Rolling Stock skinning ideas

[Gumboots]

B and C eras are now running live. The B era cars are fine.

There's an odd bug with a few of the bogies on the C era cars. The first and third axles for the body are out of position. The hex appears to be correct so it may be one of those weird RT3 bugs that crop up every so often. Everything else with them is ok. It's only those few bogies that are playing up. I'll find a workaround if necessary. Will look into it tonight.

Both doubles now have individual cargoes for the front and rear units, which looks better IMO. They still have exactly the same numbering on both cars, which should probably be changed at some point, but if you have more than one double in the consist they'll have to share numbering anyway.

Out of the three eras, the B double cars are the most tolerant of lumpy track. The D era triples are pretty tolerant, but not quite as much as the B's. The D era triples have about the same wheelbase as the Big Boy locomotive (sans tender).

The C era doubles are the least tolerant, which is not surprising since they have the longest wheelbase. The C era doubles are roughly 10% longer than the D triples, and at just under 98 units in length are pretty much on the 100 unit limit for decent behaviour. All three are fine around most corners.

Edit: C era bogie bug fixed. See new topic.

[Gumboots]

I'm thinking I should push ahead with the coal and iron cars, just to get the default mining stuff sorted. That'll provide a better range of cars for testing, since I generally find more coal and iron gets shipped than bauxite.

[Gumboots]

Since I haven't had much spare time this week I've been slack on the coding side, but I did have a quick play around with other ideas for late era cargo cars. Screenshot shows three options. All of these are pretty simple to do. They're less complicated than the double and triple cars, and would have lower poly counts, and are easy to skin.

First consist is 86 foot hicube boxcars. These will still work for decent behaviour in the game, as they're under the reasonable limit of a 100 unit wheelbase. Second consist is twin 40 foot containers on standard 89 foot flatcars. Third consist is double-stacked 53 foot containers in well cars. Could also do standard 89 foot bilevel autoracks, as they're basically just a box on top of a flatcar.

Out of these, I personally like the twin 40 foot containers on flatcars the best. This is just because they are the longest, which looks cool, and because by skinning each container differently we could have more variation in the looks than the box cars. They're also more suitable for a range of countries and routes than the double-stacked containers.

And obviously it would be possible to mix things up and have some cargoes in boxcars, and some in twin 40's on flats, and some in double-stacked 53's.

Edit: Hey just found something else. Another option would be to do twin 40 foot containers on Railrunner chassis and bogies. These could have a transition unit at the end of each double unit, to connect to non-Railrunner cargo cars in the RT3 consist.

This would be no more complex than other double cars, and would still be ok for overall wheelbase length.

[Hawk]

Those look pretty cool.
I like them all.

[AMD 103]

Edit: Hey just found something else. Another option would be to do twin 40 foot containers on Railrunner chassis and bogies. These could have a transition unit at the end of each double unit, to connect to non-Railrunner cargo cars in the RT3 consist.

This would be no more complex than other double cars, and would still be ok for overall wheelbase length.

Sorry, it's now summer, and I've been getting back into complex games, ala SimCity and Railroad Tycoon (1-3).

The Railrunner stuff reminds me of a older concept called RoadRailers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrailer

Basiclly, these are specially designed trailers, that road on standard freight car trucks, Jacobs-Bogie style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadraile ... 107_MI.jpg

They couple with normal rolling stock via Couplermates. (Yes, that is the real name.)

http://hebners.net/Amtrak/amtROAD/Roadrailers.jpg

They're an older concept, appearing around the 1950s, and may be more appropriate for RT3.

[Gumboots]

Cash on Wheels got me thinking about double cargo cars again. I had them in the back of my mind anyway since this new weight change scale has extra later eras and will ideally have models to go with them. These are just a quick play around in Blender, mutating some of the default models without bothering to re-skin them. All I did was leave the UV mapping alone and scale the mesh.

All of them were scaled lengthways. For the enclosed auto racks I also scaled them a bit for width, to bring them up to the same width as other D era cars (they're a bit narrow by default). For the older open auto racks I duplicated the car models and cut one in half (they're all done as one block originally) so that there are 12 cars on the two levels instead of the default 8. I also scaled the cars and their racks up 20% for length, width and height since they were tiny cars. Now they're closer to car size and look more like it. the flatcar itself was just scaled for length.

The hoppers are a 25% stretched version of WP&P's D era grain hoppers. You can see the original shorter hoppers in the background behind the first two big ones. The skin still looks reasonable despite the stretching, and would do for a while. These longer hoppers are still short enough to do as doubles, which is how they're done in the consist.

So there's scope for some fairly quick and easy shenanigans to make later years more interesting.

[Gumboots]

Here's a bit more fun. Before WW2, cars were shipped in boxcars. Shipping them on open racks on flatcars didn't start until the post-war period. So for the three earliest eras in the new scale (1900-1919, 1920-1939, and 1940-1959) I want custom boxcars, so I did a bit more playing around in Blender. These are quick and easy reskins of the default boxB, as a single for 1910-1919 then as a double for 1920-1939, and the default refrC done as a double for 1940-1959. Could use any decent image to skin them with. I just grabbed what I had handy, which were some shots of model billboard cars. You can tell what they're carrying easy enough.

[Hawk]

I guess the 1910-1919 cars will work for 1900-1909, since the auto plant starts in 1900, at least according to the industry chart.

Looks good.

