Trainz Content Creation By Whitepass

Using PBR and UVmaping

You now need to assign a PBR material to your mesh. How you assign depends on what program you use, so you will have to look that part up.

Trainz has only 5 material types but for roiling stock I have never used more than 3.

TRS19 only uses PBR all older content get converted to PBR, this takes up very little room, one common normal map, one common pbr map per old texture type, and one green and white texture used for all missing textures, this is why you get green/white mesh from FBX. Note that if you have a missing texture in your PBR it will get replaced with the green/white one (had this on last car with ARN as I missed one normal file and got numbers with a checker board look).

All PBR used for Trainz are metal/roughness and are ether a set of 10 or 11 data files used to color a mesh. The data is saved as 3 textures in RGB or RGBA as ether name.tga or name.png. At a power of 2, can be square or 1:8, max size is 2048x2048 aka 2K, a 4K will not give an error but will be downsized to 2K by CM.

Most used one. name.m.pbrmetal used for most things, metal, wood, plastic, rock and so on all on one material.

Name.m.pbrmetalmasked used the same as m.pbrmetal but has a Alpha channel used as a mask, has to be used to make ARN.

Name.m.glass used to make glass or other transparent things.

Name.m.pbrmetaldetail used to make finer detail, I have not used it as most of what I make dose not have finer detail, painted steel and painted wood.

Name.m.clutter only used to make clutter mesh, I have not used,

Good place to go to:http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/Material_Types

Each texture has to have texture.txt with it, the Blender FBX exporter will make them but not right. best way to make is to copy a known working one, edit it and "save as".

what it look like:

File name: normalskin.tga

inside:

Primary=normalskin.tga

Tile=

File name: pbr.tga

inside:

Primary=pbr.tga
Alpha=pbr.tga
Tile=

My car has PBR textures set up just use skin.tga, normalskin.tga, and pbr.tga. This way you do not need to make the PBR textures yet, just edit them for now.

Next you need to make a UVmap, there are programs just for that and most 3D programs also have it built in. What it dose is flatten your mesh out, like unfolding a cardboard box so it is flat. This way you do not have the same data used for more than one pixel, very bad with PBR, did not mater in old way. Some times you can overlap where you can not see it from the out side. The size should be the same for all faces but you can be off up to about 2x.

What this looks like: