Click the image to zoom in
Is that better? This is just a basic front texture, but it gives an idea of what it would look like.
The process of animating the controls and producing ace files is not difficult, just tedious. This is cab no 5, the first was on the Bagnall Armistice, and I would like to think that this is rather better than what I was doing 9 months ago. Basically, I start from an animated model of the cab, and first of all take a screen-shot to become the front texture, with all the moving bits hidden (not forgetting the pressure gauge needle). Then, restore the moving parts and WITHOUT CHANGING THE VIEW IN ANYWAY, take one screen shot of each animation (of the whole cab) frame. The next step is to crop them all to the same size (as the screen-shot will probably include the 3D modelling application). Next, resize them all to a common size which is a multiple of 640 x 480 - in my case this means trimming away some of the top, or bottom, (or both) as the screen-shot is too high in proportion. MSTS will use front textures 1024 x 768, and though I always use this resolution, I strongly suspect that if you went for 640x480, you wouldn't loose anything. All the shots with the moving parts will need resizing to 640 x 480, and it is very helpful to have a copy of the main view to this size. Now comes the really tedious bit, for each control, you need to identify a rectangular area which will cover all the movement of that control (and not interfere with any other) and copy that identical area out of each screen-shot. They need to go into a new file sized to accomodate all of the pieces for that control - so that if your regulator animation has 8 positions with each piece being 80 x 60 pixels, a BMP 160 x 240 would suit. I always produce a translucency layer, in case the control doesn't go in exactly the same place as on the "background" - it also means that you can use the control in another cab. The position for each control in the CVF file is determined by the x and y coordinates of one of the corners of the animation pieces you took off the screen-shots ( I can't remember which).
I have done two 15" gauge cabs - one for a Romney Pacific, and the other for the Kirklees engines, but neither would really be right for the Twining twins.
I'm looking forward to trying the other two, but what with one thing and another I haven't had time these last few days...