[Gumboots]

Well I can always find other images to play around with, or even just edit the years on the existing ones. This was just quick messing around. Point is that with boxcars being so simple in shape it's easy to re-skin them. All you need is a profile shot of the car you want, preferably at least 1024 wide. A bit of an angle isn't a problem because you can correct for perspective in Photoshop or Gimp by pulling it back to a rectangle (which is what I did for these). Here's another one, with double default pre-1900 reefers and a custom Trinity reefer for the modern era.

Same goes for the enclosed auto racks or for reefers or even pax or dining cars. Hoppers and tankers are a bit trickier but still not a huge deal.

Oh yeah the other thing is that for the modern era, some of the freight car graffiti being done these days is pretty awesome. Check this out for a grain hopper: https://www.flickr.com/photos/civisi/2818297466/

[Cash on Wheels]

All of us are drooling over the autos & the containers. Here's some "ideas" for the 40' containers. Like we disscused eariler we want something that can fit in world wide. standard 40' shipping containers fit the bill. Like goods for example could have a red 40' container in the well with a yellow 40' on top.(counts as one load) To mix things up Toys would use two 20 footers in the well with a 45' container on top. Now the tricky part is how to blend it with the trainmaster boxcars. That's why I would not worry too much about the boxcar weights.

Also 89' TOFC use could be used for next last era.

Outside of north america does anyone use TOFC? Class one railroads are reducing TOFC service as we speak.

[Gumboots]

Trainmaster boxcars aren't my problem. At the moment I'm not interested in trying to get anything to work with Trainmaster. Other people can do that if they want to. All I was talking about in the other thread was possibly using some of the skins from Trainmaster.

The boxcar weights I'm messing with are part of a new weight change scale for RT3 1.05 and 1.06. Boxcars are what some stuff will be shipped in before the late 20th century, but for game engine purposes it's only a car designation. The "boxcar" can easily be modelled and skinned as COFC or well cars or whatever for the late 20th century onwards. I'd already thought of similar ideas to the ones you suggested, and have a few other things stashed in Blender.

TOFC is frankly too much bother to model for not enough benefit, IMHO. I'd rather do other things.

Edit: By the way, just so you know, the limitation with RT3 is lumps in track. Unless the map is absolutely dead flat (hardly any are) you are going to have lumpy track somewhere. Multiple units won't flex over lumps. They'll bend horizontally around corners just fine, but they won't bend vertically at all over lumps. The entire wheelbase of each RT3 car load (no matter how it's skinned up) is dead straight rigid in the vertical direction.

Basically anything over about 100 RT3 units (83 feet or so to scale) starts to look too bad, too often. So really this is what stops us going nuts with Gunderson MAXI-IV's and stuff like that. A MAXI-IV would actually be pretty easy to model and skin, but unfortunately it would look utterly terrible a lot of the time on most maps.

[Cash on Wheels]

I'm talking about the stand-alone well cars. Greenbrier makes a 53' model. 70' total length.

All these were stand-alone 48' well cars. They are being streched to 53' or chopped down to 40'.

[Gumboots]

Yup, I was just mentioning the multi units because it'd be cool to have them, if we could make them behave reasonably well in the game. For RT3 a 53 foot well car is a nice unit. Long enough to look good, short enough to be manageable.

These are good too: Astrarail Sggrss 80´

That's just short enough to look reasonable on most track, and it'd be good to have some units that weren't double stack, just for variety.

[Gumboots]

Got those box cars for early auto carriers running in the game. They basically work, but once again RT3 is being inconsistent, and pulling stunts that it doesn't pull with other things that are coded the same way.

Sometimes this old crud of a game engine really gives me the @#@&@&!

There is probably a way around it, eventually, but I can't be bothered trying to find it tonight.

[Hawk]

Those look pretty good.

[Gumboots]

Yeah they're not bad. I might try the other auto boxcar images I have available and see which one I like best.

Couple of glitches with them. First one is UV mapping isn't reversed on the other side, so the text is backwards. This is a common problem with default models and it beats me why they did it that way. It would have been just as easy to switch the UV's on one side during development, and that way there would have been no problem.

Anyway I'll fix the model with nifty Blender tools, and that way the image will look right on both sides.

The other problem is with the DDS image itself. Bits of the skin keep dropping out at some distances and angles. I've seen this once before:

Just grabbed the alt Berkshire zip yesterday, now that I can see all skins on my box, and it's still a bit funny.

The tender is really good (even has the name on it in clear lettering) but the loco itself is a bit blurry and indistinct in outlines. It lacks the sharpness and clarity of the tender.

Also, the loco vanishes at some view angles and distances. You can be looking at the thing up close, then zoom out a bit and the loco will disappear.

The profile shot is still the old "ran into a big can of black paint" look too.

For some reason these new auto boxcars are doing that, even though the other boxcars I made recently don't do it, and even though other DDS skins I've made for other assets don't do it either. It'll be something simple and stupid, but I was too tired to do more testing last night. Will sort it over the next few days.

[Hawk]

I don't know if this is relevant to RT3 but in my modeling days for Microsoft Train Simulator I found that MSTS would render a model based on it's access of origin, which MSTS considered the center.
If the origin point of the model wasn't the center of the model, it would disappear at certain angles in the sim.

I hope that makes sense.

[Gumboots]

Yup, makes sense, but I don't think it's the problem here. I'm pretty sure I goofed with some of the DDS export options. I'll try a few things and see if I can figure it out.

[Hawk]

I didn't think it would be, since that problem primarily pertained to large models, but thought I'd throw it out there anyway - just in case, considering the persnickety obfuscated workings of this game.

[Gumboots]

Had a bit of fun. I think we defo should have some stuff like this sometime.

Back to sensible reefers now...