Modern Cars?

A lot of the cars in Trainz are generic and boxy, like ones from the 1980s and 1990s, they are not even real brands. Some of the good models are the JCar and CCar models, but they are from Japan and Europe. The only good North American cars that I found are from davesnow, and even then they are only a few, Ford F150, Ford Explorer and a Ford Crown Victoria. I have not found many minivans or SUVs, which are more common in North America. Is there any modern cars.
 
Someone just did a series of Mustangs, you might look for them on the DLS. There are some other good cars out there, but I don't have any others right at hand...
 
Look again at the JCAR series. There are some Camaros, BMWs, Audis, and other modern models. HP Trainz made some Smart Cars and other modern vehicles, but they're definitely scenery only due to their high poly count.
 
Thank you everyone for all the suggestions, but I am more looking for minivans and SUVs like the Honda Odyssey.

Like this
2020_honda_odyssey_angularfront.jpg
 
Another question, is there a way to convert scenery cars for traffic cars? I tried that once, but the car's tires go below the road. Is there a way to convert them and make them at level with the road?
 
Another question, is there a way to convert scenery cars for traffic cars? I tried that once, but the car's tires go below the road. Is there a way to convert them and make them at level with the road?

Look for the super adaptor.

This allows you to convert scenery cars to road vehicles.
 
I thought the super adaptor turned the scenery cars into locomotives, cars that appear on roads are considered trackside objects.
 
I wonder why no one has made enough randomizing traffic vehicles so we can have traffic regions with more than 100 cars
 
Another question, is there a way to convert scenery cars for traffic cars? I tried that once, but the car's tires go below the road. Is there a way to convert them and make them at level with the road?

I think the answer to both questions is ‘yes’ and I will assume you know how to clone an asset, open it for editing and find its config.txt file.

(1). Conversion

Converting a Kind scenery asset, even a tree, to a Kind scenery-trackside asset capable of being used as road traffic is just a matter of adding a line of text to the root level of its config.txt;

trackside 0.01

...where the number is the distance (in metres) the object will be to the side of the road’s invisible “track”. Positive values mean it will be at the right of the track going forward, negative values place it to the left. It’s usually best to make this value close to zero, because you don’t want your vehicle driving through roadside fire hydrants, signs, pedestrians, et cetera. If your modification has been successful, Content Manager will list it as a Track Object instead of Scenery, Vehicle, Building or whatever else it previously dreamed up for its Type.

As others have mentioned, such scenery-trackside assets need to be included in (referred to by) a Kind Region asset and that Region must be used by the Route in order for the vehicle to show up as auto-traffic.


(2). Orientation and position

You can change the direction the object faces and its spatial position relative to the road to correct problems like cars driving sideways, backwards, sinking into, or floating above the road surface. Do it by inserting tag lines into the mesh-table section of the vehicle’s config.txt (i.e. at the same level as you find the tags mesh, mesh-asset, or auto-create). The tags required are;

orientation 0,0,0
position 0,0,0

..where my 0’s represent just the default values of these tags.

The value for orientation is the rotational angle you want to apply to the vehicle around the mesh's X,Y,Z axes. The angle is in radians, not degrees, just to make it user-unfriendly in time-honoured N3V fashion. This may help; there are 2 x Pi radians in 360 degrees, so a rotation of 90 degrees will be;

2 x Pi x 90/360 = Pi/2 = 3.159/2 = 1.5795 radians.

Who said high school maths would never come in handy?

The values for position are distance offsets, in metres, along the object’s X,Y,Z directions. Normally, it would only be necessary to adjust the vehicle’s height Z, so the value would be 0,0,0.3 if you needed to raise it by 0.3 metres. Use negative values to reduce the height.

These mods are what you would do to the clone of an asset, local only to your copy of Trainz. Distributing a cloned asset under your kuid for others to use would require permission from the original author of course. And remember to wash your hands for 20 seconds after touching another person’s assets.


.
 
Last edited:
Look again at the JCAR series. There are some Camaros, BMWs, Audis, and other modern models.

The thing is though, most of the JCAR series cars have the steering wheel on the right, which wouldn't make sense for a North American scene.
 
Here is the best way to find cars and trucks (road vehicles) ready to be added to a region's config file:

They are all track objects, so just go to Content Manager, choose DLS, and then click the "type" column heading. This will cause a sort on type, scroll down to find all the track objects grouped together.

Then just poke around and you will see all types of cars and trucks, from most parts of the world, both contemporary and vintage as well.

Let me add one thing to clear up confusion for newer Trainz users. A car or truck can be:
1. A static object (just scenery)
2 A driveable vehicle ( a train in disguise using a superadaptor) on an invisible track
3. A road vehicle to appear as road traffic (which I think is what this discussion is about and what I describe above)
 
Last edited:
A lot of the cars in Trainz are generic and boxy, like ones from the 1980s and 1990s, they are not even real brands. Some of the good models are the JCar and CCar models, but they are from Japan and Europe. The only good North American cars that I found are from davesnow, and even then they are only a few, Ford F150, Ford Explorer and a Ford Crown Victoria. I have not found many minivans or SUVs, which are more common in North America. Is there any modern cars.


There's no other solution that find 3d models of those cars and convert them via 3dsmax. The pity is that many of them are payware and are very high-poly models. Sketchup is also a good source for vehicles, but those need to be realigned to make them workable on a region.
 
There's no other solution that find 3d models of those cars and convert them via 3dsmax. The pity is that many of them are payware and are very high-poly models. Sketchup is also a good source for vehicles, but those need to be realigned to make them workable on a region.

The other problem is the Sketch Up models require more than that kind of reworking because they are extremely high-poly models with tons of separate textures aligned to each face in the model.

With that said, I use the JCAR models. When riding by, it's not noticeable that the driver is on the "wrong" side of the vehicle.
 
I'm gonna write a whole list of vehicles that we could use traffic enabled versions of
all JCARs
all of lotharhake's vehicles that aren't already
all of Zubik's vehicles
all of Misterairbrush's vehicles
all of Vulcan's vehicles
all of sister's vehicles
all of dinorius_redundicus's vehicles that aren't already
all CUK vehicles that aren't already
 
Last edited:
I'm gonna write a whole list of vehicles that we could use traffic enabled versions of
Keep in mind I have not done this. But isn't it just of matter of:

1. Learn what is different (in the config file) between a static vehicle and a track object (road vehicle).
2. Clone the static car you have in mind.
3. Modify the config file to make it a road vehicle.
 
Back
Top