Trainz the end of an era?

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See, I'd never even heard of Substance Painter/Designer until I read this thread.

That illustrates one of the problems. Unless you are totally up with the new technology, for example if it is part of your job, then us amateurs and hobbyists are always out of the loop. I do hope that N3V do release a list of the software tools that they would recommend as being required to create assets in the NEXT/Trainz 2018 environment.
 
See, I'd never even heard of Substance Painter/Designer until I read this thread.

No worries, there isn't much to be known in terms of software. Blender, Autodesk Max and GMAX (unless they are the same?), and now Substance Painter/Designer. Maybe CrazyBump if I see fit, but I haven't touched it in months. Paint.net for texture work that involves logos or stripes, designs of any sort. But apart from a good modeling software, a good image editor (mine is by no means "good"), and now Substance Painter, you really don't need much other programs to keep up with content creation. The learning curve for Substance Painter is not even an eighth of an eighth as difficult as it is for any of the modeling softwares. But the brushes and general navigation interface are a bit different, nothing some YouTutorials can't help.

The money side of it doesn't bother me. $149 for a copy is really nothing - one of the advantages of being older.

Being younger that seems like a lot to me - 15 hours of work! But I suppose now you really don't have many excuses to complain about the difficulty of PBR. If you are younger, you can run an educational license. If you are older, just buy it.

@ Mick Berg I think Sumit was referring to how in the future there would possibly be tutorials on PBR and getting it working. Maybe a Substance Painter > Trainz tutorial would come about.
 
Perhaps those of us who are older and have limited time remaining ( I'm in that club ) should consider what we do with our work once we are no longer actively working with Trainz or pass away .

Of course when we die or stop creating our knowledge is lost, but we could at least make sure that the original creations are available for others to use as a knowledge base.

For instance, I know that I could probably take another persons simple model and change it so it could become another item within blender, whereas making it from scratch might be beyond me . I'd have a start as materials and structure would be there and I could adapt as needed and learn from the mistakes I make with a model that's already there .

Now I realize that for those who strenuously cling to their creative rights and are copyright fanatics will find this concept odious , but there may be some creators who would be happy to bequeath their original model files to the trainz community for adaptation and non commercial use .

Ok, we have the DLS files but I think its a shame that many creators original 3D works will be deleted down the track because relatives have no use for them or don't know who to give them to .

is this impractical or what ?
 
Perhaps those of us who are older and have limited time remaining ( I'm in that club ) should consider what we do with our work once we are no longer actively working with Trainz or pass away .

Of course when we die or stop creating our knowledge is lost, but we could at least make sure that the original creations are available for others to use as a knowledge base.

For instance, I know that I could probably take another persons simple model and change it so it could become another item within blender, whereas making it from scratch might be beyond me . I'd have a start as materials and structure would be there and I could adapt as needed and learn from the mistakes I make with a model that's already there .

Now I realize that for those who strenuously cling to their creative rights and are copyright fanatics will find this concept odious , but there may be some creators who would be happy to bequeath their original model files to the trainz community for adaptation and non commercial use .

Ok, we have the DLS files but I think its a shame that many creators original 3D works will be deleted down the track because relatives have no use for them or don't know who to give them to .

is this impractical or what ?

Totally workable IMO, there was a thread that Peter, AKA Narrowgauge, brought this up in a year or so ago.
 
Totally workable IMO, there was a thread that Peter, AKA Narrowgauge, brought this up in a year or so ago.

I know a few creators have put their gmax files online on their own sites, but that's rather impermanent , perhaps there could be a section on DLS that if you are a registered creator who has pledged to not use the items for gain, you could access them via a separate login ?
 
Perhaps those of us who are older and have limited time remaining ( I'm in that club ) should consider what we do with our work once we are no longer actively working with Trainz or pass away .

Of course when we die or stop creating our knowledge is lost, but we could at least make sure that the original creations are available for others to use as a knowledge base.

For instance, I know that I could probably take another persons simple model and change it so it could become another item within blender, whereas making it from scratch might be beyond me . I'd have a start as materials and structure would be there and I could adapt as needed and learn from the mistakes I make with a model that's already there .

