Gmax

[485riogrande]

Where do i find gmaX? IM new at trains.

 

[rweber95]

You can download Gmax from http://www.turbosquid.com/GameTools
You'll also need this http://www.auran.com/trainz/creation/Trainz_Asset_Creation_Studio.zip

Bob

 

[Johnk]

Although the links above are correct, you can find heaps more, including tutorials etc at the Trainz Resources Directory. Just click Software.3d for all the gMax links and Tutorials/gMax for all the tutorials.

 

[johnwhelan]

Where do i find gmaX? IM new at trains.

Have a look at Blender before starting down the GMAX path. Paul Hobb's tutorials are available for both Blender and GMAX here. http://www.44090digitalmodels.co.uk/ I'd read through the first Blender one before committing to GMAX.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender#Newcomers_start_here might be useful.

Cheerio John

 

[485riogrande]

Thanks guys! I appreciate it guys.

thanks

 

[fullsteamahead]

Have a look at Blender before starting down the GMAX path. Paul Hobb's tutorials are available for both Blender and GMAX here. http://www.44090digitalmodels.co.uk/ I'd read through the first Blender one before committing to GMAX.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender#Newcomers_start_here might be useful.

Cheerio John

So for a newcomer to modelling which is the better? Which is the easier to use? Is there any differene in result? etc etc.
Andrew

 

[johnwhelan]

So for a newcomer to modelling which is the better? Which is the easier to use? Is there any differene in result? etc etc.
Andrew

GMAX is rather elderly these days, Blender is still being developed and enhanced. There are some technical things such as normal mapping that Blender can do that GMAX cannot do directly and a number of people find Blender easier and faster to create in.

Cheerio John

 

[rweber95]

Plus Bender is open source and is constantly being improved and expanded in capabilities, whereas, Gmax is nolonger a supported product.

Bob

 

[Johnk]

Plus there are more tutorials for blender. The best ones are listed here:

Link


Although someone has put a bit of effort into creating the wiki tutorial, it's almost impossible to view. The images are about 3 feet wide and don't quite fit the standard monitor.

 

[fullsteamahead]

Plus there are more tutorials for blender. The best ones are listed here:

Link


Although someone has put a bit of effort into creating the wiki tutorial, it's almost impossible to view. The images are about 3 feet wide and don't quite fit the standard monitor.

That's a great link and I just ran the very first tutorial in the 3D series and it began with the basics - what you are actually looking at when you first open Blender. So often these tutorials forget to give you the basics and leave you playing catch-up. It talks about a semester of tutorials so I can see its going to be like going back to University.
Once again thanks for the link.
Cheers
Andrew

PS I found the image fitted perfectly within my widescreen. I suspect my computer automatically adjusts the size.
A.

 

[johnwhelan]

Plus there are more tutorials for blender. The best ones are listed here:

Link


Although someone has put a bit of effort into creating the wiki tutorial, it's almost impossible to view. The images are about 3 feet wide and don't quite fit the standard monitor.

Works fine on a 1440 wide screen and you can always scroll. 9/16 wide screens when they did the HD TV research match what your eyes see most closely by the way so its the human head that needs adjusting to the older narrower screens.

Cheerio John

 

[Johnk]

The older narrower screens as you put it, still make up, 80 to 85% of the monitors out there. I'm glad you don't design web sites

 

[johnwhelan]

The older narrower screens as you put it, still make up, 80 to 85% of the monitors out there. I'm glad you don't design web sites

I think it's worth looking at some of the other reasons behind the wikibook trainz. One is hosting, a number of Trainz tutorials have moved or disappeared because the hosting web site has disappeared, the wikibook site should be more stable. Even if the person who first set it up hasn't the time to keep it updated others can continue to update and correct it. The wikibook suffers because it has had many people contributing who often use different styles, it also gains because the writer doesn't have to get it absolutely correct, some one can come along later and correct or update the information. For example you could add an embedded tutorial based on a narrow screen if you feel strongly about it.

This one is about the third Trainz wiki, and is the one with the most information loaded into it. Trainzdev has a wiki but its not really designed for newcomers and even people who have been around have difficulty finding things in it, the earlier one wasn't quite so heavily used.

By the way from a hardware performance point of view if you use a screen that isn't 16 by 9 aspect ratio then you aren't getting the most out of your hardware. Your eyes discount top and bottom bands on a narrower screen and actually concentrate on a 16 by 9 stripe across the middle, so essentially you are paying for more pixels in the wrong place than your eyes can use.

Cheerio John

 

[Johnk]

I think that people messing with other people's stuff is rather apparent on the Wiki. It is not an enjoyable place to visit. Have you got any statistics that show how many people have actually used it in the past 6 months? I'd love to see them.

