Railworks America

The wonderful Bezier curve. I'll try to explain how I go about using this in Paint.Net. I'm sure the same applies in other editors. Stand by for posts.

See kids?

All that pointless math you learn in school allows you to repaint locomotives in Trainsim. It does pay off afterall!

Learn complicated math and be real engineers, then you can do stuff like this for fun.

Thanks Buzz

By manipulating these control points you can make the curve any shape you want. My first piece of advice is to not try to do too much with each curve. It's easier to make a couple of simple curves rather than a complex one particularly if you are trying to the the end to match up with a continuing line. I'm going to work with Paint.Net for this but all of the graphic programs have something like this. A bit of trivia about Paint.Net is you will find that the 1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15 thick lines all have sharp edges, while the 2,4,6,8,6,8,10,12 etc. all have soft edges so when making real crisp lines use the odd numbers if possible.

Most of the curve here will be on the nose but first we need to make sure that the lines on the sides are in the right place as in the SAME place on both sides so all of the stuff lines up. I lot of my early paints looked great on one side and not so matching on the other. That was from not getting the main line on the sides lined up.

We'll do the sides first.
And then move on to the nose.

Let's do the stripe on one side like this.
Then we will use the rectangular section tool, copy and paste it into a new image. Make sure and find some edges so when we paste it back in you have some reference to align it.



When we have it pasted into a new image we will need to flip it horizontal, select all, copy and then ..............

Paste it into the main image. You will note that I keep blowing this stuff up so I can see the stuff close up for accurate alignment.

Now you just move it around until you see everything is in perfect alignment.

I keep my TS running while I do the next step because several restarts are required for good alignment. If you hit the escape key you will see the restart tab. That's all you need to do when changing textures. You do not need to make a complete restart of TS. On to the nose..................

Draw your line. I swear I didn't get the marker light there on the line on purpose.
I try to have a picture open of the real loco I'm trying to paint especially during this step so I can kind of eyeball where my line is compared real thing. This is the only step that needs a little art eye.


I got close but you can see the stripe doesn't quite line up.

This is now back to these numbers. Go back in and undo until your data points show up. Left mouse button on the dot and my eye says move it down by three numbers. Remember the line is 11 pixels think here so some quick math guess is the best way to get it where you want to go. Sometimes this takes a couple three tries but the results are worth some patience.


This was pretty simple however it's all kind of like this. Any questions?

... a new appreciation for those who repaint for us users..... Thanks!

Thanks Buzz! I make curves all the time in Photoshop, but even I learned a little something from this. I didn't know brush size had to do with fuzziness. Thank you for supplying this again.

thegevo5k wrote:Thanks Buzz! I make curves all the time in Photoshop, but even I learned a little something from this. I didn't know brush size had to do with fuzziness. Thank you for supplying this again.

Check it out and see if it's is the same in PhotoShop. I'll take a look at GIMP which I have.

thegevo5k wrote:Thanks Buzz! I make curves all the time in Photoshop, but even I learned a little something from this. I didn't know brush size had to do with fuzziness. Thank you for supplying this again.

In Photoshop, the "fuzziness", feather, bleed, falloff, or whatever you want to call it this week, is not controlled by size alone. Its controlled mostly by the Hardness of the brush, and also some other attributes of the brush, which Photoshop has many. Also, once a line is made it can be rasterized by right clicking the layer, as most curved lines are created with the Bezier curve tool or Pen tool. Once it is rasterized, it then can have a blur filter applied to it to create different levels of "fuzziness". PS is very powerful in this respect, so don't let it over power your thinking, use it for what it can do. Something I do often is when I want to try something I haven't done before or haven't done in a while is to open a new image and practice the moves before I attempt it in the actual work I am trying to create. Just an FYI to help out.

Time to put this tutorial to work. Thanks Buzz! Well done...