First Attempt At Weathering

M

mrscsi

Happily Retired
I've never done much re-skinning, I've tinkered around a bit but never anything seriously. With CloakedGhost's containers and JointedRail's new containers a lot of people who come over and I put Trainz up on the 46 inch and start running a train with containers the one thing they always say "they're beautiful and truly realistic, but where's all the dirt and graffiti?"

Now I know JointedRail has said they're going to release weathered versions, but I decided to experiment just to see if I could mess one up or not. I went and found a brush for Photoshop called "distressed" and thought that pretty much summed up what I was trying to do.

So I open the skin, mixed up a color that kind of resembled Yuma desert dust, picked one of the brushes and made one click. Below are the results, I think it's pretty good for a first try and considering it was only one click I may wind up doing it for the rest of them.

Now of course I won't be releasing these, and I'm really not even sure if the red HUB is CloakedGhost's or JointedRail's, I pretty much mixed all of them together using a cloned version of JointedRail's 53 foot container product. I liked the way it loaded and I just added CloakedGhost's containers to a clone of it.

But anybody who uses Photoshop or a program that uses Photoshop's brushes you can get the brush here, and it's really easy to select one of them or mix-and-match and you can really get a distressed look really quickly. The brushes are so big that they will do the entire skin with one click.

weather.jpg


Now just to find some graffiti brushes or fonts:hehe:
 
Looks pretty good. You can get kind of the same effect in GIMP using layer modes, don't remember off-hand if it is burn or dodge but it has a similar effect.
 
Expyker said:
Looks pretty good. You can get kind of the same effect in GIMP using layer modes, don't remember off-hand if it is burn or dodge but it has a similar effect.
Click to expand...

I thought this was pretty slick since it was simply one click right in the center of the skin, the brush being diffused and extremely large (I think something like 2500 pixels) it just gave me a nice pattern across the skin with no repeats.
 
www.abstractfonts.com has a lot, dafont.com is a really popular place to get fonts these days, I don't use it so I can't vouch on their graffiti collection however.

I might suggest after entering you 'message' in the font to convert it to a non editable mode (I don't recall what photoshop calls it) which will allow you to color various bits of the letters differently.

peter
 
Looks good. I would lose the drop shadow though. Makes it look like it's standing out from the car.
 
You also might want to put the graffiti on before the weathering...or underneath it. It's looking pretty good though.

Cheers,
Fred
 
Zorronov said:
You also might want to put the graffiti on before the weathering...or underneath it. It's looking pretty good though.

Cheers,
Fred
Click to expand...

Yeah i just put that on the jpeg as a goof

I think I am going to explore illustrator a little, I found some nice graffiti eps vectors and if I put them on the skin then weather they should look painted on corrugation and all...:D

If it all works looks like I will be cloning and doing artwork for the next month or two to make a zillion of em so they won't repeat when loading...
 
Last edited:
Looking good mrscsi. :D If those Photoshop brushes are image files, then you can use them in the GIMP also, which might be quite helpful for me when I need some weathering effects on a texture. :eek: :D ;)

Regards.
 
graffiti shadows (they do use them) are usually solid shadows, it can be pretty hard I'm told to do opacity with a spray can.

peter
 
I think I am going to explore illustrator a little, I found some nice graffiti eps vectors and if I put them on the skin then weather they should look painted on corrugation and all...
Click to expand...

Yes...vector graphics, illustrator, and photoshop is the way to go for skinning. Try to avoid using bitmaps for this kind of stuff because resolution is always lost when resizing raster images. Keep going...looks good.

Cheers,
Fred
 
Decided to do another, I just took a graffiti vector and put in on and put the weathering as the top layer and the result is pretty good...

weather4.jpg


And from the front corner showing the corrugation...

weather3.jpg


Weathering could have been better but I just really wanted to see how the graffiti was going to look...
 
Yeah...that's better. Try reducing the opacity of the graffiti layer...oh say..to 70 or 60 percent. See how that looks. :)

Cheers,
Fred

P.S. The percentage doesn't really matter...eyeball it...see what looks good to you.
P.P.S. You might want to adjust the opacity of the weathering layers too.
 
Last edited:
Zorronov said:
Yeah...that's better. Try reducing the opacity of the graffiti layer...oh say..to 70 or 60 percent. See how that looks. :)

Cheers,
Fred

P.S. The percentage doesn't really matter...eyeball it...see what looks good to you.
P.P.S. You might want to adjust the opacity of the weathering layers too.
Click to expand...

That's the beauty of trainz... As long as I am using a clone I can keep trying till I get it right :D
 
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