Now I realize that for those who strenuously cling to their creative rights and are copyright fanatics will find this concept odious , but there may be some creators who would be happy to bequeath their original model files to the trainz community for adaptation and non commercial use .

Ok, we have the DLS files but I think its a shame that many creators original 3D works will be deleted down the track because relatives have no use for them or don't know who to give them to .

is this impractical or what ?

I think one problem is just the sheer quantity of the stuff. Some of my old blender source files have a bit of corruption that has crept in. They evolve over time and when I go back to them the big problem is working out which source was used for which model.

Cheerio John
 
There is nothing overly difficult to learn mate. For animations, learn to use bones, lot easier than using just dummies. baking out normal, AO,
albedo, metal, emmissive and other associated PBR parts can be done inside Substance Painter and Sunstance Player to assemble them into the files that Trainz needs. Substance Painter can either be had by a subscription method of $24.90 AUD a month or an out right purchase of an Indie Lic for $149 USD once only. Substance Player is a free utility. FBX/trainzmesh is not all that different to using the old *.im format.

Has anyone successfully used Substance Painter to texture Blender models? Are there any models made using Substance Painter that can be viewed, e.g., Downloaded from the DLS? I wouldn't want to purchase Substance Painter only to find that I can't texture models made in Blender or get the mesh and the texture files into Trainz.

Does anyone know, when the 30 day free trial expires can one still play with the program exploring its feature or are you locked out?

Cayden
 
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Has anyone successfully used Substance Painter to texture Blender model? Are there any model made using Substance Painter that can be viewed, e.g., Downloaded from the DLS? I wouldn't want to purchase Substance Painter only to find that I can'ttexture models made in Blender or get the mesh and the texture files into Trainz.

Does anyone know, when the 30 day credential expires can one still play with the program exploring its feature or are you locked out?

Cayden

Substance Painter takes .FBX, you can't import a .blend file directly. You are able to assign the Roughness, Metal, and Albedo textures to their respective channels in the export menu.

For Trainz you would have to assign the Green channel of the Parameters texture to Roughness, Alpha channel to Metal, and export the Albedo as its own texture. The Ambient Occlusion can be baked within Substance Painter but I haven't tried it so stick with the faithful Blender-baked AO maps. 90% of our creations do not use emissive and I don't think Substance Painter touches on it. So it will be left black. I don't know about the 30-day limit but I think it will just ask for a license as it is connected to the internet.

I think most people that decide to go forward CC'ing will get Substance Painter, and find that the workflow changes from being Blender/3DS to Trainz, to Blender/3DS to Substance Painter to Trainz .

Although very highly recommended, if you do not care for the PBR but want to create at the most recent build level you could at the least import into SP and set the "specular" and "reflective" properties for the material, playing around with it until it looks right.
 
Substance Painter takes .FBX, you can't import a .blend file directly. You are able to assign the Roughness, Metal, and Albedo textures to their respective channels in the export menu.
...

Ron's summation is similar to that suggested by CG Cookie in a (subscription) video tutorial. i.e. bake what you can, and load the FBX model plus those baked images into SP and SP will bake the other maps. The method of creating textures within Substance Painter is a bit mind blowing and will take a while to master.

In due course, I'd like to see lots of discussions about using Substance Painter with TRS18. There is potential to share materials that could save us an incredible amount of work.

In response to John's original post, I don't see this as doom and gloom but rather the opportunity to start making models that look really good. It might however, require the investment of time to learn some new techniques, and some monetary investment in some new tools.

I intend to add some tutorials to the N3V WiKi when I feel confident enough to publish. There is much about PBR I don't know but I do know how to make parameter textures out of other images.
 
Ron's summation is similar to that suggested by CG Cookie in a (subscription) video tutorial. i.e. bake what you can, and load the FBX model plus those baked images into SP and SP will bake the other maps. The method of creating textures within Substance Painter is a bit mind blowing and will take a while to master.

