Question about creating miniatures

[jjanmarine3]

Hi guys.

I am not into creating yet and I would like to know whether creators can take existing trainz assets and their configs -as is - in any guage and manipulate any or all of them into miniature sizes. For example, take an existing standard gauge route and all it's assets and change it all into say 7-1/4" guage.

 

[daveinblock4]

Wouldn't that be nice.
An alternative would be to take a 7 1/4" layout and build it eight times as large (7 1/4" trains are approximately 1/8 full size), and just use standard gauge locos on it.
Coincidently, there are some miniature trains on the content pages but they don't seem to work in TS2012 (same old problems - faulty or missing dependencies). If anyone can fix them please let me know, I would be very interested.

 

[jjanmarine3]

I have thought and wondered about this quite often and just never asked, when I saw a post with your avatar and 7 1/4 " gauge it reminded me to ask

 

[ray_whiley]

A few months back I played around with reducing some of my own buildings to1":1' scale with a view to creating a miniature village, and tried some track to the same scale plus a small loco - an easy one, a Wisbech and Upwell tram engine. No rotating wheels, but with the skirts on this loco this wasn't noticeable in such a size, and I liked the overall appearance when used with full-size people.

Incidentally, the buildings were created using TACS/GMax and scaled by using the program's scaling function. This left them floating in midair so they needed to be manually brought down to ground level in TACS. No other alteration was needed except for a new KUID and description in the config file; all textures were as on the original. It would be equally easy to resize buildings to one-eighth scale - but of course only if you have the original mesh!

These have not been shared on the DLS as I thought they would be of no interest.

Ray

 

[jjanmarine3]

A few months back I played around with reducing some of my own buildings to1":1' scale with a view to creating a miniature village, and tried some track to the same scale plus a small loco - an easy one, a Wisbech and Upwell tram engine. No rotating wheels, but with the skirts on this loco this wasn't noticeable in such a size, and I liked the overall appearance when used with full-size people.

Incidentally, the buildings were created using TACS/GMax and scaled by using the program's scaling function. This left them floating in midair so they needed to be manually brought down to ground level in TACS. No other alteration was needed except for a new KUID and description in the config file; all textures were as on the original. It would be equally easy to resize buildings to one-eighth scale - but of course only if you have the original mesh!

These have not been shared on the DLS as I thought they would be of no interest.

Ray

Hi Ray.
I think it would be so cool to be able to reduce one's favourite assets to a desired smaller scale but as you say there probably is not enough interest.
Imagine ones favourite route resized to a desired or preferred scale - little locos and rolling stock little people and the whole toot....BIG work though, and I am still to grasp the basics about meshes . I would definately be interested. Going to peep at your site now, there are so many sites.
Perhaps a creator will tackle it in future..:udrool:

 

[ray_whiley]

There would be no problem for the original creator to reduce buildings etc. to any scale - but no one else could do so without acquiring the original mesh.

Rolling stock would be more difficult because of the wheels which I think (although I have no experience with wheels or animation) would be the difficult part - but perhaps not for someone with that sort of ecperience!

Track is track and it doesn't matter what it looks like or what gauge it is as far as Trainz is concerned - for instance, any train would work on any track, even if it is 'invisible'. But bogeys would need to be placed at standard height ie. way above the scaled model - so it would be necessary to use 'invisible' bogeys (which is what I did).

Ray