Railworks America

Well since I'm probably the worst at repainting engines myself, I was hoping someone with more experience could make the Santa Fe to Albuquerque commuter train called the rail runner. I would suggest repainting either the San Diego Commuter Rail F59PHI DLC or the F59PHI from the Pacific Surfliner DLC. Would greatly appreciate anyone who can do this since i need this train to make the Santa Fe to Albuquerque commuter route that i plan on constructing. Now for some pictures to help the painter




And here is the logo

You might not find anyone to do these due to the fact that the F59's are so hard to repaint and that some repaints will need child objects made.

Too bad because this is an awesome livery.

Now if only we had an MP36...

Ok, if I work really hard on this it may just be possible...



No promises as this has taken me six hours solid work so far and It is, as you see, a mess, but I hope that is because I am just testing the texture map for now to see what lines up where.

As you can see, it's a Laff!

Long time no see, Marleyman.
Welcome back!

Chacal wrote:Long time no see, Marleyman.
Welcome back!

Thank you.

Ok, it cannot be done and here is why:

The section of the 'beak' highlighted by the arrows is the troublesome part...



That part is from this section of the texture map and as you can see on the model it appears in two different places. So those two specific parts on the model are covered by just one texture.



I should also point out that the first image has the right hand side of the model flipped to best demonstrate the issue.

I would think other liveries could be done but this one cannot be done without child objects which are beyond my skill-set.

Which brings me to the question, is there a tutorial out there anywhere about creating child objects?

What specifically would you like to see in that tutorial? I will tell you from experience that Mike and I did all our child placement using trial and error. You can only use the BPE to place children when you have the IGS files.

If I take this skin as a project for creating a child object, a guide could start there.

Questions I would have are;

What do you mean by 'BPE' and 'IGS'?

How do I know what size to make the Plane that would be required to sit at the side of the Loco?

What tools are required? (Blender, Photoshop...)

Does the plane need to be textured (painted) before export from Blender?

EDIT:
I have Blender 2.71 installed and I have added 'io_export_ia.py' and 'io_export_igs.py' to the addons folder. Now reading 'Blender 2.6x Train Simulator 20xx export' by DOM107

Marleyman wrote:If I take this skin as a project for creating a child object, a guide could start there.

Questions I would have are;

What do you mean by 'BPE' and 'IGS'?

Blue Print Editor, IGS.... Intermedia Geometry, errr idonno. Anyway the IGS file is the file which Blender, or 3DC, or Max would export. This file in turn is compiled into a GEO by the BPE (once you fill in all the blanks). You can read through my tutorial to see how that works.
http://thegradecrossing.blogspot.com/20 ... tents.html

Marleyman wrote:How do I know what size to make the Plane that would be required to sit at the side of the Loco?

I have had to make a best guess as to the size of the shape. Since it sounds like you want to make a decal, just drop a box on to workspace (blender defaults with one), remove all faces but one, resize, texture, add material, and export. Update: you probably want to which material to use. I would go with TrainDecal.fx, For an LOD use 1_1000_ since its just a face, and for your texture (ACE) 10 layers would work nice with an LOD of 1000. Again the context is a single face, if it were a more complex model we could talk more about this (see the locomotive tutorial for an idea).

Marleyman wrote:What tools are required? (Blender, Photoshop...)

Yup, but read the tutorials (mine and blenders). Translating from 3DC to Blender may take a bit, but if I can do it then is it not impossible.

Marleyman wrote:Does the plane need to be textured (painted) before export from Blender?

Yes. This is the case for any modeling program you use.

Marleyman wrote:EDIT:
I have Blender 2.71 installed and I have added 'io_export_ia.py' and 'io_export_igs.py' to the addons folder. Now reading 'Blender 2.6x Train Simulator 20xx export' by DOM107

It will still work. We (VRC) are using blender for our next locomotive.

Once you get this far, we can then add it as a child. Yes, any model can be added to another as a child. Please read this:
http://thegradecrossing.blogspot.com/20 ... ldren.html

Is this what I need?



To the best of my knowledge this is a textured single plane object. Looks terrible to me.

The RailRunner MP36PH-3C does not have strobes in real life; why not use the Amtrak version as a basis?

You are stretching the texture. Create a texture in proportion to the face you created.

Well making this square took longer than I expected. I think I broke blender twice.



Now that I have a Square Plane with the texture on it I am at a loss as to what I should do now. I do know there are naming constraints I need to be aware of but other than that, I have no clue.