Headcodes

[demonshadow]

Rather than have freight animations you could fit the lamps permenantly but make them of transparent material.

Alternative sets of ace files could then be done for each headcode with the unused lamps alpha'd out.

Brilliant idea Ian... I wonder why its taken so long for someone to come up with that, it seems so obvious now you have said it...

It's already been done Tim Court did it with his BoB/WC and maybe other BATS SR loco's (not sure if that applys to both disks and lamps, i then set up the disks for Danny's unrebuilt MN, i also intend to use the same approach with all my models with two folders containing the live lamps/disks in one and dead in the other.

Thanks Ian i'll try out the Alpha Bright idea with the lamps when i get round to them

all the best

Mike

[mickrik]

HI there,

I have had another look at headcodes. I have now made a better lantern with a better lense. I have made the model so when exported, the specular value of the lense is 0 which means the lense glows in the dark. I take it that is what you mean by alphered out as 3DCanvas works a little different



I hope the nightlight picture shows up for you



also I have started work on something else



mickrik

[demonshadow]

Mick i believe you understood it wrong,you'll find is down to the tga files, simply an alpha is a black and white version of a texture file for this other half of an image you'll find that black is negative (can not be seen) and white will be positive (can be seen)
simply
when you've done your lamps,the type of the poly surfaces should be set to something along the lines of alphatrans or alphanormal these names are taken from TSM so they will mostlikely be named slightly different in 3DC from what i am guessing. but as you have discovered about setting the lens i would suggest making sure that the lamp lens surface is set the way you have done so for the screenshots

a great example to look at would be DEE's Unrebuilt MN in the trainset folder for this model you'll find two folders titled Diskslive and Disks dead. Disks live contains the headcode disks with a positive alpha (white) and disks dead will contain the headcode disks with a negative alpha(black) have a look at the tga files for the disks in each folder and you should then understand what i mean if you don't already

Hopefully all that should make sense