What next?

Ok, open to suggestions. What on the art front has you stumped? Lofts? Track? fancy train shaders? animations or just some hints tips on modelling?
Feel free to request.

regards

Derek

How to make a Platform light with emmisive glow

In the route of your ‘Provider’ make a new folder called Lights. This is where you will keep the max, igs and xml files.

In the Lights folder make a Texture folder. This is where you will keep your textures

Step 1: Gizmo creation

We need to make a Point light gizmo.

This is what we will use to determine where the light effect gets generated from. This gizmo you will be able to move around in the Asset editor.

I have made a 30cm Diameter sphere with a Tex material, the texture is a bright pale yellow, 64/64 pixels, planar mapped from the top.

This I centred at 0/0/0 in max.

Export this into a igs file.

point_light.IGS

Step 2 Make the point light xml.

Right click the point_light.IGS in the asset editor and click new shape blueprint and select point light blueprint.

Treat this just like any other scenery object, name it in the relevant fields, and give it a provider product in Primary named texture set.

In the light component section give the light a radius, I have given mine 10 (M)

Give your light a colour, I picked a warm yellow/orange.

Click Save.

Preview your shape and you will have your object in front of you. Click the Day/Night cycle button in the top left flyout menu. Your object should glow (because of the tex material)

Select your object and lift it up in the scene. You will see that it now emanates light. Experiment with the light and radius values to get the desired effect you want.

Step 3: Light Asset Creation.

There will be at least 3 objects in your scene but 5 materials:

Objects in scene:

1_0500_LampPost

1_0500_bulb_day

1_0500_bulb_night (with Forward facing glow element)

I have a 4^th object which is the glass.

1_0050_glass

Materials used:

Material 1 used on  1_0500_LampPost. It can have any material you want, I have a TrainBasicObjectDiffuse. It uses 1 256/256 texture which I boxed mapped.

Material 2 used on 1_0500_bulb_day. It can have a tex or a TrainBasicObjectDiffuse. It uses 1 32/128 texture which I planar mapped.

Material 3 used on 1_0050_glass. It has the Trainglass.fx shader explained in a previous blog post.

Material 4 used on 1_0500_bulb_night This uses the TrainEmissiveGlow.fx shader

In the sub material slot 1 I have a diffuse texture very much like bulb day texture. However I colour the bulb section yellow (this is used for the colour of the glow) Name this texture Bulb.ace

In the sub material slot 2 (making sure the same UV channel is used (1)) I have a texture that is the same size as my bulb texture but it is black and white. The white area defines the glow area, the black is the non glow area. name this texture with Bulb_EM.ace

There is a second element (but part of the same object) to 1_0500_bulb_night which is a simple plane centered through the bulb.

This plane uses material slot 5 which is AddATex. The texture is all black except for a faint glow in the centre. make sure you name this with _nm so that it does not get compressed.

This material has the View facing flag ticked under the Viewer Facing options.

Save the max file and export as an IGS, I called mine Platform_light.IGS

NB The bulbs are named so that the day bulb will show during the day and the night bulb will show at night.

Step 4: Bringing it all together.

In the asset Editor right click the platform_light.igs and select New shape blueprint, then select scenery blueprint.

Preview shape, you lamp should be as you expect it. Click on the day/night button and see your bulb glow.

Name the relevant fields, and give it a provider product in Primary named texture set. Expand Children and click insert first.

Give the Child name/provider product and select your previously made point light and click preview.

Your point light orb will be at 0/0/0 select it and move to the correct place. 

Click Save and Export.

Your light should now be viewable in game.

regards

Derek

TrainEmissiveGlow.fx

Anyone want to know about TrainEmissiveGlow.fx?

TrainLightBumpSpecMask

I have seen a few people confused on new shaders, also seen one person post up how it does not work when it is clear he has his material set up wrong.

So, here I am to teach those who want to get their learn on.

TrainLightBumpSpecMask

Use this shader on scenery objects that require normal maps, specular maps and ambient occlusion maps.

Ambient occlusion

In basic terms, when creating these assets, think of an ambient occlusion map as a shadow-map. Light areas of the map are unaffected and dark areas of the map represent the shadowy areas (under gutters or in crevices).

