Tomix's Rollingstock

[Tomix]

Since I quit modeling for other Train sims such as Trainz and Railworks, I decided to make more RT3 skins and engines(since we could use more good ones). I'll start working on other locos which will mainly be Thomas rollingstock, but I'll do others as well.

Thanks to Gumboots for helping out with the alphas, I present the Big Boy in it's proper livery.



If you need a smaller version of the image Hawk, let me know.

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Edited by Hawk: Deleted the rar file from this post. It's now in the archives.

[Gumboots]

Oh nice. I'm in the middle of something but will take a look at that later.

ETA: Just gave it a quick run. Nice skin. Well done.

There appears to be a problem with the left side cab numberplate being cut off, but that would be a bug in the default body .3dp file so without fixing that (which means repacking a whole load of stuff) it'd need a bit of a workaround for Big Boy skins. The way you could do it would be to make the numbers smaller so they don't need as much length. That way it should be possible to it look the same both sides.

The reversed text on one side of the tender is impossible to fix without completely rebuilding the default tender mapping. Some locos have that bug, which is a bit of a PITA but there you go.

[Gumboots]

Oh hey I think I figured out why PopTop painted the Big Boy in such a weird colour scheme. Since I've been checking out the loco models I noticed that the Big Boy and Challenger are almost identical. I have a suspicion that when they tested the game they thought the two engines were too similar, so went fluoro mental on the Big Boy to make it obviously not the Challenger.

[Tomix]

Interesting thought, you are probably correct.

[Tomix]

I always disliked the textures on the A1, so I decided to revamp them. You might recognize where some of the textures are from.

[Gumboots]

Big improvement. Just be aware that the A1 model is rough as guts in terms on some details. This will bork your skin to some extent. If you're interested in having those bugs fixed I'm happy to help out. Correcting the bogies, for example, is not that big a deal. The mismapping of the gfx on the underside of the boiler shouldn't be that much drama to track down either.

ETA: Oh and if you really want to do a good job of it, do it at 1024 A skin. You could just grab the existing 512 and scale it up for a start, then tidy up the gfx to suit since you are doing that anyway. I can give you a diagram/overlay of the mapping if you need it.

[Tomix]

Yup, already scaled it to 1024. That would be great if you wanted to help with the wheels and mapping. I did a quick look at the mapping in Blender, and I'm surprised the model was released like this.



What were they thinking? As far as the Big Boy numbering issue, I'm aware of that. It's interesting since I compared the Big Boy model and the Challenger model, and the Challenger model has a longer polygon on it's cab than the Big Boy.

[Gumboots]

I suspect the A1 was a bit of a rush job when they were doing the CtC Expansion release. It doesn't seem to have got much love.

It's supposedly representing one of the post-war Peppercorn A1's, judging by the starting date, but the model (such as it is) is closer to the pre-war Gresley A1's, which were quite different. I'd like to do a proper Peppercorn at some point as that would mean we could also have Tornado in the game as a 21st century steamer by using the same basic model. That would rock.

Anyway I'll take a look at the bugs in the A1. Fixing those will require fixing the .3dp files that are stashed in the default huge PK4's. You wont be able to fix it all by just playing with the skin, AFAIK, but we should fix the basics of the A1 anyway if we're doing this 1.06.01 bugfix patch. The full-on revamp as a proper Peppercorn will probably have to wait (depends on time and enthusiasm).

[Gumboots]

Took a quick look at it. I can see what's causing most of the problems. The arrows are pointing to where stuff is misaligned. This explains most of the wheel wobble (although one bogie is still way out of whack apart from the gfx). It also explains the misalignment under the boiler/smokebox. You should be able to see how the lower section is shunted to the right relative to the rest. So that one just needs a little bit of a remap.

Class_A1_bugs.jpg (182.91 KiB) Viewed 7697 times

[Tomix]

How difficult will it be to remap those parts? I tried to do it with texturing, but it overlaps the other UV ever so slightly that makes it not work.

[Gumboots]

It wont be too bad. I'll just have to be a bit careful and double check stuff. The thing is that the A1 model is a total pig of a thing. Everything, and I mean everything, is tied to something else. It's impossible to visually break it down into components by shifting points to negative z, which is my usual trick for rapidly mapping files. However, I've found where some of those points under the boiler are done in the gfx mapping.* I'll just have to check I have the right instances of those particular values. After that, tweaking those mapping coordinates should do it. It's only a few values that need doing. I should be able to give it to you tomorrow my time.

With the wheels, if you just do new gfx that are centred on the mapping square for those wheels, you should be fine.

*Used another trick for this: check the overlay for the mesh and get the coordinates for the relevant faces, then search for a truncated version of that (last four bytes only) in the gfx mapping section of the hex. That way I can ignore most of the tangled-up body coordinates stuff.

ETA: Oh and the Class A1 body file also suffers from that problem of being laterally asymmetric. IOW, whoever did it borked the transfer of X coordinates between right and left sides, so you have to think and be cunning when figuring out which points do what. This problem afflicts quite a few default files, to a greater or lesser extent, but the A1 seems to be one of the worst at this too. It even has points that should be on the centreline out of whack.

Anyway, by being cunning I've found the right points, so should be able to fix things.

[Tomix]

Sounds good.



Why on earth did they put handrails on the tender?

[Gumboots]

Beats me. Anyway check this out: Basic bug fixes for Class A1

[AdmiralHalsey]

Ah the good old Apple-Green livery of the A1's. Always brings a bit of joy to me heart when I see it.

[Gumboots]

I'm thinking if Tomix is ok with it we should make these skins the defaults, and ditch the old PopTop ones.

[Stoker]

I'm thinking if Tomix is ok with it we should make these skins the defaults, and ditch the old PopTop ones.

Providing he doesn't sneak a goofy face on the front of the firebox I think that is worth considering.

[Tomix]

Fine by me.
Getting the wheel textures centered is more of a pain then I thought. Thanks to importing them via Blender, it makes it easy to check.

[Gumboots]

You have the mapping visible in Blender though don't you? I didn't check it too closely. If the squares for the wheels aren't square, or if they're at some weird fraction of a pixel that's messing things up, I can remap them to something nice and even without much trouble. Wheel mapping is pretty straightforward. The real nightmare with this model is the loco body file. That's the one I want to avoid.

[Tomix]

Don't worry about it. Just a little fiddling in Photoshop and all is good.

[Tomix]

Skin is for the most part finished, I just need to replace the other rod parts.