Railworks America

So here's another little thing I've been doing that I had my heart set on since I bought the Clinchfield U36C in the Lunar Sale. It looks really good except for the texture itself, which has an odd "shininess to it (does anyone know how to fix that?) Otherwise, the last thing I have to really work on are the number textures and handrails, then it should be ready for the library.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufEZqAHgzq8

You have to edit the alpha channel of the body texture.
But please be careful - lots of people do it wrong: they set the alpha just to black and that is no shining at all.
In my opinion that just looks odd and flat. Even a dirty loco has some shining - particularily at the edges. This makes work, of course !

With DXTbmp you can extract and restore the alpha channel. Aware that you don't get the old version which has issues with compression of the dds.

Good work

I hadn't bothered getting CL U36C yet, but if you release this, I'll probably pick it up the same day...

So, as for a little update, I was able to get the proper step and handrail colored properly in a nice highlighted yellow, now for the difficult part, finding a decent number font!







Also thanks to both Kris and Buzz for the advice, now it looks much better, especially the nose.

Number font should be a bold weight of Akzidenz-Grotesk if memory serves.

Railfan722 wrote:Number font should be a bold weight of Akzidenz-Grotesk if memory serves.

Oh ok, there's one problem however, some units seem to have different fonts, most notably three different kinds.

Last one is almost certainly a Conrail patch job, and should you want to include that version you can find the Conrail font at http://www.railsimstuff.com/fonts1.html. The second style you posted appears to have only ever been applied to certain U33Cs, so for now at least I’d go for Akzidenz as that seems to cover the majority of the fleet.

With the number textures now complete, this thing is now ready for the library.



Thanks to all who put in their two cents to make this thing look the best it can be.