The Shader

Use this shader on foreground buildings. Group assets that are built specifically for use as a background object should not use this material.

Slot 1 is the diffuse texture. (1st mapping channel)

Slot 2 is the normal map (24bit) with specular map (8bit) in the alpha channel. (1st mapping channel)

Slot 3 is the Ambient Occlusion map. (second map channel (shadow/lightbake))

Generally, make slot 1 and slot 2 share the same UV channel 1, and the Ambient Occlusion map have a second UV mapping channel 2. This allows for the same flexibility as when using the old shadow-map technique on the old legacy assets.

Example

Trackside Buildings

One thing to understand about this material and Trainlightmap with Diffuse, surfaces that point upwards the shadow bake gets washed out by the sun because it is a light.

If the same shadow/light map was applied to a vertical surface in stead of a horizontal one the shadow is more pronounced. (see image 3)

Shining a torch in a shadowed baked area now gets lit up, you would not expect to see a soft shadow that was generated from a global light would you?

Example of the occlusion map.

Once you have your materials set up correctly you can see how it looks.

This is a great shader to use on stations or any other track side buildings. Buildings away from the track really do not need this material.

regards

Derek

RW Ace tool

New Version now for download on our website under art plugins:

http://www.railsimulator.com/support.php

Fixed mipping problems on terrain textures. (thank you Ben!)

cheers

Derek

WANG: PART 7

The cool thing about the terrain system is you can specify a different texture per season.
Also you don't have to make seasonal variations of each texture, you can just reference what you hvae in your list.

So, in my little test route using the same methods in earlier posts I made a Snow, Mud and meadow texture sets. I then referenced them on the season slots for mix map 1.
So, where every the grass is sprayed, in spring there will be a meadow, Autumn there will be mud and in winter there will be snow.

A good example of this in RWs is where we have a ploughed field in Spring, Cornfield in Summer, mud in Autumn with snow in winter. This really does help give your routes a different feel when driving in the different seasons. (Of course if you have a procedural grass texture you must take into account the changes and make season variations of the grass. (look out for further posts))



Spring



Summer



Autumn



Winter

Regards

Derek

WANG: PART 6

Ok, we are nearly there so hang on in there.

Load up RailWorks and Start the game.
Click on Routes, then New Routes.
Choose a template, for now just pick Default, (but the choice is yours) Click Create and give your Route a name, I called mine Bishop. Click ok and an empty route will load up with the default textures.

Close RailWorks.

Navigate to your Route folder. (something like: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\railworks\Content\Routes )

Organise the folder by date, your new route will be at the top, I rename my route folders so I know which one is which. I added BISH in the second set of digits.

Inside that folder is a RouteProperties.xml

We are going to edit this file using Notepadd++ and reference our new terrain xml.

PLease note the correct way to do this is to set up your own Route template that is discussed on the WIKI

Ok, now that I am breaking all my own rules, please Note... Take care editing any xml in Notepadd++

1. Open the RouteProperties.xml in a text editor such as Notepad++
2. Browse to the following. I have highlighted the important bits in RED:

(Click on image below for higher res image)

3. Change the parts highlighted in red to match the location (including product and provider) of the exported texturing file you have created.
4. Save the RouteProperties.xml then run RailWorks and load the route. Your new terrain textures should now be available.
5. If your new texturing file is in a provider/product which is not preloaded, you should tick it in the object set filters for that route so that it is preloaded next time.

So this is where the fun started.

With Ben's RW Ace tool it worked great but I had an issue with the last mip. I have emailed Ben to see if he can improve the situation. Will keep users posted.

So I reverted back to the trusty ToAce by Paul Guasden, only to find out the problems of using the 64 bit system. I'm sure there is a work-a-round for this but at midnight and no tech help I just left it alone.

Time to boot up the trusty xp machine to convert the tga files.

And here is the result. Not the smooth ending I wanted but got there thanks to Ben and Paul's tools.

Note that no spraying/painting was used on the below image, all of that was because of the values we put in the xml.

By going through this process I certainly have felt users pain if they do not have photoshop.

All noted for sure.

So thats the end of Wang, next up procedural grass.

regards

Derek