Railworks America

I've been repainting the Brindley GP15 and am not at all pleased with the logo patch system. It distorts a circle and fuzzes the edges terribly. I've tried to make the logo transparent as I did on the GP7, but it just prints a black square. I haven't been able to figure out what he's done. It's not used for the Auto-numbering, so would someone here please take a look and see if you can make the Logo clear or gone? If that can be done, I'll just paint right on the cab and get nicer results.

I've worked through some of the transparency issues and will be glad to take a look.

This is a tutorial Michael Stephan sent me regarding editing his roadname textures. It seems to me that the concept will also work to edit the GP15 logo texture. The issue with the Mopac logo looks like it was not created from a sharp original image.

If you have DXT2BMP and RW_Tools installed you already got all you need to edit a texture and its alpha. First, follow the standard procedure to convert the TgPcDx to dds with RW_Tools. Then open the exported dds (see RW_Tools's temp folder) in DXT2BMP.

In the case of the name (or any autonumber) textures, first, go to the IMAGE menu and "send to editor" the main image. To make you life easier, you should choose your preferred paint tool first in the PREFS menu of DXT2BMP (it defaults to MSPaint). When your image has loaded in the paint program, flood-fill all of it with the desired color of your name/number font. Use a light grey if you want it to appear white in the sim. Then save the image file (overwrite yes). Return to DXT2BMP and click on "Refresh after Edit" in the IMAGE menu.

Now repeat the same for the alpha channel (ALPHA menu --> "send to editor"). Only this time, flood fill the whole image with 100% black (0,0,0 color) and then type on it in 100% white (255,255,255). Save the file when you're done, return to DXT2BMP and run "refresh alpha" in the ALPHA menu.

Now save the DDS file in DXT2BMP, return to RW_Tools, and convert the whole thing back to its original TgPcDx. If you didn't exit RW_Tools while you were editing the image, it will find the correct files automatically after you click on convert to tgpcdx.

Hope this helps.
Harry

Thanks Harry... here's what I came up with for the texture:


And here's the not so very good result:


It seems the logo doesn't use the alpha channel at all...

I can back that up for you Mike. I tried to play with the alpha back when we worked on the Y688.

I was mainly trying to show you how to make the heralds invisible. Just don't put anything on the black alpha texture and put your herald directly on the locomotive.

harryadkins wrote:I was mainly trying to show you how to make the heralds invisible. Just don't put anything on the black alpha texture and put your herald directly on the locomotive.

I understand... however, since the thing doesn't use any alpha channel, it just turns black and not transparent.

By the way, being a real fan of brute force, I tried to change to position matrix to force the logo 20 feet underground. Of course, my luck being as it is, the matrix can be entirely deleted from the code (!) and it still draws right there.

The shader for the logo is TrainSpecEnvMask, which does not use alpha blending; sorry :( you'll just have to make the texture higher resolution if you want to stop it blurring. Find a 512x512 texture ( excessive but a good test ), rename it to gp15_logo and insert your paint into it in RSBintool, that's the quickest way.

Kali wrote:The shader for the logo is TrainSpecEnvMask, which does not use alpha blending; sorry :( you'll just have to make the texture higher resolution if you want to stop it blurring. Find a 512x512 texture ( excessive but a good test ), rename it to gp15_logo and insert your paint into it in RSBintool, that's the quickest way.

Is it possible to change the shader to a more friendly version? I by no means am above rewriting the .Geo files to beat this.

Later: Your suggestion works very well, the logo is sharp and clear, and after a bit of fussing lines up fine. It's too bad the author used such an unconventional method.

You can change just about anything - if it was a wagon. Can't edit engine geos, I'm afraid.