I have been having problems with items I am making when you try and do night time running. The object does not get dark, like the techdocs say it should, or objects supplied with MSTS do. I got around this with the telephone kiosk by setting up the night time texture which looks like the light is on inside. However, I don't want to do this for all the objects I make, as most won't light up at night. I compared my object with a similar supplied object, eg. the post box, and the .sd file and the entry in the settleca.ref file both correspond. I even compiled the .s file to see if that made a difference, but no.

The objects also behave differently in the Route Editor. When trying to select an object, each of the supplied objects turns red as the mouse passes over them. My objects just get a very slight shade darker.

I have been using .bmp files for the texture, so its nothing to do with alpha channels.

Any ideas anyone?

Aha! I just made a PW Hut to go with the toolstore I had made with the Beta version of 3D Canvas and planted them together on a route. Then, when I took a night time look at them, the old toolstore was dark, but the new hut was shining like a beacon. There is something different about the new version of 3D Canvas.

Looking in the .s files produced, the line:

           named_shader ( TexDiff )

is now:

           named_shader ( Tex )

I just edited the new .s file with Wordpad, changing Tex to TexDiff and now it goes dark at night.

does that work oaky in both the editor and the 'game world' ? The only time I tried something like that on a locomotive model other textures in the 'world' got screwed up.

I agree something does seem to have changed since beta. I'm putting together a tutorial on the Scotsman coversion from the 3ds file. When I loaded the freshly exported file from 4.2, the loco was very much darker. I loaded one of the original files to check this. The old file looks fine and the lighting on the loco is a good match to the tender. The current one looks terrible by comparison. Richard, did you change anything ? or could I have changed something in the program options without realising the result ?

Mike

Hi all,

This is what you are looking for (from the help file):

Typically materials should be applied using an ambient level of 20 and a non-zero specular level. This will produce models that look appropriate in Microsoft Train Simulator. ....

....When specularity is off, materials appear much brighter. This can be useful if you want an object to look particularly bright. In general though a non-zero specular level should normally be used. ....


To correct this you can either reapply the materials or use the material editor on the media downloads page (http://www.amabilis.com/mediadownloads.htm) to adjust the specular level and/or ambient level. I don't exactly know how to work it. I think it might have comments inside the script file.

Richard, I've played around with this some more, including re-installing the beta version to make sure the effect is repeatable. I've also included a comparison image this time so you can see the extent of the effect.

The good news is that it appears to be limited to imported models from another source. Scratch built models and re-imports of exported scratch built models don't show the same effect. So I guess it's not realy an issue unless you still want to push Canvas as a conversion utility.

I tried using the script to see if I could correct it that way, but however I tried using it, I got the following message:
Run-time error "" (-2147221230) occured in script at line 92

Can you shed any light on this ? I got the same result trying to use the script on the scratch built model too.

However, I did quite a bit of work varying the Diffuse, Ambient and Specular paramameters and judging by the range of variation I managed to produce, I doubt the imported model could be corrected using the script... even if someone thought the effort worthwile. Mike

I believe that I have given you the correct answer. It looks to me like the ambient in the picture is too low. Looks like 0 to me. Easy to tell though. Just use the sample tool to determine the ambient level.

There is no point in using anything other than Ambient and Specular. No other material attributes are supported by MSTS.

Don't know much about the script except that you can select all of the faces with the same material (ctrl-shift-click? I forget) and then run the script to change the ambient.

I had missed that bit in the tutorial - oops :-[
So I retextured the model, setting ambient to 20 and specularity to 1 and, hey presto, 3D Canvas puts TexDiff into the .s file and it gets dark at night in MSTS.

Thanks.