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Giving credit where it's dueI owe a great deal to Ben Jackson and Jeremiah Johnson, whose LEGO® raytracing work served as the inspiration for this effort. Without their creative vision, my own tinkering with ray tracing and BRIO® wooden railway sets would have never come to pass. And, of course, I simply must thank my wife, for letting me spend all this money on children's toys, and for putting up with me as I spent hours modeling trains, tracks, trees and everything else I could get my hands on. How it all beganOn Christmas eve of 2000, my wife surprised me by fulfilling what has been essentially a life-long desire. Ever since I was a kid, I had played with wooden toys of various types, including a tiny BRIO-like train set. What I had never had, however, was a real BRIO train, and had something of an obsession for the play sets that I would see in children's stores. What she surprised me with was a box three feet long, two feet wide and nearly as tall. Inside were six boxes:
These sets were followed by other goodies, including three selections from the "Trains From Around the World" series, the Reversible Double Track Bridge (#33397) and track, track and more track. I was, of course, hooked. Introducing the computerIt hadn't been more than a couple of days when I realized that it was hard to make layouts without running out of certain types of track. The brute-force solution to the problem, of course, was to simply buy as much of every piece of track as you can afford. However, BRIO track is expensive, being both made from pricey beech wood and imported from Sweden, which meant that I had to plan my track purchases carefully. The obvious approach, in my mind, was to use AutoCAD (a professional Computer Aided Design program) to model the tracks, and play with various layouts. The idea was to draft out a quick layout idea, and then figure out what track I was likely to need in order to build it. Over time, frequently needed pieces would get built up, and I wouldn't waste money buying track that was more rarely used. About two days into the project, however, I hit a wall: modeling the track simply did't work, since I couldn't get the pieces to line up after introducing complicated curves or switch tracks. I double-checked my measurements, which I confirmed to be correct, but it wasn't until I actually tried building a small layout that I realized what was wrong: BRIO tracks do not line up perfectly. In fact, they aren't designed to.
The end result of this realization, which was obvious in hindsight, was that modeling the BRIO track in order to experiment with layouts was simply too frustrating and time-consuming. Faced with the facts that I could create a real layout with the actual pieces faster than I could do so on the computer, I abandoned my efforts. From 2-D to 3-DFortunately for my ego, I had stumbled across Ben Jackson's LEGO ray tracing Web site several months previously, and my grim defeat in the 2-D world slowly transformed itself into a twisted plan to create 3-D scenes of BRIO sets, not for the purpose of determining what track I would need, but rather just for fun. Let's face it: sometimes, economics simply get in the way. Layouts that would be wild and possibly fun to build might simply be infeasible in real life. One of my early idea, for example, was to built a sort of "switch yard" using switch tracks and lots of train cars. In real life, such a layout would take more space than I have to work with, and more switch cars and track than I could reasonably afford. Not to mention that, normally, I wouldn't have a use for a dozen box cars, five engines and other random accessories. Since some of these layout ideas would never see the physical world, I decided to instead start modeling my BRIO pieces in 3-D using AutoCAD. The end result is what you see here: a small but growing library of images, some based on real layouts I have created, and others that exist only in the virtual world.
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If you
look closely at the track joints, as shown in the photo on the right, you see that BRIO track is intentionally
designed with a little bit of "play", meaning that you can
wiggle the pieces around in the joints to make the track fit together at
slight angles and even pull it slightly apart. This is necessary because
the curved tracks create 45º angles, and basic geometry tells you that a
45º angle leads to distances that are multiples of the square root of
two. It would therefor be extremely difficult to manufacture properly
sized tracks that fit together perfectly in even a moderately complex
layout. Through the use of this "wiggle room", tracks can
instead be pulled around enough to make a decent fit that would otherwise
be impossible.