Conversions?
- Thread starter flyboy559
- Start date
johnwhelan
Well-known member
There are major differences, in Trainz the bogeys are a separate mesh in MSTS they are integrated. It's usually quicker to create from scratch, additionally the MSTS items are a bit dated these days typically we use more polys and larger texture files etc.
If you create in Blender then there are exporters around for a number of sims.
Cheerio John
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Locos are complicated, steam ones especially so. The forum is littered with people who started then found the learning curve too steep so gave up.
Generally speaking its better to create a scenery object first, then an item of rolling stock then a loco or even start by reskinning some one else's work, just be careful about permissions.
There are a series of tutorials here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender#Newcomers_start_here that start you off in Blender 2.49b and takes you through creating a house, then making it into a rolling stock item. Blender 2.49b is still available from Blender.org.
For some of the more advanced techniques Paul Hobbs has tutorial that takes you through creating a UK steam loco but I still suggest you do the house one first unless you have a background in 3D software.
It took me a couple of years to create the 1922 coaches on TPR, and even then I had a lot of help on parts of it. Realistically if its a detailed model you are thinking of creating it will take time to make. Even today I avoid anything to do with script writing. If you want good performance then you have to watch the polys especially for curves. Textures are a problem, typically I'd look at someone else's loco and see how they have done it. Try to keep the number of textures down to a minimum.
Avoid Sketchup, the models it creates have enormous poly counts, one loco I saw was around 170,000 polys. 30,000 is probably as high as it is is reasonable to go even with TS12.
Having said that there is lots of assistance available through the forum and there are some libraries of components available to help speed the process.
The number of people actually creating meshes rather than just reskinning is surprisingly low and there is always room for a few more.
Cheerio John
norfolksouthern37
what's a normal map?
eh, 50k loco plus trucks i think. thats what i shoot for. LoD is your friend.