Track Ballast
under review
Justin Rupp
Some people like to ballast their track. There are multiple ways to do this, and BrickLayouts isn't going to be able to cover every single possibility.
Some thoughts:
- We could add ballast plates that some companies make. They could just be parts that you have to place in the layout. This feels very cumbersome. While this would be the most configurable/customizable way, it would also require the most user effort to do.
- We could make a way to toggle the display of ballast for all track parts automatically. This would be the least configurable way to handle this, since you would only be given the choice of "on" or "off", and every track part would be shown with ballast.
- After adding the ability to select multiple components, we could have a way for you to add/remove ballast for a whole group of track at once. This could maybe allow you to select the style/manufacturer of the ballast being added. You would not be able to reposition ballast separately from the track parts.
- There could be a toggle for ballast, and configuration of which ballast type you prefer. The toggle and configuration would only be used for newly added track parts. This would require a change to the part selection user interface, since there is no place to put these options right now
- Some combination of the above?
- Something else entirely?
Joost Slager
If you are looking for a "standard" maybe the L-gauge ballasting could be a good one. I think it is one of the widely used ones.
C
Cameron Miller
Displaying ballast would be neat to make pretty pictures of lots of layouts. My use case for designing layouts is to layout the track so instead of a on/off for ballast, you would have a display parameter that is "schematic design" "bare track" "ballasted track (maybe add 4 colors LBG, RB, DB, BLK)"
Just some thoughts. This only works if you arent tying things to specific manufactures. For instance the 4DBrix implementation of R40 yard ladders is different than the Trixbrix version of R40 yard ladders. So it could be a lot or a little work depending on how deeply you want to integrate the exact brand offerings.
Justin Rupp
marked this post as
under review