Saturday, December 22, 2012
Friday, December 21, 2012
Day 5
I have the side frames done, there made of 4 parts each so I can do an LOD on them.
LOD - Level of Detail
This is where you replace a high detail mesh with a lower detail mesh. The game does this bast on the percent of screen width and is in a text file where 1.0 = 100% and 0.01 = 1%. To do this you need to have a reduction of at lest 500 polys and should be around a 50% reduction. Generally I have 2 to 4 LOD's depending on the car or loco, some just do not have that much to remove.
LOD - Level of Detail
This is where you replace a high detail mesh with a lower detail mesh. The game does this bast on the percent of screen width and is in a text file where 1.0 = 100% and 0.01 = 1%. To do this you need to have a reduction of at lest 500 polys and should be around a 50% reduction. Generally I have 2 to 4 LOD's depending on the car or loco, some just do not have that much to remove.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Day 3
Bogey Shadows
Today I made the shadow for the bogey so a bit about shadows first.
All kind Traincar and Bogey must have a shadow mesh and it can only have 1,333 vertex's or it will be replaced by a box. The mesh should not have a texture just a black color. The bogey shadow mesh should go below the track as all the new track is higher and dose not have a shadow so if you look you can see the wheel shadow dose not touch the ground as it should.
Note: you can not animate a shadow.
To make one I start with a cylinder just a little smaller than the wheel diameter and as wide as the two wheels. I then stretch half to the other wheel sets and lower the bottom plane. It looks like this.
I also started on the side frames. I make them like Lego blocks so I can do a Boolean to make holes without getting a lot of extra polys, I will weld them all into one when done. Below you see the first 4 blocks that only have 2 Booleans done, I just copy and re-size a lot.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Day 2
So today I fixed the engine file I made yesterday as I had not tested it and found that under DCC I could only go 4 mph.
Started bogey number one. This loco is odd in that bogeys are 49 feet apart and unsymmetrical witch shows an oddity in Trainz in that if you just turn one bogey around to reuse it the loco dose an odd thing on going up or down a steppe grade, one bogey will rotate up the other down. The bogeys rotate based on how they where made not how they are used. So I had to make two.
I started with the bogey from my C-liner as it was 3 axle and had 42" wheels, just what I needed. I start by sizing a plan of just the bogey to the right size and center the pivot point at y=0 witch is 5" off from the center wheel. I export just the wheels to test in game. In game I see I had the wrong side and had to redo.
Note: I re-space the wheel by moving the "lattice" or "dummy" not the mesh.
Started bogey number one. This loco is odd in that bogeys are 49 feet apart and unsymmetrical witch shows an oddity in Trainz in that if you just turn one bogey around to reuse it the loco dose an odd thing on going up or down a steppe grade, one bogey will rotate up the other down. The bogeys rotate based on how they where made not how they are used. So I had to make two.
I started with the bogey from my C-liner as it was 3 axle and had 42" wheels, just what I needed. I start by sizing a plan of just the bogey to the right size and center the pivot point at y=0 witch is 5" off from the center wheel. I export just the wheels to test in game. In game I see I had the wrong side and had to redo.
Note: I re-space the wheel by moving the "lattice" or "dummy" not the mesh.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Remaking a Loco
Day 1
I am complete remaking one of my old locos, the Lima-Hamilton 2500hp Transfer loco. Only 22 made and all used only on the Pennsylvania R.R.
The old one was made for UTC I think, I did one update so it is in version. 2.0 and on the DLS. I have moved my old files to my work folder and put loco, two bogeys, and engine file in CM's Pick list so I can make new versions.
The engine file was done first(normally I do it last) this was just adding a thumbnail and the two new lines for TS12. This has been made into a CDP and uploaded to the DLS.
the old one
I am complete remaking one of my old locos, the Lima-Hamilton 2500hp Transfer loco. Only 22 made and all used only on the Pennsylvania R.R.
The old one was made for UTC I think, I did one update so it is in version. 2.0 and on the DLS. I have moved my old files to my work folder and put loco, two bogeys, and engine file in CM's Pick list so I can make new versions.
The engine file was done first(normally I do it last) this was just adding a thumbnail and the two new lines for TS12. This has been made into a CDP and uploaded to the DLS.
the old one
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
The Art Icon
The Art Icon is only used in kind Traincar, It is a 128x64 32 bit tga file name_art_icon.tga. It is used in at lest 5 places in Trainz and a lot of content makers ether do not make one or make it wrong. Back in Trainz 1 it was used to make up your train and every one made them. You find them in the Railyard list, in Driver in the driver list(under the driver's head shot), and a lot of the pop-up menus. If it is not made a black box is used, I see a lot of them and some that are just the thumbnail, also not right.
The Art Icon should be a side shot of the car or loco on a track with a black background that has a alpha mask that will knockout the background.
To do this I made a map with the one track going North-South and a white ground color with one side of the map having a large hill, this is basically a stdio product table. This is a one baseboard map and one Session with just one loco at the end and my new car or loco placed about 400' down the track, this way I can just edit the Session to replace the "old" with the "new". Run the Session, set the camera and "Sun" (my light) and hit Prt Scr.
The Art Icon should be a side shot of the car or loco on a track with a black background that has a alpha mask that will knockout the background.
To do this I made a map with the one track going North-South and a white ground color with one side of the map having a large hill, this is basically a stdio product table. This is a one baseboard map and one Session with just one loco at the end and my new car or loco placed about 400' down the track, this way I can just edit the Session to replace the "old" with the "new". Run the Session, set the camera and "Sun" (my light) and hit Prt Scr.
This is the map.
And this is how the shot looks.
The Art Icon
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