Building Loco's and Rolling Stock

[Jaxster]

I'm downloading Tranz now, and had a question for anyone who might know. Is there the ability within Tranz to build locomotives and rolling stock? Or is that done in another program?

Thanks for the directions.

 

[JCitron]

Jaxter,

You need to use an outside 3d-modelling program such as 3dStudio Max, Blender, and others. Once the model is made, it's imported into the Trainz format using a special plug-in for the program.

John

 

[Jaxster]

Would the Google SketchUp program work? Do you know the file format, or a resource that might know?

 

[JCitron]

Yes. Sketchup will work. You need the RubyMX plug-in to convert the Sketchup format to Trainz format models.

John

 

[Jaxster]

Do you know of anyone who has done this, and where I can go to see some of their work? I know there are tons of train modelers on the 3D Warehouse.

Sure appreciate your help JCitron

 

[JCitron]

Do you know of anyone who has done this, and where I can go to see some of their work? I know there are tons of train modelers on the 3D Warehouse.

Sure appreciate your help JCitron

Yes. Look for ModelerJ on the forums. He made the plug-in to take Sketchup models into Trainz.

Be careful though. Some of the Sketch-up models will have a ton of textures and faces due to the way they're made.

John

 

[Jaxster]

How does one go about looking up a member or their work?

 

[JCitron]

How does one go about looking up a member or their work?

Search for posts about Sketch-up. That would be the fastest way. I think N3V turned off the member search because there's a bug in the forum software.
Warning: The forum search stinks though, so you may or may not find everything you need initially. I'm sure someone else will wander on to this thread and help too.

John

 

[slabay]

The problem with Sketchup is that there are a lot of polys in many of the models it makes. Using too many high poly assets will bring Trainz (framerates) to its knees.

 

[johnwhelan]

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz and look under asset creation. Sketchup works for scenery objects but unfortunately creates models that are rather poly heavy this is because of the way it creates more faces the more complex the model. We've seen 250,000 polys mentioned where you'd expect 10,000 maybe 20,000 and additionally it doesn't yet support the a.bog0 etc points that locos and rolling stock need.

At the moment Blender isn't a bad choice in the free 3D software arena http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender#Newcomers_start_here will take you through the basics. There is a steep learning curve to content creation so be aware of it. Locos typically take months to build even for an experienced content creator. I suggest starting with a simple scenery object then tackle more complex things later on.

Trainz has to render in real time so at 30 frames per second you have roughly 1/30th of a second to render. This means it pays to keep the poly count down so third party models found on the web which are designed to look good tend to have too many polys for Trainz. Problem areas typically are curves, we tend to use fewer faces and the smoothing button to get something that isn't too bad.

Cheerio John

 

[Jaxster]

Being a Google Certified Geo developer who models architectural models for Google Earth, I understand how to keep a model small, so I'm excited to find my skill set fits with the Trainz format. Thanks for all your help guys. I found all the information about the plugin, so I'm on my way. Now only if Trainz would download faster! LOL!

 

[johnwhelan]

Being a Google Certified Geo developer who models architectural models for Google Earth, I understand how to keep a model small, so I'm excited to find my skill set fits with the Trainz format. Thanks for all your help guys. I found all the information about the plugin, so I'm on my way. Now only if Trainz would download faster! LOL!

The problem with sketchup is fairly simple. If you have one rectangular box then it's six sides or 12 polys. Create another so they cross in GMAX or Blender its 24 polys but in Sketchup it splits it up into segments, one where they interchange and one each for the arm. So now you have 5 rectangular boxes of six sides or 12 polys each for a total of 60 polys not 2 rectangular boxes for a total of 24. As the model gets more complex so the number of polys escalates. For a house you actually don't need the bottom faces since its sitting on the ground so in GMAX and Blender you can delete these saving 2 polys per face. Being able to delete these unseen faces means you can normally save 15-20% of the total number of polys. For complex models being seen at a distance you can't see that much detail anyway at 5 kms so we use lod or Level of Detail separate meshes that contains many fewer polys. I've yet to see this implemented using sketchup. I have yet to see a Loco or item of rolling stock built in sketchup brought successfully into Trainz unless it has been imported into Blender first and had additional work done in Blender or had a second mesh used in the config.txt file.

You can check the poly counts using one of Pev's tools the mesh viewer. The poly count doesn't really matter when you are rendering for a model, it does matter when you are rendering in real time.

Cheerio John

 

[ModelerMJ]

Being a Google Certified Geo developer who models architectural models for Google Earth, I understand how to keep a model small, so I'm excited to find my skill set fits with the Trainz format. Thanks for all your help guys. I found all the information about the plugin, so I'm on my way. Now only if Trainz would download faster! LOL!

Hi Jaxster, and welcome. Any questions about the plugin, don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
-Mike

 

[Euphod]

I'll look forward to seeing your models, hopefully on the DLS, and hopefully not too poly heavy.

 

[Jaxster]

Just a little insight for those who may not know. Most of the detail in 3D models coming out of SketchUp is due to photo texture detail, and not as much about structural detail. In this way, models can be visually detailed without being poly heavy for being uploaded into the 3D layer in Google Earth. Hopefully this practice can be carried over in making some good models to work better in Trainz. I guess we will see.

 

[Euphod]

One the problems the Sketchup models have is too many textures. Trainz likes as few as possible, like one or two.

 

[johnwhelan]

The overheads are 300 poly equivalents per mesh and 200 per texture so multiple textures should be avoided where possible.

Textures have a look at KUID2: 86627:2362:2 and KUID2: 86627:2129:4

Cheerio John