Saturday, February 22, 2020

How to start

 
You need to know Trainz and CM before you can do anything. Learn how your paint program works and do some re-skins. Then learn what ever 3D program you have, do all the tutorials, you may never use most of it but you need to learn the interface.

You should set the red underline like shown in TRS19, this turns on parallax witch you should check for, I did not and had to fix some things and re-upload to DLS.

 
 
For your first export into Trainz just make a box and get it to show in game, that can be a lot harder than it sounds.
 
Animation is the hardest thing to do so put that off for two or three things made first.
 
How I start new content:
 
This can be hard some times, What to make.
 
Next thing is to do research what you plan to make. I have lots of books and magazines plus Google and long list of web sites. You are after plans and good photos.

Photos: before 1861 there are only 5 known railroad photos. Early Photos only recorded blue light so red looks just like black, some thing to look out for, color came in around 1930's but did not become common tile med 1950's. There are a lot of off color photos on line.

Plains: a lot of old plans are just gone and a lot have thing that do not match the photos. You may need a flat bead scanner.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Making content for TRS19 and up

With FBX and PBR
 
 
About me: I'm 74 and have been making Trainz content for about 20 years, started in Trainz 1.0, been a Beta tester for UTC,TRS2004, TS10, TS12, TANE and TRS19. I was part of the group that made content for TRS2004.
 
About Trainz: N3V posted that they had 70 build out there. How thinks work and look very some with each build so you need to change with them. LOD first came out in TRS2004 and most did not use it so now N3V has made it required so some time they are going to make PBR required to.
 
 
What you need to make content:
 
A mesh
A texture
A UVmap of the mesh
A config.txt
A thumbnail jpg

Programs you need:

A 3D program that can export FBX
A paint program that has channels and layers
A text editor

What I use:

Blender 2.79
Photoshop CM6
Substance Painter
Windows Note Pad
TEE (no longer available)
Windows Calculator