Newbi needs help

[sleepyto]

I am trying to get into texturing. Is there a good tutorial on this or even a good site to go to. What I am mainly interesred in is creating some terrain textures since we (Or at least I am) limited on what we can use in routes. For instance there are no decent ground textures to select from. I noticed that the textures in RW have about 6 files for each texture. A good place to get started is what I am looking for. I have photos of what I want, now I just need to know what to do with them

[Bananarama]

Ground texturing is one of the hardest projects to master in RW. About the best advice I can provide is to read through the RS developer docs or the RW developer Wiki on terrain textures.

[rgarber]

Marc's right, it isn't easy. It is doable but getting from the default to adding your own ground textures takes a bit of doing. But know this, most of the effort it takes isn't what you do in the sim, it's what you do in your graphics program. It's a lot of little steps to get to finally put them into the sim. It's complicated by one thing too. And correct me if I'm wrong. What I found out and mind you I do distribute routes so I have to be careful when adding things to my routes I don't screw up y'alls, that I just couldn't add a texture or two to compliment the default. The problem came in when I was trying to add a texture of my own, the blueprint wanted to know where it is. Well, it's in my folder of course. But the default blueprint is looking for the blueprint in the default specified places so how could I make it to see my own? I came to the conclusion I had to make up a whole new terrain texture set that I can call my own. So now the bluepint points to me. For what I do as payware that only makes sense anyway.

I'll give you a little summary info to get you started. You basically have two different kinds of terrain texture. The first is your standard repeatable tile texture. It's gotta be 256x256. You want to get it as patternless as possible because if the slightest pattern is detectable you'll see it fill up you landscape. I've had decent success with these. If you stick with this approach your life will be made easier. So to do this make your 256x256 texture, create an alpha for it, save as tga. Copy it to your Source developer folder and then Toace.exe it to an ace. Then, open up the Textures blueprint and add it to the end of the list mixture texture list. You don't want to add it to the top of the list or that will screw up your indexing. The indexing is the list at the bottom of the Textures blueprint that points to what terrain textures will be used in certain elevations. The top of the mixture text list is 1 and increments as you go down the list for each texture. Save and export and you're on your way. Bear in mind that if you use seasonal textures you'll need to include those as part of your mixture terrain listing.

This is just a very brief hardly adequate summary of what you need to do. Don't even think by reading the above you are any closer to your goal. You need to understand blueprints, and your own graphics program to get a good grasp of this. Okay, we covered the basic tiling set, now the advanced stuff.


The advanced stuff is called Wang. Instead of 1 texture you use 8. See pages 6-8 in the Terrain Texturing folder for what a Wang is and how to do it. There are two basic things to understanding Wang. First, on page 8 is the diagram showing how the texture should be cut up for ABCD. The second is understanding placement of the cut-outs on page 6. The four borders are colorized as blue, green, red and yellow. Literally you place the cutouts into your texture based on the border colors based on the 8 tile layout. It’s not hard to do and once you do it, you’re okay. The thing is it takes a bit more time because you’re working with 8 textures instead of one.

The Wang texture is best used for larger areas where you can keep any pattern minimized. So green grass is a great example. Woodsy areas or meadows. These are great candidates for Wang. Like the individual textures you want to create an alpha. Wangs are named slightly different as each texture is assigned a letter A-H. Most of this is explained adequately in the manual but it does take some doing to figure how to make these look great in your scenery and getting a grasp of the concept takes some doing.

So it’s the totality and getting the results you want in terrain textures that makes terrain texture more difficult. Once you get going you’ll move smoothly, but slowly. I’ve spent whole mornings on a single wang rock texture that ultimately I threw out as no good. So great patience is needed. Like anything else it takes some experimenting to get comfortable with the process.

[sleepyto]

Thanks for the info. Does look like a long process, however patience and time are something I have a lot of. I wanted some just plan old dirt and clay textures. Most of the yards in East Texas have clay and dirt in them.

Thanks Again for the info.
John

[rgarber]

Here's a picture with my own terrain texture creations.

terraintex16.jpg

For me, one of the biggest reasons for creating my own terrain textures is to have a better control over where the terrain flora appears.

Rich

[rgarber]

And you can get some pretty good detail as well. One of the things to learn is how tight you need the basic texture to be even before importing into the sim so the detail of the texture is in proportion to the things within the sim itself.

terraintex15.jpg

These pictures are from a mockup scene I made temporarily for my Fort Kent route. The textures themselves are a mix of wang and standard terrtain textures. If you can get the standard terrain textures to be patternless you'll be pleased that you can't tell the difference between them and the more complex wang textures.

Rich

[sleepyto]

Looks like the learning curve on this is going to be pretty big. Oh well up the hill three bags full.

