Railworks America

Does anyone have any suggestions in regards to making a neon sign appear to flash on and off?

mdurdan wrote:animate a lit and non lit polly to switch back and forth in front of each other. Works like a charm

Thanks md! I will have to explore this, because I'm a blender dude now...

An animated texture would work fine for this:

http://railsimilarity.blogspot.com/2009 ... tures.html

I'm sure there's a means of doing this in Blender.

Hack wrote:An animated texture would work fine for this:

http://railsimilarity.blogspot.com/2009 ... tures.html

I'm sure there's a means of doing this in Blender.

Thanks Hack, there seems to be a number of different ways to do this in blender. I'll have to figure out the most efficient and one that works with the exporter. Thanks!

Every time I'm reminded of project Similarity, I cry a little.

Actually, I haven't found a tutorial that deals with animated textures in blender. Actually, I should clarify: There are many tutorials dealing with animated textures in blender, BUT none that I have found for TS... I wish I knew of one! I'm working on a neon sign that has ten different images. I got them to work as an image sequence in blender, but the igs exporter looks at it and says 'Huh?' If anyone has done an animated texture in blender, I sure would love to hear from you! The post above from Hack references ace files that look like this: XXXXX_anim3.ace.

Do animated textures in TS have to follow this naming convention?

@mdurdan: UKTrainSim.com has all the information about the exporter.

There are no railworks pluggins for blender as such, that I know of. There are two RW exporters that I know of, and I have been using this one:
http://members.uktrainsim.com/filelib-directory.php?form_hide=on&form_country=15&form_sim=14&form_path=ty=10,cls=2838
It comes with a pdf help file, which is kind of daunting, because it was written by someone much smarter than most of us. You just have to fool around with it; trial and error. Mostly error, but it does work. I have managed to export some fairly simple models, with night textures. I haven't figured out the LODs and grouping quite yet, but I am close. The problem that you are going to run in to is this; there are a few tuts out there (on this forum) that show how to export with blender 2.4x. Blender is now up to 2.69, and the interface is different. I really like working in blender now, but translating the work to TS is a pain in the arss! Mainly because you're blazing your own trail and watching reams of blender tutorials on youtube. Oh, that's just me... sorry. I will write a tutorial when I feel confident enough, but for now, I'm in the wind. And dang, now you have to interface with the new brownprint, er, blueprint editor which is like sticking straws into a piece of Styrofoam.

mdurdan wrote:I know they have the tutorial for the exporter but I need it for the animated textures

If you find one, please post! I'm going to start another thread on this.