In due course, I'd like to see lots of discussions about using Substance Painter with TRS18. There is potential to share materials that could save us an incredible amount of work.

In response to John's original post, I don't see this as doom and gloom but rather the opportunity to start making models that look really good. It might however, require the investment of time to learn some new techniques, and some monetary investment in some new tools.

I intend to add some tutorials to the N3V WiKi when I feel confident enough to publish. There is much about PBR I don't know but I do know how to make parameter textures out of other images.

People will continue to make content , but it might reflect their age more than ever. so far we have a lot of old timers who grew up during the steam age , but as we die off those who like more modern rail will more or less take over . We can see this process now, less and less older content apart from locos and rolling stock but much more modern content in general , less content from the english speaking world and most of that from the modern era.

Given it is much easier to make diesels and electrics than it is steam and that those who have grown up with diesel/electric are happy using these items ( with exceptions ) if we make it harder to make already complex items, the learning curve gets higher and more people are put off even starting .it gets harder to learn new things with age and often there's an issue of costs for older ( and younger people) not just for software, but for computers able to use software.

I taught media for 2 decades and I can tell you that there are probably fewer young people who are likely to take up 3d modeling then there were a decade ago as ( certainly here in australia at least ) not all that many have a great work ethic. Apart from that, its a very complex business and those who do like it are more likely to make models that they can use in role player games . So far I've never come across a student who modeled railways. probably 0.05 percent of people might dabble in 3d work in the first place, in 20 years 0% in my experience want to build 3d models of rail related stuff.

So NV3 may in a few years have to update the existing models for older routes themselves if they are going to keep these routes going , there is a dearth of stuff available for pre 1950 already and since TANE was introduced , a lot of the content one could use back in 2010 has disappeared off the radar. Sadly, I can just see this getting worse in future.
 
People will continue to make content , but it might reflect their age more than ever. so far we have a lot of old timers who grew up during the steam age , but as we die off those who like more modern rail will more or less take over . ... Sadly, I can just see this getting worse in future.

I fear that you are correct but, as someone who did grow up in the steam age, I have no intention of dying off just yet. :hehe: Since I retired, some nine years ago, I discovered a whole new world where I can create objects that I can use in a simulation. This is part of my plan to avoid some of the issues that affect older people. So I will continue to learn and experiment and, should I find something useful, then I will pass that information on to others.

Trainz is unique in that it offers creative stimulation to those who use it, and those who create routes, sessions and the necessary assets for those routes and sessions. I'd rather do that than sit around and watch mindless TV all day and turn into a vegetable.
 
Can I ask, do you think that Trainz Dev being a closed community has helped develope new content creators?

I don't think so and it was never the intention of TrainzDev. You should read this post and this post by Windwalkr. It might be a closed, or even privileged community, but we have an obligation to inform the wider community.

In the past we got to play with things that may, or may not, make into Trainz. A couple that haven't made it yet were the interactive route editing feature and Asset Editor which is the replacement for CCP. Asset Editor is in the current TrainzDev version but doesn't seemed to have progressed from the earlier version I saw.

The big item for this version of TrainzDev (aka TRS18) are the PBR materials and I think most of us are still trying to figure out how to do it.

I sometimes think we need a special project or activity to encourage new or potential creators to develop their own content. There are tutorials around but I'm thinking of a mentoring program.
 
I fear that you are correct but, as someone who did grow up in the steam age, I have no intention of dying off just yet. :hehe: Since I retired, some nine years ago, I discovered a whole new world where I can create objects that I can use in a simulation. This is part of my plan to avoid some of the issues that affect older people. So I will continue to learn and experiment and, should I find something useful, then I will pass that information on to others.

Trainz is unique in that it offers creative stimulation to those who use it, and those who create routes, sessions and the necessary assets for those routes and sessions. I'd rather do that than sit around and watch mindless TV all day and turn into a vegetable.

Change is good, but only if its improves things for the better, TANE has been a very mixed bag of good and bad , but it would have been much better if it had removed a lot of existing faults with the old program and improved the surveyor interface , I was SO disappointed when I saw surveyor, hardly any new features that the program was crying out for , such as different color coding for object vs track spline points , selections that work, better use of textures, working rulers .
But its biggest issue was that it broke so many items that worked well previously. it was at least a year before I used it .

