Diesel Reskins

[nezo]

thanks alot they are great ive got them on now is the fp 45s available to ?

[Itsa Timmy]

Im glad you like them!
The download for the FP45 re skins are at the bottom of the first post and the FP45 doubles are 7 posts down.
Keep in mind that these are beta and I plan to update them, unfortunately work has kept me quite busy lately.

[nezo]

ice now got the reskins but i dont know where to put the rar file am used to pk4 and car files if you could tell me where to put it that would be great.

[Hawk]

ice now got the reskins but i dont know where to put the rar file am used to pk4 and car files if you could tell me where to put it that would be great.

You need WinRar to unpack the rar file. It's similar to WinZip.

[nezo]

ive got it now thanks for the link for winrar and thanks for the skin its brilliant

[nedfumpkin]

Here's a preview of the 1953 CNR refurbished heavyweight coach that was in service until 1960. It's being pulled by the EMD FP7.

When I do the set for CPR, I'll be using WP&P's dome cars with the Budd cars for the same period.

PS:...I'm hoping that I get my new PC either tomorrow or Wednesday and I will have a significant improvement so screen shots should be better.

[WPandP]

Compared to the engines, which have a lot of deep black, this skin looks a little washed out. Perhaps the roof needs to be darker. If you could find a way to give it more pronounced shadow lines, too, that would help; simple fix is to push the contrast a bit (Contrast Up, Saturation back down a little, since colors will tend to enrich). Another option is to use a copied layer on a "multiply" setting, then gamma correct the snot out of the copied layer until it's pretty much only the darkest regions of the underlying image, the rest is washed out to white. That way, you're effectively only multiplying the dark areas, leaving the light portion alone.

Of course, another option is to go back and tone down the F-unit skins, but you've already released those.

I'm finding that a mid-range charcoal grey is really all you want for black in most cases. The skins I did for my N&W class A and Y are on the dark side, but if you examine the skins you'll see that they aren't really all that dark.

[nezo]

in the 1st post you have 3 trcks togther how do you get them like that i cant get mine near that mine has a gap ov 2 stations between them and cant get any closer,

and the new style cars look great cant wait for them all.

[nedfumpkin]

Compared to the engines, which have a lot of deep black, this skin looks a little washed out. Perhaps the roof needs to be darker. If you could find a way to give it more pronounced shadow lines, too, that would help; simple fix is to push the contrast a bit (Contrast Up, Saturation back down a little, since colors will tend to enrich). Another option is to use a copied layer on a "multiply" setting, then gamma correct the snot out of the copied layer until it's pretty much only the darkest regions of the underlying image, the rest is washed out to white. That way, you're effectively only multiplying the dark areas, leaving the light portion alone.

Of course, another option is to go back and tone down the F-unit skins, but you've already released those.

I'm finding that a mid-range charcoal grey is really all you want for black in most cases. The skins I did for my N&W class A and Y are on the dark side, but if you examine the skins you'll see that they aren't really all that dark.

I'm going to wait for my new pc before putting the finishing touches on the skin sinces the colours are almost the same, but the game isn't showing them as that. There is supposed to be a slight difference though.

But alas, with my current video card the screen caps are not so great for detail. By the end of the week, I'm gonna have an NVidia GT120 with 1gb of RAM, on an Intel Core 2 quad 9300 at 2.5 GHz. This will be a slight improvement over my PII 350 and my voodoo 5 card.

[WPandP]

*cough*slight*cough* !

[nezo]

hi all

aint been on for a while been very busy,

does anyone have any reskins or new engines from british rail,virgin,or national express ive got all the ones from the site but im trying to keep my game up to date abit aswell as using old engines.
any would be gud if you wana share with me

[Itsa Timmy]

Good News, Folks! After a long hiatus, I have started working on these again! For now, a teaser. Also notice the difference between the .DDS skin (Lead Unit) and the .TGA skin.

[Itsa Timmy]

The wait was long but I think you'll all agree it was worth it

Thanks for all the help and enjoy! Let me know if you find any bugs.

FP45 MOD.rar

(1.08 MiB) Downloaded 287 times

Next on the list is figuring out how to re skin these.

[WPandP]

Those look really good... and it didn't even strike me until quite a bit later that they were pulling my cars (the silver Budd streamliners and the ATSF Hy-Cube boxcars)! Together, they are quite compelling. I see you've flipped one trailing unit (a "tender" according to RRT3) which means you feel comfy hex-editing a 3DP file. Next step would be to trade the trucks for those from the GP-35, and then shorten the FP45 body to match, and paint it up as an Amtrak F40PH! I dare you to do that!

[nedfumpkin]

I double dare you.

[Itsa Timmy]

Comfy is certainly one way to put it! I had a heck of a time remapping the skin coordinates! While not necessarily hard once I figured it out, It was still horribly time consuming. Converting hex to decimal and back takes by far the longest (why is everything backwards!) Any pointers for speeding up the process?
Also, would I have to modify points or faces or both? I'll probably just dive back in the pool and and see what I can come up with (Thats the only way to learn to swim right?)

First, though I want to update my re skins and add a few more (a pair in Milwaukee Road Armour Yellow would look so awesome!) and throw in a skinning kit so people can make their own.

Also, I never got any info on the engine specs, do they look alright?

[General_Popeye]

First, though I want to update my re skins and add a few more (a pair in Milwaukee Road Armour Yellow would look so awesome!)

I've had the Milwaukee Road Armour Yellow passenger scheme and the Black and Orange freight schemes i will post as soon as i find my flashdrive

[WPandP]

What speeded up the process for me immensely was discovering TinyHexer, my hex-editing tool of choice. It has a pop-up window that can provide decimal conversion on the fly, and lets you type in decimal amounts rather than hex code - it even gets the inverse-order correct! Prior to finding that gem, I had to use two tools, one to do conversions and another to hex edit, very cumbersome.

To change the shape, such as shortening a unit (or lengthening a boiler as I did in my Class A), you don't have to bother with remapping faces; you're just tugging the corners of the faces around. Of course, this will warp the skin a bit, think of the newsprint image on a piece of silly-putty when you stretch it; you'll just have to tweak the skin file to look right. I suppose one *could* remap the skin coordinates, if you want to avoid having to stretch or squish the skin file's components, but I think it's just easier to squish in the skin file.

If you wanted to do more than just move existing points around, such as perhaps adding an extra radiator grill or other feature not present in the current model, then you get into modding both the points and the faces. It's not hard, either, just tedious, but with TinyHexer it's at least plausibly achievable. I did this for my SD40 - I took the GP-35, spread its two radiators out a bit, then enlarged the center third radiator to match the others, and remapped its skin coordinates to match the other two.

[Itsa Timmy]

Well, since I'm not getting any bug reports on these, you might as well put them on the downloads page, hawk. Ill hopefully add a better read me similar to the ones Ned has on his stuff when I get the time.

[Hawk]

Okee Dokee! I'll try to get it added today, but it might be tomorrow.