Tutorial 2: More Basic Modelling and Texture Mapping part 4

 

We're ready to export the Dash9! As in Tutorial # 1, go to File on the menu bar, then select export...

Find your mydash directory, then save the file as dash92000.3ds and click on Save.

A pop-up will ask if you want to replace it, click on Yes. Another pop-up will show asking if you want to preserve MAX's texture coordinates, click on OK.

Go ahead and Save a .MAX version of your file. Go to File on the menubar and select Save. You can quit out of 3DSMAX now.

We have a new texture - testtex.tga. We need to convert this to an .ACE file. Let's update our convertmydash.bat file to convert the texture also. As in Tutorial #1, go to your mydash directory and right click on the convertmydash.bat - select Edit from the pop-up dialog box.

Add this line to the end:

makeace testtex.tga testtex.ace

Save this file, then close Notepad. Now double click on convertmydash.bat

Just like in Tutorial #1, copy the dash9.s and the testtex.ace files into the Dash9 directory in MSTS. Review tutorial #1 if you forgot where that is.

Go ahead and run MSTS - choose the Dash9 and hit key 2 to see an outside view. Take a look at the top texture…..Yikes!! what happened to the color? Look at all of the banding….

Quit out of MSTS - Let's make a change….go and right click on convertmydash.bat, select Edit. Now add -trans to the last line like this:

makeace testtex.tga testtex.ace -trans

Save the file and double click on it. Copy the testtex.ace file to the Dash9 directory and run MSTS. Look at the texture now…much better, not as much banding on the top texture.

So what happened here? Well, it turns out that there are 3 different quality levels associated with what kind of bitmap format that you convert into an .ACE file. The best quality is with a 24 bit .BMP file. You'll have all 24-bits (16.7 million colors ) - no banding or weird graphic artifacts.

The average quality is with a 32 bit .TGA converted with the -trans option. The -trans option tells the convertor that this texture has an alpha but it is to treat it as a 1 bit alpha - only black and white (fully opaque or fully see-through). In the game development community, this is called "punch through". Using this option, you are limited to only 32768 colors.

The lowest quality is with a 32 bit .TGA without the -trans option. This tells the convertor that the texture's alpha is a full 8 bit alpha. That's how you get semi-transparency - tinted windows. This is neat, but it comes at a price - you only get 4096 colors! That's a big difference from the 16.7 million colors in the highest quality. It is the thing that separates this

scale the texture verti

 

From this ces. In the Edit UVWs wi

 

Keep this in mind if you want quality textures that stand out from anyone else - including MSTS… In a future tutorial, I'll show you a simple trick to allow you to have full 24-bit textures with semi-transparency!

One more thing before we end this tutorial. Notice how you can see through the window in our object, but it looks like the other side disappears - we don't see the backside of the window. In our next tutorial, I'll show you how to fix this!

Keep looking out for our next tutorial. It will be the last of the beginner tutorials. The tutorial will concentrate on editing the .eng file, modeling and texturing a brand new simple loco that can be seen, driven, and placed in a consist, and learning how to Alias cab and sound files so you don't have to have extra copies of files to clog up your harddrive.

After that tutorial, we'll start the intermediate tutorials that will build on the beginner tutorials. We'll be building a diesel locomotive from scratch and to prototypical spec. After the intermediate tutorials, we'll do the advanced tutorials - we'll build steam engines from scratch and pretty much learn everything - from modeling and texturing, to .eng tuning, to adding and editing new sound effects, to building cabs and passenger interior views.

By time you are done with this series - you could be on your way to being a master engine modeler for MSTS as well as other train sim programs.

 

 

Go to page 6