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NoLimits: Tutorial Part Three
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NoLimits: Tutorial Part Three / By: Devin Olson, Sunday, August 08, 2004 -
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Once you've completed customizing and perfecting your track in the NoLimits Editor, chances are that you might not mind making it even more realistic. If you aren't satisfied having your track on a flat plain with a few trees around it, the NL Terraformer is the program for you to check out. This handy little add-on to NoLimits compliments the design process and will allow you to add any type of terrain you want to your track file, along with water features.
First, you need to verify that you have it on your computer. If you purchased NoLimits recently, you will have it already in the same directory that contains Editor and Simulator. If not, you can head over here to download it. After you start up the NoLimits Terraformer, you'll get a nice black screen with some options and buttons at the top. Much like the NoLimits Editor, you may likely have no idea where to go from here without some direction. But don't worry - getting the hang of the Terraformer doesn't take too long, and before you know it, you'll be sculpting mountains and oceans around your track.
The first thing you'll need to do is to open up the track file that you plan on Terraforming with the top left folder button or under 'File' and 'Open Track....' After you have the track that you want to add terrain to opened, you will be greeted with a low-detail version of your track, and nothing else. The next step is to add some land beneath your track. Do accomplish this, click the 'New' button which is just to the left of 'Open' or go to 'File' and 'New.' Doing this will present you with a window containing options for creating a terrain structure to use.
If everything is installed in the correct folders, there will already be a few textures for your land and water and the detail that goes along with them ready to load into your track. There should be nine options for both land and water, ranging from 'Grass' to 'LavaRock' to 'Tropical' water and 'Lava.' You will have the ability to preview each of the textures by clicking on 'View' and also the detail that will go along with them. If you have a .jpg or .tga file of your own that you want to use for the texture, just head to 'Open' and browse to it.
Before you click 'OK,' you can mess around with the options at the bottom to customize the detail on the terrain. Higher detail means that you will have more control over the shape of the land. If your computer is slow, you might have to sacrifice some detail. By clicking OK, your terrain texture will be loaded and ready to edit.
The first thing to do once you're in edit mode is to get the feel for the Terraformer, and get comfortable with moving around. The icon on the far left on the second row down at the top of the screen being selected shows you that you're in 'Camera Move Mode,' the setting that you need to be on in order to move around. As for moving around, the procedure is just like the 3d view on the NoLimits Editor. Simply right-click in order to have the ability to toggle the view with a move of the mouse, and hold down on the left mouse button to move forward.
When moving around, you'll probably notice the pink node on the ground or the square of nodes. This is your control on raising or lowering the terrain, and to start using it, move yourself into position so that you get a good view of the area that you'll be editing and then go up to the view buttons at the top left. Now click on the second button to the left that looks like a gray node with several lines coming out from it. With this selected, you can right-click for the ability to move the terrain editing nodes around on the map, or adjust the size of the area being edited. To do this, choose from the node sizes in the row of the six 'Effect Area' node buttons.
 After you have the right size for the land editing area set, right-click and then drag the ground up or down with the left button, and the entire area will move either up or down. Go down much, and you'll hit water level. Some sculpting options to keep in mind lie in the two green icons to the left of the 'Effect Area' buttons, as these two buttons control the method of raising or lowering the land. If you have the first one, 'Terraform Relative Heights,' selected, raising your area of land on an uneven surface will raise the ground until everything is even, then keep going, much like editing land in RollerCoaster Tycoon. But if you use the 'Terraform Absolute Heights' setting, raising an uneven section of ground will lift the entire area up as a whole, leaving it unchanged, and only raised up.
Other helpful tools to keep in mind when you're terraforming are, of course, the 'Undo' and 'Redo' buttons, but also the 'Copy' and 'Paste' icons beside them that will allow you to copy any area of land selected and drop it down wherever else you want it. Going across the controls you have, you have options to mirror a selected area of terrain from the North to the South, or from the West to the East. Then there's the 'Invert' option that will turn a moutain into a hold in the ground if you desire.
