Railworks America

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We're going to be building a 12 story Chicago style office building in 3D Crafter Pro.

First though you need to know how to make your own textures with either Paint, or I would advise Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

Also you need to own 3D Crafter Pro.

I'll show you the basic steps to building a building and then later get it into the sim.

First we need to drag a cube into the scene from the Primitives Panel.


Next, we need to size it up times 7 or 8 for each floor that we plan to make. Most building floors would be either 7 or 8 feet so you need to set Crafter to feet in the tools panel.
8 times 12 = 96 feet so the building will be 96 feet high, 60 feet wide and 90 feet long.

Now our building is buried halfway under the ground so we need to click on it with the select tool and drag it upwards until it's bottom is placed on the grid.

Next, we're using a 3 floor high texture so we're going to divide the edges into four sections. First right click on the model and select Draw As Solid Outline. This will be so we can see what we're about to do.

Next we select the edges around the model as follows.


Now we right click on one of the edges while holding down Shift and select Divide. If you did it right the one edge will light up blue while the rest stays yellow. Select 4 Edges from the menu and that will cut our edges into 4 sections, next we need to join the sections together.

Press both Shift and 1 to select two of our new points that we just divided as follows.

Now while keeping the points selected by keeping Shift pressed we're going to open up the Shape Operation Panel. Now we need to select the tool Create Edge From Points. This will join our edges into one face.

Now do the same thing and join the rest of your edges into new faces as follows.

Now our vertical lines are finished the next thing we need are our horizontal lines to prepare the faces for the texture.


Now select all of the horizontal lines on the front and the back. On the front and back we want 4 edges and on the sizes we want 6.
Now do the same as before and divide the edges into 4 sections as follows.

Now that we've divided the front and back edges we're going to start joining the faces together with Create Edge From Selection.

Now we'll start joining together the rest of the front and back faces as follows.

I know it doesn't look like much yet, but our building is shaping out nicely.


Now we first need to divide our side horizontal edges by 2.

Now we need to join together the new divided edges with a new downward edge separating the two halves.

Now we divide the rest of the horizontal edges by 3 edges as follows.



Now join the rest of your edges together into new faces and the next thing to do will be to place the wall texture.
Now if you did it right the model should look like this.

First you need to make your texture and save it as either 512 x 256 or 1024 x 1024 BMP


Open up your Paint tab to the side as follows.

Also, make sure you click on your color box "to the left of the screen where it shows your selection, mine is custom," and set it to full white, here it's showing up a little pinkish, but it should be white to be correct. As well, for best results in the sim you'll set your diffuse and ambient to 1, usually I might first set it to Diffuse =25 and Ambient= 1 to first check to see how the texture will look. Then I retexture it in Diffuse= 1 and Ambient= 1, that will be so your building will show up more realistic in the sim and won't appear to be too bright if TSX is selected.


As well, Specular will be set to 0 and Translucent will be set to 0.

By now you should have either made or selected your texture. However, this is the tool for importing a texture if you haven't done so already.


This menu allows you to find and import your texture. Find it and press Open.



I've already selected my texture so I'm going to first select the Select tool to select a face from the side menu.


Now while holding down Shift we're going to find the UV-Map tool from the Shape Operation Panel.

Now click on the UV-Map Selection tool and it will open up a menu.
You might have to resize the tool. When you're ready select OK from down below.

This UV-Maps the texture onto the face.

Of course, there's a much easier way for getting the texture onto the object if it's a simple item such as a building. The tool that does the job a ton easier and much quicker is the Paint Brush tool.
We're going to select the paint brush tool from the side menu.


Next using the Paint Brush tool highlight another face. This will transfer the texture onto the face.



Now do the same for the top and bottom. Once you're finished it should look like this.