Trainz is my main interest in retirement, but it is a very frustrating program at times, one can plan to work on it for many years, but as I've found out recently , you never know when ill health will strike and limit what you can do daily. We need new blood to replace the old,but my chief concern is , if the learning curve gets too hard, it will affect the long term assets we can use and correspondingly, the routes we can drive.

Jango has not updated some of his masterpieces to work in TANE , most likely because there is so much work involved to get them to comply and he would rather be working on new routes. if many of us route builders are constantly having to just update all the time so their old creations will work with new incompatible software, it does become a chore and removes a lot of the fun quotient .

I suppose it all depends on how much the new version is incompatible with the old.if its like TANE was when it was first released ,then I fear we are going to be losing a lot of creators, one can only take so much change......
 
There are many motives that drive humans in being creative. Only one of them is a desire to make money. When this desire is portrayed (or even enforced) as the only legitimate motive for being creative, things tend to degrade to "least effort (and consequent low quality) for most profit". Read about the demise of PFI in Britain, as well as similar scenarios eslewhere, for an illustration of this. The international Art market is another variety of degradation-through-profit-addiction.

But those creators who create for the love of creating (and several other non-pecuniary motives) still have cost overheads. It would be no bad thing if we users of their creations could contribute to these overheads - the cost of software, computing resources and so forth. Creators could continue to create to their high standards, out of the joy of doing so, with no worries about it emptying their wallets if they don' sell sell sell.
Trainzkuidindex is a small realisation of such a scheme, perhaps.

Incidentally, I don't claim that any enterprise that makes a profit is automatically bad. Many enterprises have a multiplicity of motives additional to their profit motive - the desire for quality, utility of product, improvement of life and so forth. Sadly, such enterprises are becoming fewer, as the accountants sneer at anything not increasing the bottom line to max-black.
But I digress.

In addition to the cost overheads, the ever-accelerating changes to the software base of Trainz requires a steeper and steeper learning curve. Would profit-making stimulate creators to learn faster? Perhaps in some cases; but learning is also a form of creation and many like to learn new things for the sake of learning them, with all the associated pleasures and skills acquired, not least the ability to be persistent. :)
NV3 seem intent on "upgrading" (that dreaded word in modern life) at an ever accelerating pace. This pace seems to create more bugs and glitches for all, including creators. Still ... that's modernity for you, especially in the domain of technology.

Lataxe, happy to contribute to a Creators' Fund, as well as coughing up for the odd bit of payware.
 
Why is there a need to produce the new assets for NEXT using the FBX exporter. Are the models so much better, are N3V expecting creators to produce professional quality models. If old methods were still allowed creators wouldn't be giving up. It is fine for those creators who like to experiment but some creators just want to see their models in Trainz it may not be as good as a FBX exported model but not all creators have artistic talent any way.

I recently uploaded some carriages build 3.6 and was surprised that there were so many errors listed. This was N3Vs attempt to try to only allow what they regard as efficient assets into Trianz, surely a more sensible idea would be to grade all assets on Content Manager by efficiency, 5 being the most efficient and 1 being only use at your peril and don't complain about. frame rates. If efficiency was published on CM then route builders and session creators would be able to assess the impact on their work.


Ken
 
Why is there a need to produce the new assets for NEXT using the FBX exporter. Are the models so much better, are N3V expecting creators to produce professional quality models. If old methods were still allowed creators wouldn't be giving up. It is fine for those creators who like to experiment but some creators just want to see their models in Trainz it may not be as good as a FBX exported model but not all creators have artistic talent any way.

Generally, there are no visual or performance differences between IM models and FBX based models once in TANE. (see * below) However, the new PBR materials are only supported for FBX. I expect IM to be around for a while.