[rgarber]

You missed what I said earlier. Getting the texture in RS/RW isn't that bad. It's the work outside of RS/RW is where you will have the most trouble. You got to find a textures that look good mapped all over the countryside. We didn't have to do that for MSTS. We took one texture mostly and carpeted everything with it. In RS/RW you're mixing and matching inside the program and then keeping things in proportion we didn't even do in MSTS. You'll see more of your graphics program and File Explorer than you will of RS/RW. It's not that bad though. I'll give you a hint though. Take the dirt texture above. When I first chose it from my library of pictures it had a lot of extraneous detail that if tiled over a landscape would look very paternesque. So in the graphics program I took pieces from different part of the textures to get rid of the extraneous detail. The clone brush is fantastic for doing that but there are other ways too. Whatever detail you leave in the texture keep it simple and unpronounced.

Rich

[sleepyto]

As I am new to working in the graphics program I know it will be a lot of trial and error. But I have got to learn so I am going to give it a try. Got to start somewhere. Thanks for all the info.

[spec5sx]

I have created custom textures for my Cascades Sub route and I have some experience in this area. We had a discussion about this over at "The Other Forum" a while back. http://forums.flightsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?t=277089&page=7. Pages 6 and 7.

A Free utility for making wang tiles can be found here:http://robburke.net/mle/wang/WangTilerAndTextureTransfer.zip. It was a BIG help in creating custom textures for my route. It's not a complicated program to use but, be sure to read the documentation.

A few things to remember:
Repeating and Non-Repeating:
Repeating textures are good for painting texture such as farm crops or furrows. Non-repeating textures (wang tiles) are good for things like grass, rock, stone, pebbles, leaf litter, mud, soil, anywhere where a repeating texture would look strange.

Color:
Just like RS, RW oversaturates the color of your textures.You should desaturate the colors in your texture files by at least 20 percent before coverting them to .ace.
The image below shows the same cracked earth texture but the one on the right was desaturated before importing into the game.



Scale:
As Mark Nelson pointed out to me, your textures will appear larger in game then they do in your graphics editor due to the large patch size. If you use the utility above, start with a high resolution image. Make your texture files large and resize them down to 256X256. This will help scale them down. Especially if your working with photographs of pebbles,gravel or stone. Like the image below. The cracked earth texture looks dispraportionatley large in relation to the person standing on it.



Uniformity: Some images do not make good ground textures. Like the texture below:


The obvious seams show you that this was not a good source image to take a texture from. Too many large, irregular patterns and high contrasting colors.
However, the texture below turned out pretty good:


Good uniform pattern distribution in source image, colors that contrast well.

There is a lot of trail and error involved in making terrain textures. My advice is to experiment in a test route. Create a few custom textures and try them out. get the feel for making them. If you don't like what you see you can always start over. I'm no expert but I figured I would pass on my experiences in this area. I hope this helps you out.

Regards
John

[rgarber]

"Repeating textures are good for painting texture such as farm crops or furrows. Non-repeating textures (wang tiles) are good for things like grass, rock, stone, pebbles, leaf litter, mud, soil, anywhere where a repeating texture would look strange."

That's a good way to put that. If I tried, it would have taken me a novel to say just that.

Good explanation John, you're a natural at it. I find RS/RW difficult to explain.

Rich

[sleepyto]

Thanks all for the info. I will be giving all the suggestions a try.

[norman]

Thanks for the info. Does look like a long process, however patience and time are something I have a lot of. I wanted some just plan old dirt and clay textures. Most of the yards in East Texas have clay and dirt in them.

Thanks Again for the info.
John

Are you planning a route in East Texas? This I gotta see. We have a wonderful assortment of RR's in Texas, and more track than any other state. Yet there's a paucity of Texas routes in MSTS.

[sleepyto]

Yes I am building a route based in East Texas. I have all track laid for the Longview Yard south to the Eastman Kodak plant and it's surrounding yards. I hope to eventually have the route go south to Kilgore then Tyler and on south, and also west to Dallas.

Right now the terrain textures are not to my liking, so I am trying to learn the art of terrain texturing.

Some shots of the network

Longview Yard

Longview Yard.jpg

Eastman Plant

Eastman Plant area.jpg

Full Network

Full Network.jpg

The last shot is just a area I am testing out some of my options, just experimenting

Expermintating area.jpg

Verey Very rough at moment. Long long way to go.

[norman]

Yes I am building a route based in East Texas. I have all track laid for the Longview Yard south to the Eastman Kodak plant and it's surrounding yards. I hope to eventually have the route go south to Kilgore then Tyler and on south, and also west to Dallas.

Right now the terrain textures are not to my liking, so I am trying to learn the art of terrain texturing.

Some shots of the network



Verey Very rough at moment. Long long way to go.

Now I'm drooling! I lived and worked in the Tyler area for several years. I used to chase trains with a friend up to Longview and down to Palestine/Rusk. Sometimes over to Hearne.