a number of problems involved, disable the tilt derailment and somehow get the car to stick on the track as it rotates, I don't know if the couplers are designed to swivel or not since it's never been done before. As for the animation, if you CAN get it to work, the default loaders/unloaders all have synchronized animation - for example you press SHIFT T over a coal unloader, the unloader animates with the coal dust while the car simultaneously animates with the coal level going down. So it should be possible (assuming all the other obstacles are overcome) to have a single SHIFT T keypress do the whole thing, rotate the car upside down and have the coal automatically spill out as it inverts.

[OTTODAD]

Another consideration is that the length of the rotary dumper has got to match the length of the coal hopper which is to have it's contents dumped.

The track it is one also rotating will temporarily break the tracks ribbon and have no idea what the consequence of that would be !

O t t o

[Trainguy76]

The track it is one also rotating will temporarily break the tracks ribbon and have no idea what the consequence of that would be !

O t t o

You could make the track invisible, and have "track" part of the rotary, then have the tilts as animations.

[OTTODAD]

I got a feeling that some of this can not be achieved unless the source code of RW is being told about it !

O t t o

[dick8299]

This subject has been perculating in the back of my mind for a few days, and I finally decided to see what could be done.

I used an existing model that I had (a Michael Gilmore created flat car), added animation to it to rotate it around its axis, and created a new RailWorks wagon with a bulk material load.

This You Tube video is rough but it demonstrates that the car will rotate without breaking the consist. Actually the wagon geometry rotates, all other parts of the RailWorks physics stays connected.

When I created the animation, I just used the existing axis of the wagon which was level with the ground. More sophisticated animation would need to be applied for a realistic rotary dumper.

The only drawback is that in the cargo def portion of the bin file, there is only room for one animation. That means that if you use rotation to unload, you would also have rotation to load it (not a good thing).

Having demonstrated that this can be done, I leave it up to a skilled modeler to actually create the rotary dumping asset as well as cars animated for the rotary dumper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcVEThklGWs

[BNSF650]

Good video... Now lets just see who has the skills to make one.

[Christoff]

Nice work dick8299!

Pete