Days 14,15

Not a lot to talk about, working on steeps and new hoods.

Day 13

This shows why I get content in-game as soon as I can, the cab ends are not in the same place in-game as in Blender, the fix is just a Ctrl+A.

You can also see how useful it is to use the plans to make the texture.

Day 12

Added more under body detail so I could see how much of the bogeys show. Will now go back to finish up the bogeys but will not upload as they do not fit under the old body.

Day 11

Have stated the body frame. I am using a deferent set of plans than what I used last time and there are a lot of small deferences. You can see that I have most of the attachment points in already.

I will be adding to the bogeys but can not tell yet how much.

Day 10

Made bogey 2 from bogey 1 this was mostly just rotating every thing but the wheels 180.

Started on the body by laying out the master skin texture in Photoshop and make the update copy in CM, most of witch will be replaced. Also re-did most of the config.txt.

Day 7,8,9

Have it mostly done for now but it may need something when the new body is made. I show it here on my aatestbed car witch I use for making bogeys and if I need to test a material/texture. The name "aatestbed" makes it ease to find and the first car I made with Blender after 8 years of Gmax.

This is also the screenshot I use to make the 240x180 thumbnail.

Day 6

Added springs and brake cylinders.

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.

Day 4

Not a lot to show, have the side of the side frame done.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is the map.

 

And this is how the shot looks.

 

The Art Icon

 

 

Using Plans

Models made in Trainz are life size (1:1) witch leads to a problem in taking measurements from scale plans, that is the thickness of the line maybe an inch or more. All the plans you will find will be on paper or were on paper witch has a 2% error. There is nothing you can do about ether but it comes out to about 2" for an 85' car and no one will see it in game.

I know of three ways to use plans and have tried all at lest one time.

Measurements

Simply use the measurements on the plans and/or use a scale rule to get the numbers to enter in.

Template

You scan the plans in and crop the scan to a know size then make a box or a plane the same size and UV map the scan onto it. You need to make a side, end, and top.

Background

Most 3D modeling programs let you add a custom background that you can re-size. This is what I use and have used in Gmax and Blender. Getting the size the same on two or more plans is very hard, one will be off just a bit. What I do is use the side as the master and if the end one is off move the part back in the side view.

PLANS

Note: the following is for the U.S. and Canada.

Plans are made by the manufacture, railroads, and rail fans/modelers.

All plans can have mistakes in them and they can also be out of date due to model changes and then the railroad shops can make them look completely different. This makes having good photos a must to make a good model.

Manufactures plans - the originals

There are three basic types, locomotive, passenger car, and freight car. All are on very large paper, newspaper size and up, witch makes scanning them hard. What is not on them is all the parts from the parts suppliers. Common practice was to not draw the wheels, bogeys, air brakes, grab irons, lettering and so on. They are also hard to find as most of the old ones were not saved. In 1879 the first Car Builders Cyclopedia was published fallowed by the locomotive ones some years later witch have lots of the original plans and the plans for the missing parts. Some are on CD, some are on Google Books, and you can buy them on Ebay and Amazon.  

Railroad plans - class books

Some large railroads made up classification books. A lot of them are on the Internet. They are small per-printed forms with a lot of data on them and a side and end view with dimensions but most look had drawn. Some have copy's of the originals.

Rail fan / modelers - plans found in model magazines and books

Model railroading started in the 1930s witch started the model magazines and a need for plans. Most of the plans came from the Cyclopedias or class books. The early ones are not that good as the models did not have a lot of detail but they did add in the lettering. By the S the plans got a lot better and are the easiest to use and find. They also had plans made by modelers that were made by measuring the real thing or from photos.

Making content is fun but it is also a lot of vary hard work and takes a lot of time, in fact most of us who make a lot of content spend most of are time doing that and not running Trainz.

To make most content you need to make a 3D mesh, a 2D texture, UV map the texture to the mesh, export it and then get it to work error free in Trainz. Not everyone can make content, everyone can try but a lot have started to make something only to find out it's a lot harder than it looks, usually they try to start with a steam locomotive, one of the hardest things to make.

To make the 3D mesh you use a 3D CAD program, one of the hardest programs to learn, and what you see in the program is not what Trainz will show. The texture is a lot simpler as you get what you see. UV mapping may be one of the hardest things to do depending on the 3D CAD program used.