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.

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

 

 



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.

Two Things to Look Out for.

 

 

After three days of looking I found out that a bogey config.txt set up that would work with the old XML/im will not work with FBX, this is in the mesh table setup.

 

 

Old way:

 

mesh-table
{
  mesh1
  {
    mesh                                "6wheel_bogey.lm"
    auto-create                         1
  }
 
  mesh2
  {
    mesh                                "6wheel_bogeyg.lm"
    auto-create                         1
  }
 
  shadow
  {
    mesh                                "6wheel_bogey_shadow/6wheel_bogey_shadow.im"
  }
}

 

 

This is what I edit it to:

 

mesh-table
{

  wheels
  {
    mesh                                "wheels.lm"
   auto-create                         1
  }

   mesh1
  {
    mesh                                "frame1.lm"
   auto-create                         1
  }
}

 

IT WILL NOT WORK the mesh's will show but NO animation.

 

The fix:

 

mesh-table
{

  default
  {
    mesh                                "wheels.lm"
   auto-create                         1
  }

   mesh1
  {
    mesh                                "frame1.lm"
   auto-create                         1
  }
}

 

For FBX you have to have a "default" but it dose not have to be the mesh that has the animation.

 

The other thing I have found out the hard way is name.m.pbrmetal with a normal texture that has an Alpha channel for parallax will NOT work unless you have Shader Quality set to Ultra and that it only goes down or into, it can not go up or out.