...
I recently uploaded some carriages build 3.6 and was surprised that there were so many errors listed. This was N3Vs attempt to try to only allow what they regard as efficient assets into Trianz, surely a more sensible idea would be to grade all assets on Content Manager by efficiency, 5 being the most efficient and 1 being only use at your peril and don't complain about. frame rates. If efficiency was published on CM then route builders and session creators would be able to assess the impact on their work.


Ken


Preview Asset already provides information that can be used to form an opinion on the efficiency of an asset. Poly count alone might be a rough indication but that is ameliorated by the use of LOD. About the most useful measure is the number of draw calls. The lower the better and the lowest LOD should be close to, or preferably, 1. I doubt if many of the "average" Trainz users know about or understand Preview Asset.

An error free asset, or even an asset that gets good numbers in Preview Asset, may not be a good asset. The CRG is constantly finding assets that pass validation but just don't work. These get added to the working faulty list. At the last count there was only 5970 to repair. :eek:

(*) The model meshes are the same but there are likely to be differences in animation. The animation in FBX is created differently so there may be some variation.
 
There are many motives that drive humans in being creative. Only one of them is a desire to make money. When this desire is portrayed (or even enforced) as the only legitimate motive for being creative, things tend to degrade to "least effort (and consequent low quality) for most profit". Read about the demise of PFI in Britain, as well as similar scenarios eslewhere, for an illustration of this. The international Art market is another variety of degradation-through-profit-addiction.

But those creators who create for the love of creating (and several other non-pecuniary motives) still have cost overheads. It would be no bad thing if we users of their creations could contribute to these overheads - the cost of software, computing resources and so forth. Creators could continue to create to their high standards, out of the joy of doing so, with no worries about it emptying their wallets if they don' sell sell sell.
Trainzkuidindex is a small realisation of such a scheme, perhaps.

Incidentally, I don't claim that any enterprise that makes a profit is automatically bad. Many enterprises have a multiplicity of motives additional to their profit motive - the desire for quality, utility of product, improvement of life and so forth. Sadly, such enterprises are becoming fewer, as the accountants sneer at anything not increasing the bottom line to max-black.
But I digress.

In addition to the cost overheads, the ever-accelerating changes to the software base of Trainz requires a steeper and steeper learning curve. Would profit-making stimulate creators to learn faster? Perhaps in some cases; but learning is also a form of creation and many like to learn new things for the sake of learning them, with all the associated pleasures and skills acquired, not least the ability to be persistent. :)
NV3 seem intent on "upgrading" (that dreaded word in modern life) at an ever accelerating pace. This pace seems to create more bugs and glitches for all, including creators. Still ... that's modernity for you, especially in the domain of technology.

Lataxe, happy to contribute to a Creators' Fund, as well as coughing up for the odd bit of payware.

Same here , i'd happily pay towards items that could be used in particular eras ( such as 1920/30s US trucks and busses ) wheres there are shortages of assets.

its just occurred to me that NV3 could encourage content creation doing a deal with autodesk to provide something like what adobe does for photoshop. a monthly subscription which is validated by a few rules, such as providing screenshots of work in progress, and being unable to keep on if one has not created anything for Trainz in a certain time period, or being able to miss months when you do not pay as you aren't in a position to create . Also negotiating group rates to use Lynda Blender tutorials would be a good way to start off blender users. its made the program a lot easier to navigate after i watched a few(Australian trainzers can possibly watch these for free from their local library online my local library provides the service for free)

its probably impractical, but helping in some way to provide the tools for content creators would be a really good way of NV3 expanding its content creator base.
 
The FBX format is used by many current games and many current 3d modelling programs, meaning you are not restricted to only using Gmax, 3dsMax Blender or 3d Crafter which are the only programs with IM exporters, FBX which is an industry standard exporter, also supports the more modern aspects of content creation required such as Paul says PBR.

Asset efficiency? Quick and dirty method.
Monitor Frame rates, Load Asset in preview asset, change the drop down to performance which loads hundreds of said asset and watch the frame rates, if there is not too much of a drop you are good to go, if as with some assets the FPS drops to zero or close, it is a bad inefficient asset. A lot of the very high poly 3d people and cars without LOD will kill frame rates if you use a lot of them.
 
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