Hi All
Hopefully I can answer a few of the questions posed in here since my last reply
How can it do? I look for that in photoshop but i think that it is not a image format.Maybe in 3ds MAX?
Other unknown way is to open the fbx mesh file with textpad or similar and change one of the values.
I don't know which value is it, but a good friend of mine (he is retired of Trainz 3 years ago) could change this value for increase the emissive effect but now, he don't remember this value. I investigated for a long time but never found that.
I've been looking at making a tutorial for this, unfortunately I've not had enough time to do so yet. Hopefully soon
However the basic steps are:
1) Open your parameters map in photoshop
2) Click on the 'Image' menu at the top of the screen
3) Go to 'Mode', and click on '32bits'
4) Click on your primary colour in your toolbar (ie how you would set which colour you are going to paint with)
5) Set your colour, then adjust the 'intensity' slider. I find that 1.5-3 stops works well here (you might need to play with this a little to get a good effect).
6) Close the colour picker window, then paint (or fill) the colour where you want it on the emissive map
7) Click on File, then Save As
8) Under 'format', select 'Radiance' (it will list '.HDR' as one of the available formats)
9) Name your file the same as your normal parameters map, but make sure the file is showing '.hdr' at the end
10) Save the file
In your asset, place the '.hdr' file in the same location as the regular version of your parameters map, then change the .texture.txt file for your parameters map to point to the .hdr file.
Generally, if you use this on a nightmode mesh, I would recommend having a dedicated texture/material for the lit objects so that you can make it relatively small.
I will look to do a proper tutorial with screenshots, and possible also a video tutorial variant as well, to hopefully make it easier for people to try this out.
but wasn't there way how to support both v5 (32bit) and v6 (64bit) speedtreees at the same time
Unfortunately you can only have one SpeedTree plugin in a game, and the 32bit version cannot be used within a 64bit game. The option here was to either move to SpeedTree V6, or just drop SpeedTree entirely.
Furthermore N3V just didn't care about cost of modelling program at the creator's side at all.
This isn't at all true. As I noted previously, it's entirely possible to make trees using other tools. They just won't be SpeedTree assets. There are tree making tools out there for blender, and 3DSMax, and other tools that can make quite reasonable trees. But they of course won't be able to take advantage of the features/functions developed by SpeedTree.
We also worked with members of the community to provide them with access to SpeedTree, unfortunately not a lot of trees resulted from this. We also offered to several other creators to work with them to provide access to SpeedTree, and they chose not to proceed further with us.
As for the nightmeshes, I have bad experiences with them, so far I didn't determinate if they replace day mesh or cover day mesh on the night scene.
Nightmode meshes should 'cover' the day mesh (ie they should sit over the top of it, a bit like an overlay). You may need to push them out a few centimeters so that they don't flicker. This is one that can take a bit of tweaking to get right, as you don't want it to look too much like it's floating, but if it's too close then it can cause flickering. You also need to check LOD, as if a recessed window modes 'outward' in a LOD then nightmode mesh may become hidden. In this case you'd need to make the nightmode mesh sit outside the lower LODs, which could cause it to float a little on the higher LODs.
My experience is such, that sometimes night mesh doesn't switch on in dark or starts to flicker randomly.
This generally means that your nightmode mesh is too close to the regular mesh, and hence is either being hidden by the day mesh, or is flickering between the day and night mesh (ie it's rendering both surfaces in the same place). Try pushing the nightmode mesh outwards a little and see if it helps.
Note generally nightmode meshes work best when you have only the 'glowing' objects in them, so the lights themselves, and any lit windows and similar. Creating light cast onto walls or floors may not work as well, since you are overlaying the nightmode rather than replacing the day mesh.
[qoute]N3V is communicating with the creators community very strangely from the beginning, sometimes creators have to use guessing, time consuming testing ot whatever else instead using clear technical support infos from the production company.[/quote]
Currently we provide the
https://contentcreation.trainzsimulator.com/ and
http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php5/TrainzDev_Wiki websites, plus our Trainz discord server, and these forums where creators can find information.
Via both the discord server and these forums, we do our best to answer questions where possible. But of course, it does require the question to be asked. If someone else answers the question then we may not reply, as the question was already answered (all I'd be doing is re-stating what was already said).
N3V needs to make it easier for the content creator, not harder.
In all honesty, game art has never been simple. And we are dealing with game art, no matter how you want to look at it. And we are selling a game to the public, and simply put if we don't keep progressing with game technology then Trainz will not continue going; this is both with the 'trains' side of Trainz and with the art/visuals side of Trainz.
However in all honesty, a lot of recent changes should make it a lot easier once you get used to them (and for new users, they won't need to re-learn from old habits).
A good example of this has been the move from a basic single diffuse, and maybe a simple reflection texture, back in the Trainz V1.3/UTC days, to the introduction of normals maps in TRS2004, through to the tbumpenv material introduced in TS2009 (actually TS2009 SP1 from memory), to the new pbrmetal type materials in TRS19.
Personally, I spent a lot of time learning the tbumpenv material so I could take as much advantage of this as I could. But I will admit, it is not the easiest material to work with as you need to tweak both the 'reflection' and 'specular' maps; and you can end up quite a way off what you should have if you aren't careful
The funny thing is, apart from combining the relevant maps into a parameters map; the PBR materials are a lot easier to work with. Instead of going 'how much reflection do I want' and 'how much specular do I want', I go 'is this exposed metal' (the metallic map) and then 'how shiny is this area' (the roughness map). Both are much easier questions to answer, and you'll tend to tweak only one of those textures till it looks the way you want.
Actually, the parameters map is really just 4 different questions in one map:
Does this area glow (emissive)
How shiny is this area (roughness)
Is this area light or dark under ambient light/shadow (Ambient Occlusion)
IS this area exposed metal (metallic map)
And we know that PBR is a big change for everyone, but at this point is it a relatively standard setup in the games industry, and there is a lot of information available on it. But, there's also nothing stopping you from using the legacy materials as well; but you need to keep in mind that legacy materials use various conversion algorithms to convert them to PBR when in TRS19. The 'tbumpenv' is the closest to PBR (it's actually the legacy version of PBR, but lacks the emissive and AO channels and has the specular map inverted compared to the roughness map
). On the other hand onetex is the furthest from PBR, as it lacks all but the diffuse texture (and possible some specular values, depending on how it was exported), and so the conversion will need to make a lot of assumptions to make it work, and as such it won't always work perfectly.
Today, we have several very good tools available for texture creation which can simplify the work on creators. There's Substance Painter, Quixel Mixer, and a few simpler tools like Materialize, and probably more I've not seen myself (I seem to recall 2 or 3 others being discussed on these forums). Personally I've used Quixel a bit, and the latest update seems to have improved it a lot since I last used it, and is currently free to use! Substance is very common these days and has a lot of tutorials, but is paid.
These take pretty much all of the guesswork out of texture creation, and can simplify a lot of the previously harder texture work. The main thing is that they are a change to your workflow, which means you may need to spend some time learning to adapt to them. But in all honesty, these tools have become so common in the industry because of how much they simplify texture creation, and how much time they save.
Here are some Pics showing what the Lights are doing in Surveyor.
The banding you are seeing is due to the way that blended alpha channels (ie alpha channels that have grey in them) are handled in games, put simply game engines don't like them and very few games properly support them. However, make sure your anti-aliasing is set as high as you can have it, as this can make a huge difference to how alpha blended objects are rendered in Trainz.
You may also need to try adjusting the 'compression' value in the .texture.txt file (see here:
https://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/.texture.txt_Files ), as different compression values will handle alpha channels differently.
Regards
