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