Railworks America

Earlier I made mdurdan a tutorial on how to alpha out cab numbers on locomotives using GIMP and I decided to put it up here in case anyone else finds it useful. I'm going to assume you already know how to export textures as DDS files and what bin files need to be edited.

This tutorial will show you how make the cab numbers completely transparent. Your numberboards will still work fine however. This is useful if the locomotive you're repainting has the cab numbers in the wrong place and you have to paint your road numbers on. i.e. my Boston and Maine GP9 repaint:



Here are the tools you'll need:

GIMP
GIMP DDS Plugin

Now first you need to get the number textures exported. You'll find them in the textures folder:



Although they won't always be named as such, it will likely be something similar.

Open up your number texture in GIMP. You'll see that it's divided in two (or in some cases three) pieces:



Please note that your cab number will not always be on the left side. It all depends on how the locomotive was set up. But it shouldn't be too hard to figure it out.

Next, use the Rectangular Select Tool to select the cab number:



Up in the toolbar, got to Layer-->Transparency-->Threshold Alpha:



This will open a new window with a slider labeled Threshold. Move the slider all the way to the right so the value is 255:



And like magic, the cab number has vanished:



Finally, when you save it, make sure to use DXT3 compression and select Generate Mipmaps:



Now just repeat the process on all the other numbers and import them back in over the old textures.

And that's it. Now your cab numbers will be completely transparent but the numberboards will still work fine.

This should probably be stickied, so I did.

Thanks Hawk.

Might I suggest that you also sticky stycx's tutorials. They're very helpful.

I don't know why I didn't do that to begin with. I guess I'm slipping.

Good morning

I tried to do this but I can not seem to get it to work properly. I can get the numbers to vanish in the GIMP program and then re save as a DDS. When I reload into RW Tools the the number is back. If I then reverrse the number back into temp DDS and open in GIMP it is still gone in GIMP. When I load the engine into the sim the numbers are present.

Any thought/

Thanks in adavnce for the help.

Perhaps it's a problem with RW_Tools?

I'm not really sure because I use RSBinTool to import and export all of my textures. But it is perfectly normal that the number will still be present when you import the texture back in.

The only suggestions I can think of are make sure you've saved the changes to the texture and cleared your blueprint cache before starting RW. If you don't clear the cache, new changes you've made to textures will not show up.

Also, make sure that the bin file for the number textures is pointing at the numbers in your repaint folder. If it's still pointing at the numbers in a different locomotive's folder, it won't be using your new textures.

Like I said at the beginning of this tutorial, I'm assuming you know what bin files need to be edited but if you don't, I can add that part to the tutorial as well.

Not sure if you ran into the other thread where we spoke about using RW_Tools for textures:
viewtopic.php?f=29&t=2926

Also see if this thread helps any:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2017

And lastly, MadMike and I just ran into something with Gimp and the alpha layer where it was not behaving again. I talk about it here:
http://thegradecrossing.blogspot.com/20 ... ayers.html
If this is the same problem you are seeing I am afraid that I don't have a solution for you because you need to cover the alpha over half the image and not the whole image (which I did for Mike).

Thanks for the info guys. I will play around with it. If it has been done before it can be done again, I think.

BTW, if you can script:

Code: Select all

Call("SetText", "", 0 )


That somewhere in the script - in Update() probably *but only run once* should also work. The last number is the texture set, iirc it's 1 for the secondary set.

Lastly you can point all the entries in a texture set to the same texture, so you only need to export one.

I'll copy this to the tutorials section on the web site.