BASIN AND RANGE
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| Panamint Butte |
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California's Panamint Valley arises from the subduction of the Pacific plate beneath the North American plate, creating north-south crinkle-cuts in the bedrock beneath the desert. The faults created allow whole blocks of stone to push upward, creating mountain ranges. At the same time, the neighboring block drops, creating deep valleys, which then fill with the stones and sand washed down from the mountains over geologic time.
From the vantage point of the train cab, it is these rocks that are visible to the Engineer, as there is no plant life to hide them. The action of plate tectonics causes soggy ocean-soaked plates to drop into the furnace beneath our feet, where rock is melted together amid water and salts, and chemical reactions produce all colors of the rainbow. The steep escarpments of the
basin and range expose these veins of color.
And so, we need to model them, and share them with route builders.
WEATHER AND SEASONS
DESERT ROCKS
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| Red Rock Canyon State Park, CA |
Luckily, we can borrow heavily from RailWorks' existing library of rock formations. All we need to do is add color. To match the shades, we went to the source, collected representative rocks, and captured them with a digital camera. This was used as the basis for a hue matching process that granted the colors without going all CandyLand. In some some cases, the rock was simply colorized. In other cases, only the brightness was adjusted. And for a few more complex formations, hue maps were tweaked.
TEXTURES
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For route builders, I have organized 32 rock entities around a palette of 6 textures, each of which was modeled after the system's "mud" texture. The textures and reskins were all done at the same time to preserve the hue choices. I have also created a default ground texture for the Mojave Desert as it exists within the Basin and Range province. It was modeled from pictures taken of Panamint Valley, and really matches what you see when you are there. Two additional textures were needed for the salt flats, one rough and one smooth.
BOULDERS
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ROCK FORMATIONS
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ROCK WALLS
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SALT PILES
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MARBLE
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Once we have the basic palette of rocks established, we can then go about mixing them to create virtually any type of reasonable marble. This is done by using the world editor to fuse different colored rocks together simply by placing them within each other. Once we have marble, we can begin to use it for more than just decorating desert washes. They become building materials wherever marble is used, creating industries served by new kinds of quarries. Works of art based on marble can be placed anywhere, and be appreciated.
SEDIMENTS
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Where the earth is split apart by the action of rivers, millions of years of sedimentation is often revealed, varying with color depending on what was being washed down off the local mountains that eon. By layering rock objects, and painting with contrasting desert textures, we can begin to replicate these often stunning displays of color. Here we have a quarry using traditional assets (inset), and then another treatment showing how desert rocks can be layered to suggest sedimentation.
