Atomic Systems

Acorncomputer wrote: Depending on what you want to do with the image, you can simply keep on duplicating the layer in GIMP until you have twenty or so duplicate layers on top of each other.

I would personally not recommend this, having tried this before I found the technique I outlined in the above link, I noticed that I was actually losing some parts of the texture. If something is already fully transparent, or nearly fully transparent, no amount of stacking layers and sticking a black background in will bring that region out unfortunately. Plus I got bored of hitting duplicate about 50 times or so before it started to look like what I wanted.

crumplezone wrote:

This is the alpha channel of the texture. For this type of texture, white = max gloss, black = zero gloss. This "greyscale" gives you fine control over the level of shine you want your reskin to have. This one is possibly the most meticulous I've ever seen and the ingame results speak for themselves, so I would be tempted to leave the alpha channel unless you want a museum piece or a rusting hulk.

crumplezone wrote: Though getting it to swap out to colour mode is making it throw a hissy fit...

What happens exactly when you try and view the RGB channel? By right-clicking the layer in the layer tab and unticking "Show layer mask" and "Edit layer mask", this should show you the RGB texture in all of its colourful and detailed glory, but is it throwing up an error or something? If this is your first go at RW reskinning then you're doing really well so please keep asking questions, if not here then by all means feel free to ask by PM. I've said it before and I'll say it again, we need more and more people getting stuck into content creation, and reskinning is possibly one of the easiest things people can do, once they've had some practice. When the kit is out, then I'll show people how to go from .psd to .Tgpcdx if they don't already know. Cutting out the .dds part is the best thing that could ever happen in my opinion... (death to all anomalies and artifacts!).

Chris

Well gave it a few more pokes and was able to get the coloured parts on the black background bit, seemed I clicked a few wrong tick boxes and it was just deciding to stay in the black and white image I posted before, its also probably to do with not being familar with Gimp, last graphics program I used was adobe photoshop back in 2006 for texturing and don't have the newer versions.

Anyhow, since the coloured image returned I tried abit of experimenting and just did a edit -> colourise and bleed the colours out to it was black and white or more greyish I suppose would be correct(probably not the best method of changing a colour, but I've not been texturing editting and felt lazy and experimental), then did the whole process of popping it to the texture file format for railworks to read for rw-tools.

The result being :-


As you can see, the thrown on acid look has been achieved , so alright I know I've bodged up in the editting phase but atleast I know I'm not doing anything wrong in the whole file changing, editting and placing back in the right place and another plus TS2013 isn't SBHH from my dabbling, so I think that is good.

Ah it used to be easier back in warhammer 40k:dawn of war modding, you had 3 layers and alpha and you were done, no file format changes of texture format change, just create a psd file and the modding tools would do the rest.

From the image just above, I can tell the texture seems to be slightly out of alignment and the colourise method didn't work, but hey its testing and learning/re-learning things I've not done in quite a few years, I'll take another poke at it after dinner and see if I want to go any further with it or just wait for the paint kit to come out and try that method instead, since it sounds somewhat easier going psd -> railworks texture format.

Edit: Actually, looking at the rw-tools dds viewer it looks like edit has caused the main1.dds to become stretched vertically, so definately something I done in editing/saving it would seem, oh well I'll start over later and see if I can get a better result.

Well, that's certainly different. Keep at it and let us know how you get on, as you say, you've got the file management (initially hard part) sorted so we just need to work on the fun part.

Chris

https://www.facebook.com/stephen.hunter ... =1&theater

Anything is possible.

ChrisBarnes wrote:Well, that's certainly different. Keep at it and let us know how you get on, as you say, you've got the file management (initially hard part) sorted so we just need to work on the fun part.

Chris

Yeah the file side is relatively easy. What I'm running into after trying to turn the oliver green to black is that when I eventually able to get things darker and goto save Gimp throws up a error about "your image appears to be a volume map, but not all layers are the same size, thus a volume map cannot be written" and it refuses to save. Though I have managed to get it to save once, convert it to the railworks texture files and get a really glossy dark grey boiler colour, abit like chrome on a car buffer. I think Gimp is making a somewhat simple process into a long akward process at the moment

I believe it saved the one time, while ignoring the error message and it did let me select the various settings of compression and the other bits you need to pop in which rw-tools mentions to make a copy for saving.

