msgsapper's undecorated locomotives

epa

Angry Trainz Nerd
Hello

When I reskin Msgsapper's undecorated locomotives, I noticed that most of the reskins look very blurry and cartoony. I understand it's and older model, but is it possible to make the reskin not as blurry as it normally is? It kinda bugs me.

-Matt
 
Well, if it's not a matter of LOD and distance from the model, you could try doubling the sizes of the texture files, within reason.
 
I don't want to sound dumb, but how do I do that? It's not LOD because it shows that way in mesh viewer as well.
 
Depends on what image editor you're using. Most have some tool "image increase 200%" or to a pixel size, also some kind of image info that will tell you what it is now. If it's 256x256 or 512x512, crank it up to 1024x1024 and repaint it. I generally go with the smallest size that doesn't blur the lettering just to keep the megabytes reasonable for downloading, but performance wise the larger size is really no penalty.
 
What editor do you use? I use paint.net and gimp, and sometimes Photoshop elements 9. Plus, im planning on only using my reskins for personal use, so I don't have to worry about people's downloads taking 50 years to complete.
 
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Okay, blowing the dust off paint.net (I use Paint Shop Pro 7), what I see is Image, Resize, then select by percentage and type in 200% to double the size. Next (took a while to find where they hid it), Effects, Photo, Sharpen, set that for whatever works, probably have to play with it a while.
 
Okay, blowing the dust off paint.net (I use Paint Shop Pro 7), what I see is Image, Resize, then select by percentage and type in 200% to double the size. Next (took a while to find where they hid it), Effects, Photo, Sharpen, set that for whatever works, probably have to play with it a while.

Hmm. Ok I did that and it's still insanely blurry.
 
Hmm. Ok I did that and it's still insanely blurry.

Don't forget that just because you double the image size, that doesn't mean that you are going to fix the root problem of the blurriness. If you take a 512x512 image and increase its size to 1024x1024 (which is 2x as big by 2x as big, so it is really four times as big as the original), you will just have a 512x512 image blown up and blurry. That 2 pixel wide line on 512x512 is just blown up to a 4 pixel wide line on the 1024x1024. Once you resize the image, you will have to rework the details too. I took his SD40-2 to make my Florida East Coast #714......

slabay201209030002.jpg


You will essentially have to retrace a lot of the detail work (panel seams, doors, etc., redo the rivets, and so on) to "start clean" before you can do a reskin. Remember that these are publicly reskinnable, so go for uploading your reskins to the DLS!! The resize of the image isn't a big deal. These locos aren't very texture heavy. The original undecorated one is 1.11MB, mine with the resized texture is only 1.3MB.
 
Don't forget that just because you double the image size, that doesn't mean that you are going to fix the root problem of the blurriness. If you take a 512x512 image and increase its size to 1024x1024 (which is 2x as big by 2x as big, so it is really four times as big as the original), you will just have a 512x512 image blown up and blurry. That 2 pixel wide line on 512x512 is just blown up to a 4 pixel wide line on the 1024x1024. Once you resize the image, you will have to rework the details too. I took his SD40-2 to make my Florida East Coast #714......

slabay201209030002.jpg


You will essentially have to retrace a lot of the detail work (panel seams, doors, etc., redo the rivets, and so on) to "start clean" before you can do a reskin. Remember that these are publicly reskinnable, so go for uploading your reskins to the DLS!! The resize of the image isn't a big deal. These locos aren't very texture heavy. The original undecorated one is 1.11MB, mine with the resized texture is only 1.3MB.

The redoing doors and stuff is where you completely lost me... I don't have the concentration power for that...
 
You don't say?

Problem is the technique to increase image size is dull science, the rest wanders off into art, which (while not nearly as difficult as understanding women) is still impossible to organize into neat little packets. Using the built in GE 44 tonner as an example;

10208868.jpg


Blurry, got a 512x512 pixel main image, increase size and you have larger blur. Sharpen creates artifacts;

52009239.jpg


So the best technique here is to redo the lettering as an overlay (to get the font and size correct) then delete and smooth out the paint underneath. I'm gonna skip that part, cleaning up paint should be obvious. Next part is pure art, you need to find pictures, line drawings, or whatever to make overlay templates, save them for each loco type you do. A lot of prep work involved in that using hue/saturation/lightness and grayscale and contrast to get the details to look just right, I still can't do that nearly as well as I'd like to.

60804697.jpg


I use pink as the designated background color since it's an unlikely color to show up on anything but the Barbie train, most image editors have some way to make the background color invisible or just select and delete. After that fiddle with the layer properties to get the overlay so the lines are there and the colors are the same, in PSP set the properties for overlay, hue/saturation/lightness I leave hue and saturation at zero and reduce the lightness until the white part is gone and the door color matches the rest of the paint.

99250338.jpg


Again I didn't bother with the lettering or paint cleanup for this quick demo, but compare the door and vent detail to the first shot.
 
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