Interior texture 'anomoly' problem...

J

Jerker

Australian DEM creator
G'day All,

I am currently working on an object for use of the general Trainz community, in the form of a specialised structure that has a small "office" interior.

In Gmax, the interior looks something like this...



..as perfect as I could expect it to be. However, after exporting it into Trains (TRS 2004), the "office" becomes a bland 'wash' of featureless colour - like this...



Ignoring the 'gamma' 'brightness factor' for the moment, this is a problem for which I have no solution. Can anyone offer me some advice as to how I may make the exported 'model' more closely match the original's 3 dimensional 'substance'?

Jerker {:)}
 
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It seems to be caused by being viewed as an interior. Interior views are not handled very kindly by the Trainz graphics and always seem to display this treatment of the textures. Look at it in normal exterior mode and set the 'light' tag to 1 in the config.txt. Seen that way, you should get the image you expect.

If someone has an answer I will also be very pleased to find out how to put this right.

Cheers

Narrowgauge
 
Hello,

The one thing I would recommend you check is that your texture files are not save as compressed tga format. This is the one "glitch" that catches me the most on my creations.

Hopefully it is something as simple as that.

Brian
 
G'day narrowgauge, bchester and dmdrake,

Thanks for those suggestions.

Brian,

I'm sure all my textures are uncompressed *.tga files (this is one thing that I do check).

Narrowguage,

I'm not sure I can do as you suggest. At the moment the 'interior' isn't visible through the "exterior" view, so I would be 'moving' into an empty structure but I will look at it to see what happens. I did try "light 1" in the config.txt file without any apparent effect but I did not try looking 'from the inside, out' in conjunction with this alteration!

dmdrake,

You may well be right, I shall duplicate the post and post it in the, perhaps, more appropriate "Content Creation Support" Forum.

Jerker {:)}
 
Hi Jerker,
Welcome to the wonderful world of specular lighting.
For you to be able to perform the task you require, you will have to download a updated plug-in for gmax.
There was an excellent thread and tutorial available on the old forum "collective sigh!" that explained the steps to produce the effects you are looking for.
One of my fellow creators is right into specular lighting techniques. I will draw his attention to your thread. Sadly, I haven't had the inclination to try specular lighting myself yet. As an alternative, I obtain the 3d effects for interior views using texturing (until I learn how to do SL).

I do have a textcopy only of the deceased thread. If I can find it I will post it.
Cheers
Sel
 
Hi Jerker

Sel pointed me in the direction of this thread. Specular lighting will not work on interiors in most circumstances and perhaps I would simply make the interior an invisible box and give your exterior model the interior you desire. That way specular will work OK. This is similar to the "shell cab" approach that a few other creators have used. With your exterior model, you can set interior view points by using a.outsideviewX (where X is the number of the view point, 0 being the first one selected when pressing the square bracket key). This way you can set a series of viewpoints.

For help on setting up specular lighting in Trainz, there
is a tutorial here http://www.steamtrainz.com/page.php?4 that may help, though I have also promised billegulla one for help with his texturing so will post a note about that when it is ready.

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Tony
 
The Wiki has some info on creating shell cabs, Pikkabird's site also has some stuff. For setting up GMax to export specular materials see the tutorials on my site Part 1 and Part 7.

Paul
 
What is happing is Trainz uses a different rendering light for interiors. Out side you have a directional light (the "sun") and for the inside you have ambient light that means you have to have a photo texture on every surface.
 
If you have the ContentCreatorGuide for TRS 2004, on page 103 is an example with pictures to show you how to set up your GMax/3DS Max for bumpmapping, which also applies to 'specular' (this topic here).

Also, if you set the 'light' tag to 1 in the config.txt file of your interior model, you will get the probably undesired effect of having the sun shining on and lighting up the interior wall that would be facing the sun, wouldn't it? Not too realistic but still ok in my book. Correct me if I am wrong but I just did a model set up as above with an interior room, where the ground texture is lit up like its roof if the sun is overhead. Or its corresponding interior wall, when the sun goes up or down.

Cheers

VinnyBarb
 
Hello VinnyBarb
light 1 has no effect on an interior. Interiors as mentioned earlier behave differently in many ways to other assets.

Regards

Phil
 
Phil_C said:
light 1 has no effect on an interior. Interiors as mentioned earlier behave differently in many ways to other assets.
Click to expand...
True, but a shell cab is not an interior, its an exterior mesh. Phil, what did you mean about shell cabs not working in TRS2006? Don't tell my locos because they work fine.

Paul
 
Hello Paul
What I meant was that the tag that Pikkabird mentioned in his tutorial is listed as an invalid tag in CMP. I don't know if that is still true in SP1 though. I did contact Auran about the issue and I did get an acknowledgment to my question but not an answer:)

Regards

Phil
 
The BlueStar tag is illegal, true, but I never found out why he added the tag anyway. Actually reading Pikka's stuff again I see that I misinterpreted what he intended. Pikkas version assumes that the control desks etc are not part of the shell cab at all, only the exterior model of the loco. In this case the control desks would not benefit from specular lighting.

What I did was to make the interior model itself a plane pointing downwards and including all the attachment points. Everything else is then attached to this mesh, including everything that you see in the cab.

What I described in the Wiki is a further development of his idea and doesn't need the illegal tag in the config.

A good example of what is possible is rumour3's Class 31 diesel cab.

Paul
 
I'm not sure what the "bluestar" tag (as described in Pikka's tutorial) adds- my class31 shell cab works fine in 04 and 06 without it. The shell cab is just a separate attached mesh object listed in the effects section of the default interior mesh, and (I think) can be called anything you like.

Off topic, but do any of you creation gurus know how to stop using specular lighting once you've got the max plug-in installed in Gmax? It's great for locos but I've been playing with a Mesh Reducing Track model and it is giving an undesirable sheen to my ballast...:(

R3

Edit: Paul- beat me to it!
 
rumour3 said:
Off topic, but do any of you creation gurus know how to stop using specular lighting once you've got the max plug-in installed in Gmax? It's great for locos but I've been playing with a Mesh Reducing Track model and it is giving an undesirable sheen to my ballast...:(
Click to expand...
Settting the specular level level to 0 should do it.

Paul
 
G'day paulhobbs,

I notice that you refer to a 'wiki' in one of the above threads. I was wondering exactly which 'wiki' that might be? Would you be able to supply a link for me so that I might ascertain some more (read more informative) information regarding 'shell cabs'.

Thank you

Jerker {:)}
 
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