Locomotives as scenery

I'm working on the Union Pacific Osage Street engine facility in Denver, and have sort of a conundrum. Since this is a major loco rehab and scrapping operation one of the primary characteristics is a large number of derelect locos waiting for rebuild or for scrapping, everything from ex-SP SW's through old D&RGW GP-40's to IP SD70MAC's.

For obvious reasons I don't want to spot a bunch of live locos on the rip tracks, which would be a real frame killer, and I want to decorate them with the grafitti that all of the prototypes have accumulated.

My thinking is to clone a bunch of existing locos, turn them into scenery objects and place them as scenery. Problem is I don't have a clue how to do this. I can do the reskinning, and I know enough to turn a loco body into a scenery object, but don't know how to attach bogies, etc so I can place them in one piece.

Has anyone done this before? I think if I had an example to work from I could manage something, but at thsi point I don't know where to begin.

Anybody got any suggestions?

Thanks.

Talk very nicely to the content creators and get them to put the bogey and body together in one .im file then make that a scenery object.

Roll it yourself by adding a second or third mesh of the bogey to the body and set the whole thing up as a scenery object. You can attach meshes to an attachment point.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

Talk very nicely to the content creators and get them to put the bogey and body together in one .im file then make that a scenery object.

Roll it yourself by adding a second or third mesh of the bogey to the body and set the whole thing up as a scenery object. You can attach meshes to an attachment point.

Cheerio John

Click to expand...

Thanks, John, but I probably need to learn how to do it myself. Olus I really don't want to ask for a bunch of different mesh fixes. It's embarrassing.

It might work...

Turn the bogies into scenery?
Chills and Frostbites, Tony.:wave:

http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?301358-Painting-tutorial

See post number 5 in that thread, unless you're experienced at cloning and fixing stuff with PEVsoft tools and manipulating files you might want to read the whole thing.

Thanks, JIm. That's exactly the sort of information what I was looking for

Life Jim but not as we know it.
Thank you very much for that tut Sniper297.
Resources like this are just awesome.
Thanks again &
CheerZ!

I thought I would try the Trainsim tutorial mentioned by sniper297 to convert a black 5 locomotive and tender to scenery items (or to be more correct trackside items). The method of cloning a pre-existing boxcar asset made by the tutorial author and replacing the meshes, texture and texture.txt files with those copied from the asset being converted worked great on the locomotive.
However the tender bogey mesh uses the env_metal texture to provide a shiny metal appearance to the rim of the wheel and when used in the method to convert to scenery, the result is a failure. The tender bogey wheels turn out as an unrecognisable crumpled pile of shiny metal like a car that has been through a crusher.
I tried deleting the env_metal .tga file and texture.txt file and used PEV's PM2IM to try to delete the reference to the env_metal texture, but no luck since the asset now shows an error about the missing env_metal texture since the mesh needs this texture.
It looks like any loco or bogey which uses the env_metal texture cannot be converted to scenery using this method unless somebody knows a method of handling the env_metal in a different way.

Scottish

Why not just convert them to ordinary wagons and remove any reference to engine sounds steam etc from the config, just use a wagon type config and adapt, bogies can stay as they are, if they are not moving you are not saving anything anyway. Advantage then is you can shunt them or move dead loco's.

Think collect and deliver scrap loco's to Scrap yard session etc.

Thanks Malc, thats a good idea. The reason for converting them to scenery objects was to use less resources than filling a yard with normal locos, but I see the point you are making that wagons will probably use no more resources than scenery objects since they are not driveable.

Scottish

Natural assumption, but wrong. Trainz loads and continually processes the physics for every loose consist car in the entire session, regardless of how far away from the player. The whole point of the "Carfizzix" sleep script is to make the game not load the data until an engine actually couples onto a car. If you do make it into a wagon and intend to use a lot of them in a session, I would advise stealing Justin Cornell's script from one of my sleep script cars and adding that. As for the funky bogey, I deliberately used low poly "disk wheel" bogies in my static cars, if you're converting a loco to a scenery object for the purpose of better framerates you should use PEV's mesh viewer to get a poly count for any mesh you include. For a steam loco tender I would use the disk wheel bogies added as an attachment, add position tag to each bogey then adjust the numbers so they sit in the right places.

Thanks for the information Sniper. Evertime I think I have learned something about content creation, I realize I am only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

When you say disc wheel bogies on static cars I assume you mean the type where the wheels don't turn (no animation). I will have a lot of searching to do to find one with one axle having a pair of wheels of a suitable size to build up the complete set of wheels on a steam tender.

If I go down the other way of making wagons, I will try to find the carfizzix script from one of your cars.

Thanks
Scottish

Postscript to my last post. I have now completed the process of converting the black 5 and its tender to scenery (trackside) objects by substituting an alternative tender bogey which does not use env_metal texture.

I will now have a go at making them as wagons with the sleep script from one of Sniper's cars.

Thanks to Malc and Sniper.

Scottish

I know this is an older thread almost 2 years old in fact, but very helpful with the nice link to Jim's post on Trainsim.com

Now I was thinking...

Would it be possible to have turn this into a trackside object instead? This would be easier, I think, for placing the object on the track. This could be done with the bogeys as well.

John