Buildings for Railroad Simulator

Ok….tga files in Photoshop……. see attached pic
The top half of the pic shows the image and layers palette in Photoshop
The bottom half is the .tga image applied to a single face of a cube in 3DC.

In Photoshop
1) Create a new file, fill it with whatever colour you wish
2) Create a new layer, draw/paint the details you wish to be visible
3) With layer 1 selected open the Select menu and click Load Selection, click OK
4) Open the Select menu again and click Save Selection, click OK
5) If you now look in the channel palette an Alpha channel has been added
6) In the File menu choose Save As, choose tga, type a name, click OK, choose 32 bit, click OK.

Thats it… Remember the saved file will not retain the layers so save the file out as a Photoshop (psd) file as well just in case you need to make changes.
If you need to make some altertions at a later date just load the .psd file… make the changes and run through the above steps again after deleting the current alpha channel from the channel palette.

Let me know if it this works for you.

Bazza

I am debating the merits of making the windows individually or painting them on a building as a texture. Some of the issues I have is punching a hole for the windows into a wall with boolean operations it doesn’t work to well. I have tried framing the windows a one walled window with have four pieces just as implied. Framing is also producing high poly counts relative to rendering painted on windows as long as I don’t use the object union command they are managable. Looking for suggestions on modeling buildings? How do you do the windows?

Buildings need to be low-poly since they don’t undergo the scrutiny that an engine or piece of rollingstock might. That means that if you can make a texture look 3 dimentional, it’s both easier and better for the simulator, since having a lot of high poly buildings would cause uneven performance as these items are being drawn on the screen.

Low poly buildings are a major consideration I have drawn the line at 5,000 polygons.

Hi Howard,
I hope thats 5000 polys in total and not for each building <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

Maybe this will give you some ideas…
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<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://amabilis.com/forumattachments/a/tpc/f/4716078974/m/190…10822931#53510822931">http://amabilis.com/forumattachments/a/ … 3510822931</a><!– m –>

I’ve been meaning to put something like this together for a while now.

Bazza

This front porch is 1113 polygons. So no. Trainz imposes a 5000 polygon limit on any one structure with this porch I paired the details down to a minimum. I have not been able as yet to make a texture where the railing could be a solid rectangle and the texture renders see through between the rails. In other words each of the cross braces in this porch are rendered individually. The black in the TGA files renders as dark black not as invisible.

That sounds like a lot of polys just for a porch. Which paint program are you using to create the .tga file for the porch rails.
Have you deleted ALL unseen faces to reduce the poly count.
Are the railings made from cubes or cylinders. If you are using cylinders you can set the Lontitude for the basic cylinder to 8 instead of the default 16 and remember to delete the end caps.

Bazza

Railings and cross braces are made from cubes I ran this through Action 3d Reducer. I use Adobe Photo Shop 7 for the textures. Not making the railings and cross braces would be the way to go. The steps were a cube with cutouts using the Subtract Boolean

I had a quick go at your porch thingie, it came out at 586 polys and I could still loose around another 50 or so. I put railings around 3 sides…maybe I’m missing something. See attached pic.

I used the extrude operation to create the steps, this could be where yo are going wrong by using bolean ops.

I’ll take a look at creating .tga files in Photoshop…should be the same as PSP.

Bazza

The consolidate operation can be useful at reducing poly counts.

If you make steps with a series of extrudes, try running consolidate and check the poly count again.

[BLOCKQUOTE class=’ip-ubbcode-quote’][div class=’ip-ubbcode-quote-title’]quote:[/div][div class=’ip-ubbcode-quote-content’]Originally posted by Paul Gausden:
The consolidate operation can be useful at reducing poly counts.

If you make steps with a series of extrudes, try running consolidate and check the poly count again. [/div][/BLOCKQUOTE]
Now why didn’t I think of that. <!– s:D –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_biggrin.gif" alt="" title="Very Happy" /><!– s:D –>

Ok…So with the steps consolidated and the side railings replaced with a solid wood panel (you could just continue with the brick texture here) it ends up with 362 polys.
If the camera can’t see the underside of the cross rails or the top of the porch roof you could delete these and save another 10 polys.

Bazza

The extrude method of producing steps had me confused let me see if I got this:

I created 7 cubes X=1.4, Y=.20 Z=.25 I than removed the back and bottom faces. I than merged them together. After merging I went to select face tool and highlighted the tops of each of the 7 cubes and raised them into steps.

The resulting object has 56 polygons, is this what was ment by building steps with the extrude?

I want you to know that I appreciate all replies received they have been most helpful.

I still have not gotton a texture using black to render invisible it still shows up as black?

Nearly right but you only need to start with one cube…see attached pic..
1) Scale a cube to the height, width and depth of the first step.
Select the rear face and extrude it by the step depth
2) Select the top face of this new extrusion and extrude by the step height.
3) Select the rear faces…extrude them
4) Select the top face…extrude it
5) And so on till you reach the number of steps required.

Delete all unseen faces and use the consolidate operation.

I prefare to do it as above. but you could do it as you did if you know the number of steps required.
1) Select the rear face of the first step and extrude it 7 times by the depth of each step
2) Select the last six top faces….extrude by the step height
3) Select the last five top faces…extrude by the step height
…and so on

This isn’t really Game Developement stuff you may do better posting in the General forum.

I’ll take a look at creating .tga files in Phototshop.

Bazza