Why would I want anyone to mess with tutorials I've taken so long to write? I'm not suggesting for one moment that people should keep there works on a single web page, but what make your Wiki so invulnerable? Look at Geocities.

A 16 x 9 monitor displays much less than a quarter of an A4 page when you consider the menus and toolbars on almost every program. My "older" 19 x 19 inch monitor which I purchased less than 12 months ago displays over half a page. 16 x 9 monitors may be good for playing games or watching movies, but they're totally useless for letter writing, and desktop publishing unless your rotate them 90 degrees.

I seldom play games of any description and play Trainz rarely, so I need a real monitor to do real work. Like most people.

 

[bchester]

A 16 x 9 monitor displays much less than a quarter of an A4 page when you consider the menus and toolbars on almost every program. My "older" 19 x 19 inch monitor which I purchased less than 12 months ago displays over half a page. 16 x 9 monitors may be good for playing games or watching movies, but they're totally useless for letter writing, and desktop publishing unless your rotate them 90 degrees.

A little off the topic, but if you have an Nvidia graphics card and a wall mount monitor arm (or something similar) you can mount any monitor sideways and use the Nvidia software to "rotate the image". This is what I do for manuals and correspondence. Also, ASUS and HP (others too) have monitors which will rotate but are more expensive. If Nvidia does this I would suspect that ATI does too but have not looked at ATI for a long time.

Now back on topic: Fullsteamahead asked which is better and which is easier - Blender or GMax? Well, first neither product is "easy" to learn. All 3d design apps will take a very long time to master. You will pull your hair out for months trying to get simple things to work, but hang in as it will come.

As for the better of the products: of the two it is definitely Blender! As John W has stated, don't even look at Gmax any more if you are just starting out. The features in Blender can not be beat! Blender is probably the best support "free" design application available. The greatest advantage is it is OS independent meaning you can run it on mac, windows, linux, and I think I have even seen a version for solaris! Since I run Linux as my main OS it is nice to be able to do the development there and then use my windows junker to play Trainz. Too bad Auran won't support the Linux or Mac environments! I'd switch to System X in a heart beat if they would!

Have Fun

Bricey

 

[Johnk]

I would purchase a 16 x 9 monitor tomorrow if I could find such a mounting for the desk. My wall is too far away. As I spend most of my life writing PDF tutorials and web pages, having a monitor that show more of the page vertically would be a god-send. Thanks for raising it. The search is on!

Having used neither program very much, my preference is Blender also. The number of tutorials available (especially video tutorials) is mind boggling. The one JW keeps pushing on the Wiki is okay, but there's plenty of stuff around that's much easier to follow. If someone would review the hundred or so tutorials listed on my site, that would really help the beginners. The best I can do is point them in the right direction and let them choose:

Link (27 listings covering over 100 tutorials.)

 

[johnwhelan]

I would purchase a 16 x 9 monitor tomorrow if I could find such a mounting for the desk. My wall is too far away. As I spend most of my life writing PDF tutorials and web pages, having a monitor that show more of the page vertically would be a god-send. Thanks for raising it. The search is on!

Having used neither program very much, my preference is Blender also. The number of tutorials available (especially video tutorials) is mind boggling. The one JW keeps pushing on the Wiki is okay, but there's plenty of stuff around that's much easier to follow. If someone would review the hundred or so tutorials listed on my site, that would really help the beginners. The best I can do is point them in the right direction and let them choose:

Link (27 listings covering over 100 tutorials.)

I was always taught to define the requirements first. For some one starting out creating I feel it is important to give them confidence by producing something they can see fairly early on. Different people have different backgrounds and some tutorials will be at too simple a level some will be too complex.

What I have seen is a lot of people try to create and then give up. Based on that premise I created a very basic tutorial aimed at an inexperienced person that covers just enough to create a simple scenery object and to convert it into an item of rolling stock. It is not intended to be a begin and end all tutorial but a basic one for some one starting out. There are a lot of screenshots yes but that is based on feedback that said people would prefer more screenshots than less, so yes at first glance it does look more complex than one that doesn't screenshot every comma. If you can create a simpler one that covers all the steps for newcomers please feel free. In fact there are far fewer Blender Trainz specific tutorials than GMAX or 3DS Trainz orientated tutorials. In fact I'm only aware of two sources, Paul Hobbs and the ones in Wikibook Trainz. You might like to add the Normal Mapping one http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Normal_mapping_(TRS2009) yes it is in the Wikibook but not authored by me and it is the only Blender normal mapping tutorial I'm aware of which is of course the side of things that Auran are trying to promote with TS2009 / TS2010.

One issue I've seen with tutorials is they don't cover every step with screenshots and often cover far more than a newcomer needs. Wading through lots of tutorials that tell you how to create a face without regard to the poly count means doing more studying than you need to and can add confusion.

