Strange Lighting on new Track

[SteveP_trains]

Hi
Just wondering if anyone can shed light on this particular issue I am having with creating a new piece of track within Blender and Briage.
I have created many types of track before but used 3DCrafter and have had no issues like this. This is the first time I've tried to use Blender to create some track and have successfully created rolling stock in Blender but I am not an expert Blender user and only started using it about a year ago.

So, I have created the rails and ballast elements as I have done in 3DC (as per the DevDoc guide), joined them and used the older shaders as specified in that document. The new track successfully exports to TrainSim, is visible and can be joined and pointwork created with no apparent problems.
What I am having issues with is that the trackwork shows different lighting when viewed at different angles, darkening to a very unacceptable degree. My previous 3DC track, using the same shaders and construction technique show none of this lighting issue.
So can anyone help me out with this? Have tried multiple construction techniques and various Loft shaders but all give same result.
I've attached two shots to show what I mean by this effect.

Thanks in advance.

Steve (SPRailways)

[AndiS]

My first guess would be that the shader in the actual .geopcdx file differs - for some unexpected reason, like your shader settings in Blender not getting passed on.

So my first step would be to serz some .geopcdx that is know to be good and a bad one. (You need not change the extension to .bin or else serz.exe goes on strike, if I remember correctly.)
In the resulting .xml file, look for the shader names given there. Sorry, my memories are not less hazy than that. Opening an .xml file in some browser can help as it allows you to open and close branches of the XML tree, thus arriving at a clear picture faster that using Notepad++.

If you find a difference in the shader name in the geopcds file, then you will use a combination of meditating on the individual letters of all the documentation you can find and trial and error. And better be sure to use exactly the version of Blender that was current when Briage was written. Blender changed much over all these years and so did some of the internal data structures which can give some freak error with Briage.

If there is not difference, then I would guess that some lightmap slipped in by a side door. Not sure you can have such a thing with track, but I did see object darkening to a surprising extension wherever the lightmap was not plain white.

[SteveP_trains]

Thanks Andy.
Have tried your suggestion on comparing a good & bad GEOPCDX and the Shaders names are identical. There are some other different values down in the nitty-gritty of the file but I can make no head or tail of those.
Will check for a lightmap but not expecting that will appear.

I have managed to get 3DC working again, in a limited fashion, on the PC and made the track that I wanted (after much scratching of head to remember what i needed to do )

I might try importing the Blender track to 3DC, export again and see if that changes the result.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Steve (SPRAilways)