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briyeo wrote:Yes I did Geoff, I sometimes reduce them to single face so I can edit a letters shape, The G in Gazelle wasn't quite right in the font I used so I altered it.

Yes indeed, some of the curved letter shapes can also be a bit basic, but it is quick and easy to use and gets most of the lettering right first time.

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Hello Everyone

I've not posted anything for a while but enjoy reading the daily digests and have learned a great deal from them.

Nameplate replicating is a favourite topic of mine and as I'm currently working on a former GWR route I've been doing some for the Castle Class. In typical Blue Peter speak "here's one I made earlier". I've used Brian's method for the text using 3D text in 3DC. I found a free GWR font online which was very useful and used, firstly, the extrude tool to create the plate and then Paul Gausden's Pipe Engineer to create the edging. In order to curve the individual letters into place I used the shift tool which was a time consuming process! I'm not sure about the size of the plate though - it looks a bit big (but maybe not!).


It's a pity that DTG have not published the Castle variations even though pictures of them were published ages ago.

Best wishes

Llew

That looks very good Llew.

Gents, not wishing to hijack the thread here, but as we're on the topic of nameplates I thought I'd ask this on behalf of a friend who's tried creating his own, with some difficulty.

He's got it all in game working fine as a scenery object, but when he tried to add it to a loco as a child object (also a B1, funnily enough), he gets this.....



It's 2D!

The text is 2D anyway, but the whole plate goes 2D as well when made a child object.

Any suggestions?

Keep up the good work all, I'm loving all of these, will share some of my own later on if there are no objections.

What is the matrix for the child object nameplate, James? Your image suggests that the matrix is flattening the object by scaling one of the dimensions by 0. Before rotation, if the object is just translated then the matrix should be something like:

1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
x y z 1

or as listed in the exported blueprint:

1
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
x
y
z
1

With x, y and z being the coords in metres from the parent object centre point.

Chris

I could have a go at adding the model as a child for him if he would like to make it available James.

A shorter name for a B1

Thanks for the speedy and valuable input guys, I've checked with him and he was using the scaling matrices incorrectly. I've gotten him to go back to the model in his modelling software and model it to scale in the first place, having reset his scaling matrices back to the way they should be (thanks Chris for the values, saves me grabbing them ), so hopefully he'll be able to sort it tonight.