There is something called the Science Citation Index which is invaluable for evaluating how important a research paper is and also by allowing you see see what the latest developments in the field are. It works by keeping track of the papers that cite the work. If a large number of other papers cite the work then it is probably important. By looking at papers that have cited a particular work you can move forward in time.

The principle can be extended to tutorials. The thread that Blackwatch quoted in this thread http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=48030 is useful because it includes tutorials that people have found useful. It adds an element of quality and relevance to creating in Trainz. Google will find you many tutorials but very few are aimed specifically at people who would like to create for Trainz. I note that you would like to include a review of the tutorials available on your web site. The information is available in the forums. Paul Hobbs ones are highly rated but are aimed at some one with perhaps a little more experience and are the ones I'd suggest people move onto after creating their first scenery object.

On desktop publishing there are stands which allow the wide screen monitors to be rotated by 90 degrees as you mentioned. Even here often you are looking at content so the 16 by 9 ratio window applies for what you are actually looking at. Do please be aware of ebooks they are making some inroads into conventional publishing and threaten to have a similar impact that Word processors outputting Times Roman in Postscript rather than Courier had over traditional typesetters had many years ago.

Wikibooks cover a vast range of subjects and is paid for by donations. Geocities was a commercial enterprise that failed. Nothing is absolutely safe but Wikibooks is fairly stable. Wikibook Trainz by the way was started by some one else and has had many different contributors so I don't really think you can say it's mine. If you wish to retain control over your work then Wiki is probably not the way to go. If its not important to you then fine it works quite well. If you are in the tutorial or documentation creating business then a Wiki may seem threatening to job security, like anarchy almost, but it does allow specialists to impart their knowledge such as the normal mapping bit, based on statements such as "It is not an enjoyable place to visit." I assume you find it very threatening for some reason.

How many visitors? No idea but to me if it means one person starts to create rather than gives up then its served it's purpose.

Does the wikibook Trainz fill the same niche as Trainz Resources, I don't think so, it just seems to be a collection of information rather than than a collection of links and if you feel the layout could be improved it's a Wiki so go ahead and improve it.

Cheerio John

 

[fullsteamahead]

One only has to look at the number of tutorials to know that the road will be a long one. My question is where and who do I turn to when it comes to the point of transalting Blender capability toTrainz Modelling. Of course the easy way out is to get someone to build the model you need. However I found when learning to to do technical drawings of locos that there was a great deal of saisfaction in building your own.

Andrew

 

[falcon500]

Gmax doesn't take ages to learn. I managed make trees for TRS2004-TC3 using PDF tutorials. Have also made some buildings, the 1st was fairly simple, but the 2nd was more complicated with steps, veranda railings and complex roof shape. The PDFs I used were mostly from tafweb and vulcan also Paul Hobbs. I was able to make these within a couple of weeks of starting Gmax. I also have Blender but haven't used it because of the lack of PDFs available for making the things I'm interested in, trees and buildings. I reckon a lot of people probably give up on making content because they want to make steam or diesel locos straight away instead of learning to do the simple stuff first. If I could have got good tutorials for Blender I probably would have used that instead.
Anyway that's my 2 cents worth. if you want to have alook at what I've made check kuid:441444 in TRS2004 Buildings and Terrain Features. Not too bad for Gmax beginner.
:wave:

 

[Johnk]

Responding to JW

• The normal mapping tutorial was listed on the TRD on the 4th August this year.
• All the tutorials in the forum thread which people have to constantly dig out, were also listed around the same time. I left a couple out because I thought they were rubbish.
• I was a Typesetter for 20 years, starting off with hand set monotype. During that time I was Printing Manager, book designer and publisher for a large tertiary college. I've written and self-published three history books and I'm currently writing my fourth, an eBook on personal computer servers. One of the books I designed was nominated for the prestigious Australian Book Design Award, but it didn't win. I've written hundreds of tutorials over the years and have developed a style. I don't want anyone changing it.
• As such, I won't be touching the Wiki for fear of someone coming along and "modifying" my work.
• I'm aware Paul Hobbs' tuturial is highly regarded, but many of the tutorials on my site start people off with Blender basics. One person commented in this or another thread, that one set of video tutoriials at least, showed him important stuff like zooming in, rotatiing, moving etc. We've all forgotten we also had to learn these things. If the Wiki tutorial addresses any of that, I couldn't wait 20 minutes for the images to download on my mobile connection to find out.
• The TRD is indeed links to other sites including the Wiki. It also hosts a few tutorials including one of mine.
• I live in a small country town over a thousand miles from the nearest major city. I've never seen a desk stand as you suggest, nor did a Google search help me. I'll wait until I go to a major city early next year.