I can see why new people might be put off by reskinning attempts, it certainly isn't as streamlined process to get from original texture to new texture/colours you wish to change and there is quite a few hoops to jump through just to even get the appropriate file ready for railworks to view the changes, what could be a simpler process is certainly inflated quite considerably. Its probably a degree down to a lack of a modding tools pack, when I did the modelling and texture modding in dawn of war alot of the work was done through dedicated mod tools provided by the devs and basically you work with adobe files then run the mod tools and they would automatically convert to the appropriate file format while also error checking the file to.

Either way its been interesting evening with the graphics editor and other tools, I'll stop for now.

Hm, link doesn't seem to work prairie, says not available when it goes through to facebook.

Name sez it all (not mine).

Very nice, if anyone is interested, I was trying to attempt to create 68013, which as you can see from this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49799937@N06/7865229830/ has lower coal bunker and port hole view out the back, I have a odd supicious it might be a repainted other locomotive so may indeed not be a true BR J94.

So if anyone feels like doing one *hintnudge* could save alot of my fiddling and somewhat failed attempts(which I know we just had haloween, but the poor J94 looks like a horror scene with my attempts)

Absolutely stunning Loco and Route, The Soundpack is amazing and the physics are great. I would just like to thank you for mentioning The Mardy Monster, The Loco at our railway, Im sure the owner will be pleased to see the screenshot i took of the message in the Welcome Scenario.
Luke

Wonder who that ones for
Edward

crumplezone wrote:Very nice, if anyone is interested, I was trying to attempt to create 68013, which as you can see from this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49799937@N06/7865229830/ has lower coal bunker and port hole view out the back, I have a odd supicious it might be a repainted other locomotive so may indeed not be a true BR J94.

So if anyone feels like doing one *hintnudge* could save alot of my fiddling and somewhat failed attempts(which I know we just had haloween, but the poor J94 looks like a horror scene with my attempts)

68013 has previously in preservation been an olive green WD one, so you're probably correct.

prairie4566 wrote:

crumplezone wrote:Very nice, if anyone is interested, I was trying to attempt to create 68013, which as you can see from this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49799937@N06/7865229830/ has lower coal bunker and port hole view out the back, I have a odd supicious it might be a repainted other locomotive so may indeed not be a true BR J94.

So if anyone feels like doing one *hintnudge* could save alot of my fiddling and somewhat failed attempts(which I know we just had haloween, but the poor J94 looks like a horror scene with my attempts)

68013 has previously in preservation been an olive green WD one, so you're probably correct.

...That is tad bit spooky that I started on the olive green WD to change into my own attempt 68013, somewhat a mirror of real life , especially when I had no prior knowledge beforehand of the change, spooky indeed

She also initially ran without a smokebox number or shedcode.

Hmm..so I think I kind of, maybe, figured out how to do it without botching the whole process and creating a .dds which when converted to the appropriate file for railworks to read doesn't come out as super buffed over polished brass finish with matt varnish slapped on generously, pic:



I know the emblem is wrong, haven't found the lion holding the wheel BR emblem in a clean and clear non-photograph format yet, but either way I can say I'm happy I've got the above image's result after not to much messing about in gimp today, might have a bash at doing to rest of the bodywork tomorrow, to tired to fiddle with much else, but its a result considering I've not done anything like this in years.

In another note, talking about the emblem, if someone has a link to a decent image of the emblem for rendering down to the appropriate size and possibly the BR font for numbering that would be pretty niffty, it might get half way to actually looking like a BR version

crumplezone wrote:if someone has a link to a decent image of the emblem

This any good?


or this...

Might work yes, I'll give it a go tomorrow, I'm also looking for the "ferret and dartboard" aka late emblem to.