Port Ogden & Northern on the Port Ogden & Northern

[sniper297]

I came over to The Dark Side just a few weeks ago;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLHo8eTuOz8

And altho Phil did a great job on the Trainz version of the PO&N route, the first thing I noticed was the lack of repaints. :'(

I'm working on rectifying the situation, with the infamous MSTS PO&N CatDog logo originally created by Kevin "Cadman" Shea back in 2001.

Made a clone of the default generic SD40 cabview, this will be the standard cabview for all the chop nose road switchers. Working on a high hood cabview, haven't gotten there yet.

Added lights in Paint Shop Pro. Anyone wants to beta these;

http://www.humyo.com/9455455/PONgp9test.cdp?a=tnn_Mc_ONec

I'm a Trainz newby, so let me know if I did anything wrong - first attempt at uploading to the download station got kicked back cuz I didn't have the screenshot set up correctly.

 

[pensfan17]

I came over just this week. Coming from MSTS, Trainz has a learning curve to overcome. But I like the operational potential. Spent some time tonite on the PO&N and enjoyed it. Looking forward to your repaints!

Al

 

[sniper297]

Learning curve don't seem too steep at the moment, altho I haven't gotten into route or scenario creation yet. Probably end up stealing most of Phil's work as a template anyway, just gotta turn it right side up and give it a Yankee Doodle accent.

More shots (or should I say "shotz"? gotta ztart zpeaking az the trainz guyz zpeak!) of other work in progrezz;

SD9s, taken in TRS2004 since I haven't converted them to 2010 yet;

Same with the RS11 models, still working on getting a decent high hood cabview.

Justin Cornell's F7s, only model I've reskinned so far that worked out of the box in both 2004 and 2010. Has working dynamic numbers too, have to figure out how to get some of these others working.

high hood GP9s, still need to get rid of the excess shine from the PM to IM conversion process on the back one. I'll probably have to look into cloning and de-shining the trucks as well.

C36-7, no errors or missing dependencies in content manager, but for some reason i get sound error messages in game on these. tried changing to different sounds, same error, so it must be something in the config.txt file.

GP15s with animated doors, had to clone the door object because the original was Conrail blue. Sent a humyo link to Joe Ramos to check out, make sure the clone won't interfere with any of his stuff.

That's all that's in the paint shed at the moment, PO&N is supposed to be a third class feeder route - but if there's enough interest I'll take requests for big road engines, weird foreign stuff (I noticed Phil is using Aussie diesels) and steamers. I don't actually claim any kind of ownership to any of this, so if anyone else wants to repaint using my scheme or your own variation, I will upload the PSP logo and color scheme templates for others to play with.

 

[springtransit]

I'd be interested in doing some old time steam locomotive skins!

 

[sniper297]

You're on!

http://www.humyo.com/9455455/PONlogos.zip?a=h543DHjPJzg

That zip has the logo in PSP, PSD, and TGA format, along with a BMP of the color samples I've been using. Altho it IS dealer's choice, the first PO&N repaint was done by Freddie "Splatter" Huff back in 2001 with a Burlington Northern color scheme, then John "I need a nickname" Fowlis uploaded an RS-2 with an orange PO&N color scheme and his own logo. Kevin "Cadman" Shea then created the CatDog logo, and when I learned how to reskin I migrated more to a reverse Chicago & NorthWestern color scheme with Kevin's logo. To add more interest I like to use a variety of schemes that represent a railroad evolving over the years, and of course paint that gets faded, scratched, rusted, and touched up in a hurry.

http://www.cnwhs.org/memberphotos/thumbnails.php?album=4

Look over some of those and you'll get the idea. Great source for textures to use for layered weathering;

http://www.cgtextures.com/

Have to register and log in to download, but they're all free to use.

Justin "NorfolkSouthern37" Cornell whipped up a high hood cabview with the short hood forward, so that's ready now;

Still got some bits and pieces to figure out on some of these, but should have most of them uploaded in a week or two.

 

[Steveo241]

That looks amazing! Much more realistic than the current one.

 

[sawyer811]

may i suggest skinning the living daylights out of Ben Neal's generic and USRA steamers? A 2-8-8-2 in PO&N paint would be awesome, though i'm still waiting for the trainz version of the SeaView streamlined 2-6-2...

i stalk obo's in my spare time, what?

 

[sniper297]

Amazing?!

Hee-hee, thanks Steaveo, I probably spend more time incab than out of it, so it's important to me for the cabviews to be as realistic as possible. Technique ain't all that hard, altho it does come at the expense of more megabytes.

First thing is take a cab like this default SW and clone it, convert the .texture files to .tga, and resize all of them 200% and Sharpen More.

Lower the gamma on all textures to about 60%, trick is to get a cab that looks realistic both day and night - dark but not too dark. Add lighting effects with the Paint Shop Pro "Illumination" tools, I suspect Photoshop has something similar. Main thing is practice, I don't have any artistic talent but I just keep playing with it until something clicks.

Finished product, the other thing I tinkered with was the camera settings to move the view slightly forward and further to the right - takes a bit of trial and error, near as I can tell the numbers are;

left(Higher)/right(Lower), front(lower)/back(higher), up/down, yaw, pitch. Dunno which way the last three go, I just changed one string at a time to see what happened (after saving a copy of the config.txt file of course) then added 0.6 to each value in the first column, subtracted 0.3 from each value in the second column, to move the interior view right and forward.

At Sawyer, Bill Burnett is currently on an extended vacation driving around Alaska for the summer, whenever he gets back to trainsimming we'll have to talk him into making a SeaView route for Trainz.

 

[sniper297]

Found a couple more PO&N routes on the DLS, one by teleport_8 and another by thackalane. Cloned one of them to tinker with learning how to use surveyor, don't remember which one this is.

Port Ogden docks, as you can see I'm working on some PO&N freightcars.

Alco RS11 7617 needs to clear her throat before we get moving.