On mountain bike trails there are usually boardwalk sections. These are a lot of fun to ride on, and essential for the Mountain bike trails I am placing in my scene.

This is a perfect opportunity to use RailClone from iToo Software. It is an amazing plugin, very powerful. Even though I find it difficult to understand & manage this kind of modeling, I really wanted to push myself and try to get some basic parametric models going!

Played with the 2 different array generators. The Railclone style in the screenshot is made up of multiple generators.
The circular berm is 2d array.
The raised boards & supports are 1d arrays. The raised boards follow a spline but the deform in the Z axis with a low-poly surface that is non-renderable. That way I can easily give them twists etc.

At the moment I have 2 splines doing the work but and it gets pretty rough beneath the planks, with the support beams not touching them or intersecting badly. I hope to tidy that a bit and maybe have it all run by the 1 spline.
The planks themselves are just one box that is randomly being transformed & in scale & rotation. The uneven spaces between each plank are achieved by having a dummy segment that is randomly scaled and placed along the spline.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
Thanks.

5 replies
    • Brendan A.G
      Brendan A.G says:

      Thanks Moussa! I going to need it 😀
      I sometimes find myself hitting brain overload, and begin changing settings at random to see if it does what I want it to do! :/ Railclone is awesome but tricky for some of us who do not have much of a mathematical mind. The guys at iToo software though, have probably the best support, tutorial & documentation.

      Hope you go well Moussa. 🙂

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