More on ARN and PBR

 

More on ARN and PBR

Some more things on ARN, now in TRS19 you can use PBR on your ARN. All you need to add is a normal.tga and a pbr.tga.

 

The normal needs just a flat color RGB of 135,135,255 will work just not a uniform color and NO ALPHA, the normal.texture.txt should look like this:

 

Primary=normdigit6b.tga

Tile=

 

You only need one, you can use it for all digits(if you are going for 3D numbers this will not work).

 

The PBR texture can also be used for all digits, looks like this:

 

Also not uniform color but dose have this in name.texture.txt:

Primary=pbrdigit6a.tga
Alpha=pbrdigit6a.tga
Tile=

Your digits in the "car" folder may or may not look good. You do not need to change anything but the PBR can look wrong in game. I find white numbers look way to white at 255,255,255 more like 185,185,185, this depends on color, size, and fount used.

 

You can now make the digits light up at night by making the red channel in the pbr.tga white, say 200,200,200. This is all you have to do, it will "glow" in the dark.

 

I had some with a alpha in the normal and it makes the numbers move inward, for me it was inward past the body side so it did not show up.

Size, I find I use 16x16 or 32x32 for digits, 8x8 is to small and 64x64 only for very large ones, like BN black and green.

ARN code uses file names not numbers so you can do limited other things like passenger car names but you can only do 9 names.

On the DT&I caboose I did, DT&I only had 6 cars, numbers 140-145 but the numbers show up in 2 fonts each in 4 places so that would be 24 mesh's and 20 numbers. I could not do anything about the numbers but could cut the mesh's down to 8. What I did was make the "number" be all three digits.
came out like this:
digit          text

0                0
1               140
2               141
3               142
4               143
5               144
6               145
7               7
8               8
9               9

The texture size was 64x32. You can not have a ARN start with "0" so in the config.txt I had 1-7 for the ARN.

 

 

 

 

 

Part 3

What the final UV map looks like, on top of the ID map:

 

Just the ID map:

 

 

And in Blender:

 

The frame UV map over it's ID map:

 

 

In Blender:

 

 

In TRS19 with first test, body done with SP, frame just ID map:

 

 





 



 

 

Part 2

Here is the top mesh:

I have also added the pbr.tga so that I have skin.m.pbrmetal and am replacing the old skin.m.tbumtex.
I made a temporary mesh by joining all the parts and then doing a smart UV Project to get the right size. Do not save this mesh!

I used this to size the layout plans I used in Photoshop.

 

This I save as the new skin.tga . It goes make UVmap, export UVmap, add it to skin.tga, save, re-open Blender(so it will see the new texture) and then do the next part of the mesh.

 

This is with only two mesh done(white background not showing here).

 

This is where I am as I post this.

 

 

 



Updating the car body

 

Updating the car body

 

My first try at updating a car body to PBR/FBX did not work and I have had to re-think how to do it.

What went wrong was the number of pixels I had to work with. In the old textures if you had overlapping UVmaps it was ok, it is not good for PBR most of the time, it works ok for like the inside of a car body that has windows but is only one color (black).

 

 

Trainz textures must be a power of two, that's: 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048.

 

4096 will not give an error in TRS19 but will not be used, it gets re-sized down to 2048.

 

Now take a 80 passenger car and you come up with one pixel is 2"x2" on a 2048x2048. Add to this a lot of detail and you run out of pixels, this is what I ran into, to fit all the UVmaps on one 2048x2048 for PBR the overall size would be about 40% smaller. So my fix is going to be use two 2048x2048 giving me about a 5% smaller, I can live with that.

 

 

So here is the car texture that was used with the UVmap shown on top.

 

What dose not work is the "X" like things on the roof and a lot of things on the black under body, makes the Bake of AO look bad as well as the PBR.

How to fix: I made the car body one mesh and did a new Smart UV project form it to see how much area it would take then quit Blender with out saving. Repeated the above but with just the car body top like an HO model and did this until I got a size that look good and save the UVmap.