When you've played around with the Terraformer enough to get the hang of moving around land to sculpt your terrain, you might want to consider further enhancing your coaster by inserting 3DS objects around your track. To do this, you need to start up the Editor once you've saved your coaster in the NL Terraformer. If you've downloaded a good-sized collection of tracks, you should already have a few 3DS objects a few clicks away. These objects should be installed in the 'objects' folder within your NoLimits Coasters directory.
To insert one of these, move your cursor up to 'Scenery' and then select the second option from the bottom, 'Choose Scene Object.' Then, just click to place your object and it will appear on the NoLimits map. Your objects will be visible on the Editor in blue framework form, with a bright green node in the center. Now you can adjust the object however you want it. When you click anywhere on the object's framwork, four additional nodes appear for you to adjust the object with. Clicking on the red, yellow, and pink nodes will flip, spin, and rotate the object around in different directions so you can get it placed perfectly, while the light blue node will shrink or expand it as much as you want, which can really come in handy. Meanwhile, the green node will move the object around on the map. And that's really all there is to object placement!
Now we dive into the subject that all coaster fans should be concerned about: how to get the rides they love into NoLimits. The process of recreating is something that will come more easily with all of the previous knowledge of track building, supporting, terraforming, and other various methods of construction that you've learned for NL. First of all, you may want to search around and see if the ride you're thinking of recreating has already been attempted before, and if so, give any existing recreations a spin to see if they do the ride justice. NoLimits recreating is an appreciated talent, and if one ride has already been mastered, you might want to take on something completely different to bring another work of art in the coaster world to NoLimits.
 One thing that will help you out a lot in recreating is a good knowledge of the coaster that you're about to attempt. Whether it's a ride that you know by heart from riding it for the past ten years or one that you've come to know well online, recreating it is the true test of how much you actually know. Pictures will be your best friend online when you need to fill in the blanks, especially for recreating individual supports and other parts of the coaster that you may not have memorized.
 The first thing to take into account once you place the first piece of track is scale. Getting your ride to an accurate scale may be tough at first, but once you have something to go on, whether it's the height of the lift hill or length of the launch, you can fairly accurately judge the scale for the rest of the ride off of what you already have. Construct a rough version of whatever you think will be the best reference point for the rest of the ride, and then go up to 'Coaster' and 'Statistics' and compare your piece of track to statistics for the actual coaster. And the physics in NoLimits are very close to real-life physics, so accurate ride dimensions will equal accurate statistics such as speed, although other variables may throw statistics off slightly. You will have the freedom with NoLimits to construct your ride exactly as it is in real life down to the smallest details, so there aren't any excuses when it comes to accuracy.
Getting the layout straight is a must in recreating, especially if you have a self-interacting layout with multiple track sections using single supports, or near-miss crossunders. You should consider making a rough version of the entire layout first, and then getting any problems with it that you may encounter worked out before you go through and smooth it out, then eventually get onto the support building. Compare the ride to pictures or any layout sketches throughout the building process, and every once in a while check the statistics if you want an accurate scale.
If you're taking on a terrain-based ride, your challenge after constructing the track will be to form an accurate terrain structure to surround it. Completing your recreation package will also involve adding in any other theming objects that may be available for you to use in the program, or any water that may exist around the track. Don't worry about getting your terrain completely accurate, but any portions of it close to the track should be close to what you'll see in real life.
 When your track is complete and any last-minute adjustments are made, your best reward for all of your effort will be getting to sit back, load your track in the editor, and get to experience a ride that you already know by heart come to life on your computer screen, a couple clicks away whenever you feel like a visual ride on it! And be sure to share your work with the rest of the coaster-loving community... Our Download Extras and Project Advertisements Forum are always ready for your NoLimits files!
I hope that my series of tutorials has been insightful for those of you out there trying to get into the best coaster modeling sim out there! NoLimits is a program that you'll enjoy for years to come as new updates for the sim are released on the official NL web site, and your own limits of creativity in NoLimits are only where you choose! Hope to see you around the NL community.
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