St. Lawrence and Atlantic GP40

[jtousign]

Hi, I followed your tuto to the letter and I still see the big numbers on both sides of the loco. Could you try it on the repaint I sent you previously? Just to see if It's me or other thing?

[ET44C4]

Did you by any chance go into the scenario editor and replace the locomotive after you followed the tutorial? It needs to be "reset" in order for the numbers to disappear in-game.

[ET44C4]

Also, I found your CabView problem. You need to go back in and edit the GP38_2_BN.bin file. Here's what you'll need to do:

Open the .bin in RWTools. Go up to the tab "Search and Replace" and click on "Find." In the top box, type this in: \BN\. In the bottom box, type this in: \CMQ\. Now hit the tab "Replace All," then save the file and close it. Now you should see your repaint while in the cab, among other things that might have still been referencing the BN locomotive instead of your repaint.

[jtousign]

Hi, YES about the incab view!! About the numbers each side of the loco I still view them even if I edit a new scenario in the editor. I can see the numbers in black from the ''numbers'' folder in the CMQ textures GP38 via RW_Tools viewer. If I do the same for the BN textures I see the numbers in white so I think I followed your tuto correctly last night. Have you checked it in my repaint?

[jtousign]

Hi ET44C4, now I understand well your tuto about the export-import alpha chanels!! And all is better now. There is just the numbering to fix and a way to create a second loco with the same repaint without a driver into the cab

[ET44C4]

I just realized I forgot an important step regarding the numbers....

In the numbers folder inside your repaint, there is this file: "GP38-2_BN_Digits.bin." Open the file with RWTools then go up to the tab "Search and Replace" and click on "Find." In the top box, type this in: \BN\. In the bottom box, type this in: \CMQ\. Now hit the tab "Replace All," then save the file and close it.

Your repaint was reading the BN textures still. Sorry I didn't include that in the tutorial, it didn't come to mind when I made it.

Here's a tutorial on how to get rid of the crew in the cab by making a "No Driver" version of your locomotive. Use this method for your repaint:

[jtousign]

Victory! The numbers are removed at last!!! I don't know how to thank you for your help! Many thanks

[jtousign]

Same thing for the no driver unit!!! You're a genius my friend!

[jtousign]

May I ask you another tip ??? It's about the way to shorten a logo without losing quality. The original logo is high resolution but when I shorten it It becomes ugly. What if I changed the 1024 x 1024 size by 2048 x 2048?

[buzz456]

May I ask you another tip ??? It's about the way to shorten a logo without losing quality. The original logo is high resolution but when I shorten it It becomes ugly. What if I changed the 1024 x 1024 size by 2048 x 2048?

What do you mean by shorten it?

[jtousign]

Sorry for my English Buzz, maybe the word minify shoud be more accurate??? For instance you take a logo which is 6 inches by 6 inches and you have to minify it to 1 inche by 1 inche. Then the resolution becomes bad. Is there a way to keep the same resolution as the initial size of 6'' x 6''?

[jtousign]

I use Paint shop pro 20, Paint.net and Gimp 2.10 for editing by the way

[ET44C4]

Glad I was able to help you out, jtousign.

As for the decal, I have the same problem. If you shrink it down, I think you're going to loose quality no mater what you try and do. That's just from what I have experienced, anyhow.

[buzz456]

Someone else may be able to explain this better than I can but here goes. You want to start out with the largest image you can so that it still has good pixel quality when you shrink it. Take a image that is 6x6 and change the size to 12x12. You will see that the edges particularly of curves become rough. If you smooth those edges out when you shrink it the image stays of better quality. I don't know if I am explaining this very clearly so if someone can help feel free to jump in here.

[Chacal]

This is the oldest problem in computer graphics.
Vector graphics can be resized (scaled up or scaled down) without quality loss. It is only when you convert them to bitmap (rasterize them) that a loss occurs.

The best way to work with logos is to use vector graphics. Problem is, real companies have vector-based versions of their logos, but we rarely have access to these. Still, if you have a vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator, you can draw the logo yourself, or you can start with a high-quality bitmap picture and convert it to vector, then scale it down, then rasterize it. That's a lot of work. I would do it for a new model that I spent hundreds of hours on, but not for a repaint.

So the next best way, as Buzz said, is to start with the highest-quality bitmap you can find, and resize it only once. You will lose quality for anything but vertical or horizontal lines. Some graphic apps such as Irfanview let you fiddle with scaling algorithms and parameters, you can try these for better results.

Why it does this:

When scaling down, you lower the number of pixels available for displaying the dots in your image. It's like building a Lego model with bigger bricks. So you lose some information. You can't go back to the original quality.

When scaling up, you raise the number of pixels available, so you can display more information. So in theory you can have more dots. But your graphic app doesn't know what you want to do with those pixels, so it just displays each dots using more pixels. It's like building each of a Lego model's big bricks into smaller bricks. You could manually edit the resized image, but that's as much work as drawing the logo from scratch, and it's unlikely to give good results.

Some (most) graphic apps try to reduce this effect with anti-aliasing: they change the color of the new pixels so that the overall image looks smoother. But this doesn't work with logos on repaints: it makes them noticeably blurred.