LNERLover,
Your L1 looks amazing - the mesh and baking match and exceed my standards currently, which probably means you have a heckuva lot more patience than I do. But here's a couple tips I'd like to illustrate:
1) From the look of your cab roof and some details on the boiler, I'm thinking you don't use the Edge Split modifier. I learned about Edge Split while I was working on
Edward Thomas, and it's very key in getting occlusion and speculars to behave properly. Like a Mirror modifier(assuming you've read Paul Hobbs' tutorials here) you need to apply it before going in game, which can be annoying when everything curved needs it, but you can use it to very good effect.
2) It looks to me like you're using the default specular settings from there - this may have been something that you meant to do later, as with the first tip - but the default speculars aren't very fun. There are two ways to modify the speculars to look a little bit:
-Editing them in the material settings
-Creating a separate normal and specular map using an external program such as Crazybump
To edit the specular settings one must go to the "Materials" tab which I'm sure you're familiar with given your loco is in game, look down below the Preview and Diffuse subtabs to where it says Specular. Color is what color your material shines - do not change this unless you want no shine whatsoever(and in that case make it black). Below it you have your intensity setting - Do not edit this unless you feel like experimenting with different shades of grey. To the right of the Color setting, you have a drop-down menu that is set to CookTorr by default. Open the drop-down list and select Blinn. Then, at the bottom, you have the most important setting: Hardness. Hardness determines whether your material all shines at once or is all held in a little stripe - the larger the number, the less material will shine at once. I generally set Hardness to 511, which is as high as it will go. You can experiment with it some though, depending on the condition you want your loco to be in.
The alternative to editing the specular settings is to employ a program like CrazyBump. To take this option, once you've textured your engine, download the trial of CrazyBump
here. Open the program, and open your textures as detailed in the video on that site. Export the normal map straight - it will give you what you need. As for the specular map, I generally set my brightness to 40 instead of 50, add 10 noise and 10 to metallic color where applicable. You'll probably want to mess with these, however. Save the normal and specular maps, and in Blender, change your material extension to .tbumptex. Set up the normal map as detailed in Paul Hobbs' tutorials. Then export your model. As for the specular map, enter the .texture.txt of your normal map once the loco is exported(If your normal image is called Main_NRM.tga, it will be called "Main_NRM.texture.txt" and enter the following line:
Alpha=Main_SPEC.tga
directly below where it says
Primary=Main_NRM.tga
. This assumes your normal map is entitled Main_NRM.tga and your spec map is entitled Main_SPEC.tga. Once you've done that, you should be home free, but there's always the possibility that I've forgotten some step and your export will screw up or Trainz will throw an error - if that happens, PM me and I'll see what I can do to help.