Just for fun, I decided it was time to dive into Blender, and Horizontal E's were my first attempt... The reasoning was simple -- I discovered that I needed a fourth signal head for a couple crossovers, and I'd never gotten that far in GMax.
After the first 12 hours of failing to figure out basic texturing of a plain cube, I kept asking myself why I was doing this, but finally managed to export the cube with four sides and a roof texture. 8 hours later, I had something close enough in size to my previous GMax created E type signals.
Another hour or so was wasted working out the lighting in the signal scripts. For whatever reason, tweaking the light positions using my GMax settings didn't work. It appears that Gmax set the axis from each subobject (HEAD1, HEAD2, etc) off the sub-object, where Blender appears to have kept the 0/0/0 location for the viewport grid. Once I figured that mess out, it was somewhat smooth sailing. Downside to that difference is I had to create new SignalType declarations in the SigCfg, but that's relatively minor..
There's still some work to do on the light hoods -- right now they look like an oversize Lego, and I need to experiment more to get the shark-nose appearance, but that's for another day... Fortunately they're isolated as a sub-object and adjusting the tubes shouldn't mess with my signal script.
For those who use Blender already... this is what I landed on for a hierarchy, and where I first shot myself in the foot. All of the normals I'd added to the mesh were in one object, which caused problem after problem when I was trying to re-scale things and move parts around, so I had to selectively duplicate items, and reset the parent object. Hopefully that's just a learning curve item for the first time around...
At some point I'll try an animation and maybe some static objects. This was traumatic enough for one day which turned into two...
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Originally Posted by alexhill
