Railworks America - Repainting locos

Repainting locos

Part 1: editing blueprints

First you must decide on a locomotive to re paint.

Next go online or on location to find decent prototype pictures of all sides. Make a folder with your prototype pictures so you can scroll through them in a slideshow program when needed (such as "Windows Live photo gallery").

In Windows Explorer, go to your Railworks folder (usually Program Files (x86) \ Steam \ Steam Apps \ Common \ railworks) and make a
shortcut of the "serz" file to your desktop.

Go to your Railworks\Assets folder (Program Files (x86) \ Steam \ Steam Apps \ Common \ railworks \ Assets).

Next you must determine which developer made the locomotive and from there it's just a matter of finding the correct locomotive folder in the list.

When you find the locomotive you want to repaint, simply copy and paste the folder and rename it to whatever you want (no "&" signs or special characters).

After that go inside the folder youve just copied and renamed and find the "Engine" folder.

In the "Engine" folder you will find a ".bin" file (that's what we call a blueprint), drag this in to the "serz" shortcut youv'e made on your desktop, this should make an ".XML" file somewhere
in the "Engine" folder.

Note: you can also do this more easily by using Mike Simpson's RW-Tools utility. Assign RW-Tools as the default program for opening .bin files, then you just have to double-click a .bin file and directly edit the xml in RW-Tools, no need to use serz.exe.

Open this new".XML" file with "Notepad" (or any better text editor such as Notepad++) and edit everything that had the old folder name to say what the new folder name is, do this by opening the "Edit" menu and selecting replace, than type in the new and old values such as:

Find what: \Old folder name\

Replace with: \New folder name\

and click "Replace All".

Be sure to include the back-slashes, if not you may overwrite other things that will mess things up later in the process.

Again DON'T use special symbols such as the "&" sign and these things "* ^ % $ # @ !"

After you've done this, do the same with the "<Name d:type="cDeltaString">Old name</Name>"

And "<English d:type="cDeltaString">Old name</English>"

with the new names of your choice (this is what will show up on the list in Railworks editor).

After this is done, save and (Note: skip the following if you used RW-Tools) drag the newly saved ".XML" file in to the serz shortcut on your desktop. This should overwrite the old ".BIN" file with a new one. If it shows an "expected same name error" (or something similar to that reading), then you probably have an unknown symbol ("* ^ % $ # @ ! &") and you should delete the new folder and start over (this is why you must NOT use these symbols).

If you've completed that successfully you can close all windows on your screen and proceed to part 2.

Part 2: editing textures

Open your "RW reskin tools" folder, run RSBinTool and find your new loco folder.

Once you've found it go to the "Engine" folder and find a folder named "Textures", this is where your TGPCDX files are (texture files).

Click on each file to discover wich part of the locomotive this covers (they use usually pretty self-explanatory names and it is usually obvious where the textures are located on the locomotive).

Once you have found the right one, click "DDSTool" and click "Export DDS data" and direct it to your desktop for easy access.

MINIMISE the RSBinTool window, right-click your new DDS file and go to "open with" and select DXTBmp, or do this through the properties option on the
right click menu.

Once you have this opened in DXTBmp you should than send the main texture to Paint.NET (you may have to go to the "Prefs" tab and select "select editor").

From here you have two options, you can edit the texture you see now or you can open the alpha in Paint.NET and copy and paste the alpha over the existing texture for a better looking repaint (unless you want to draw over the existing texture with patches and so on).

After you have done this you need to create a new layer, this can be done in the "Layers" tab under "Add new layer".

Then you must edit the transparency, go to the "layers" tab again and open "Layer Properties".

Here you need to slide the Opacity down to about 150 (this can be edited again later if needed).

After that you can add in paint and lettering and so on.

When you are done, go to the image tab and Flatten and then go to File and save.

You can now MINIMISE Paint.NET and go back to DXTBmp (should still be open) and go to the "Image" menu and select "Reload after edit".

You can then send the texture to Gimp for weathering the same way you sent the texture to Paint.NET.

Weathering is done with very low opacity, rate and pressure on the airbrush mode (I'm assuming you know what to do from here for weathering). Paint just
like you would weather a model train.

Feel free to mess around with the settings a bit to see what kind of results you get.

After you are finished weathering, save the file (flatten if you made new layers) and reload in DTXBmp again.

If everything looks good then save it (overwriting your old DDS texture on your desktop) and exit DXTBmp.

After that you need to import the new texture the same way you exported the old one in RSBinTool (overwrite the old one in RSBintool) and save.

Repeat for each texture until you are done, then try your new locomotive repaint out in the sim!

Don't be disappointed if something didn't line up as expected, nothing's perfect the first time and there is a lot of trial and error involved with repainting.

Note, you can use this same process for just about any object in the sim with the exception of a few different naming tags and so on (all pretty self-explanatory stuff).

Also, if you are going to release your repaints and you are using a payware file you must not include the object's main GEOPCDX file in the final RWP! (if you do then you are breaking copyright and can be sued by RSC or the rightfull owner, trust me, it's happened before and with a pretty hefty lawsuit).

This is why the end user must put the matching GEOPCDX file in place when installing.

Hope this helped you.