Paul
Do you know, I remember that post too now. I was desperately searching the web for the answer because I remembered seeing it on one of the forums. Might have known it was on TSF!!
Anyway, I feel I have nearly won now – the computer is only beating me on the front cab windows!! (why did A4s have to have sloping cab fronts?!!) I think I have the answer anyway!
Jon
I have a couple of queries…
1. Why is texturing so difficult?
2. Can anyone let me know where I’m going wrong here:
(attached image)
Why is the rear driving wheel brighter than the others, (it also flashed between light and dark as the loco moves)
Where is that dirty green texture coming from (looks like a smudge along the bodywork)
Is there a difference in the way bmps and tgas render because the texturing for the cab and the body use exactly the same colour palette.
Jon
So onto the next round of questions.
Why does my detail disappear – in the original shots above you can see that the level of detail is less than my screenshot from within 3DC:
someone described texturing as a black art on uktrainsim. they were right! makes 3d modelling look easy.
Jon
cheers, will try this… if Kimdurose stumbles upon this thread, he’ll know for sure!
Jon
what a difference a crease makes!
Jon
ps red tender to test theory that green was coming from reflection. Unfortunately not the case!
I think there is a difference between how TGAs and BMPs render in MSTS. But I’m not the person to ask.
As for the wheels… You could try applying a Crease to the wheels. It could be that its smoothing information is messed up. Or possibly check the materials of the wheels to see what the Ambient and Specular values are.
Richard
is it anything to do with the ‘bits’ setting on the tgas or bmps? I’ve always gone for the highest bits setting when exporting from Photoshop – is there a definitive one to go for for MSTS?
Jon
It might have to do with your Texture Detail setting in the MSTS options. andnbsp;The lower it is, the worse texture blurring will appear.
Ah. never changed any of those MSTS properties. I’ll try and see what happens.
Jon
The blurring is an artifact of either poor quality/high speed mipmapping or possibly even down-sampling of the texture to reduce the amount of memory required to display the texture and perform operations on it. andnbsp;I’m not sure what would be the best way to get around this problem. andnbsp;Truthfully, I’d never really though about it, and I might be truly terrified to see what some of my objects and skins look like on lower detail settings andnbsp;
troub – thanks, that indeed was the problem! So MSTS dithers the colours at lower resolutions to lower the detail / increase the blurring? Should I attempt to shade the the detailing over 4 pixels, not 2? In this way ensuring that MSTS has to render something in that area at lower resolutions!
I also totally re-worked my textures so that they are all tgas. This eliminated the problem of differing colour matches.
I am starting to feel as if I’m winning now, not the computer. Still, I’ve not won the war yet, only a few battles!
jon
Thankyou Paul – useful info there!! I was around on those forums – but I’d not started texturing at the time!! I still deeply mourn the loss of TSF – but at least Tim’s back now and we have uktrainsim!
I would dearly love to get a copy of the archive of the forums on Tim’s old site though – no doubt plenty more gems of info there!!
Jon
Jon,
it is a pity you were not around on the trainsimfiles.co.uk forums before they closed down….
I posted a flashing wheels solution there in November and the discussion on texturing loss of detail was there too.
The flashing wheels was due to the vertex normals of the wheel face getting andquot;corruptedandquot; – not being perpendicular to the face, so the lighting varies when the wheel rotates.
(creasing the face fixed the problem)
Some of the texture detail loss may be due to DXT compression in the texture (see DirectX SDK for info) – the new MakeAce text mentions it – use the andquot;zip onlyandquot; compression to retain all detail.
Paul
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