Repainting Tutorial Lesson #1

[PapaXpress]

Just a suggestion Marleyman, instead of flattening the layers save it out as TGA and then convert the TGA to DDS. The last thing you want to worry about is accidentally destroying all your layers when you flatten them.

There is one other way which I think Kali suggested in another thread which is to Select All > Copy Merged > Paste Into, a new layer. You would want to do this anyway if you added a High Pass Filter layer to your repaint as described here.

[Kali]

Sometimes you need to merge all, sometimes you don't - if you're using PS it depends on what masks you've used, I think, I've not quite worked it out yet. I made a PS macro for it ;flatten image, save, undo. That way I won't forget and accidentally save the merged version.

Making a new merged layer is safer by far though.

[Turbine777]

Like the original poster says, there are several ways to do paints and since user contributions are ok, here's mine. Keep in mind, I am painting a 747 in this tutorial but that doesn't matter. I wrote this tutorial for the absolute beginner to the more advance ranks, so if you never touched Photoshop you can follow along fine (tested and approved ;)
*The forum that is posted in had\has a 1 hour edit rule, which meant I needed to do it all prior to posting. Lucky for me I spent a couple months proof reading it so no corrections were ever needed, but it is using CS3 and I later updated that tutorial on my own forum with some CS4 notes. In either case though, it's very much the same with minor differences.

I have a new video series but it's a couple weeks from complete. It too focuses on working with layers and doesn't matter the subject being painted the steps are still the same.


I do have a question of my own though. I'm no stranger to making my own paint kit, but I can't seem to find the directories where they are to start with. I want to make my brother a very weathered EMD AEM-7 (dirt, rust, paint peeling, etc). I looked for dds files and bump maps, but only found a couple misc ones which was odd. Unless of course another formats being used but even then I think I've covered the entire folder structure. Can someone point me to the right place please? Thanks!
~Dan

[Kali]

The AEM7 default textures would be here: Assets\RSC\NorthEastCorridor\RailVehicles\Electric\AEM7\Default\Engine\Textures\

You will need to convert the TgPcDx files to dds ( or technically extract the dds files ) before you can edit, there's no TgPcDx editor. I'd recommend RSBinTool to do that. To make a rusty one you won't have to duplicate the entire folder structure, just the Engine folder ( and depending on how brave you are to go poking around the 3d file, maybe not all the textures either - it depends if there's any materials with hardcoded paths ).

[Turbine777]

The AEM7 default textures would be here: Assets\RSC\NorthEastCorridor\RailVehicles\Electric\AEM7\Default\Engine\Textures\

You will need to convert the TgPcDx files to dds ( or technically extract the dds files ) before you can edit, there's no TgPcDx editor. I'd recommend RSBinTool to do that. To make a rusty one you won't have to duplicate the entire folder structure, just the Engine folder ( and depending on how brave you are to go poking around the 3d file, maybe not all the textures either - it depends if there's any materials with hardcoded paths ).

Thanks Kali,
I think I may be missing another tutorial somewhere or something. This one assumes you already know the folder structure and other pretty important things like the tool (thank you for that). Is there a start up guide somewhere? Or pdf? I'm a little lost and you may think I understand things like "you won't have to duplicate the entire folder structure, just the Engine folder", but I really had no clue that I would have had to duplicate anything anyway. So in other words, this is very different then what I'm use to. I'm use to making a folder with my edited repaint then editing a config file to include my paint in the list of selectable liveries (also a texture.cfg if fallback is needed). I looked around this forum but have yet to see a word about it. You mentioned extracting the dds files, but what about after the paint? Is my only option then to overwrite existing tgpcdx files?

I finally found RSBinTool and checked that out. I went through the files in the texture folder you mentioned (thanks again) and it only has the one livery (paint). From what I can see, the only files I would edit would be:

• Body_Diffuse_1.TgPcDx
• Body_Diffuse_2.TgPcDx
• Roof_Diffuse_1.TgPcDx
• Roof_Diffuse_2.TgPcDx

Does that sound about right?

Also I don't see any bump maps, or what I think you mentioned once as being "Ambient Occlusion maps"? Or was that just for color and shading? I was hoping they had some bump map but would need to know the naming conventions used to attempt that (since I'm sure the code calls for it by name). Not a big deal if they don't.

Thanks for your help and quick reply, I appreciate that.
~Dan

[Kali]

Bump maps are technically Normal maps - I'm not at the right PC to check if the AEM7 has any or what they're called ( so I can't check if those are the right textures for the body either ). Best way is to simply open them in RSBinTool & see what each texture looks like. RW doesn't use seperate Ambient Occlusion maps most of the time - there is a building shader that uses them - so they're just shading layers in your paint package.

I think RWTools has a tutorial on how to set up a repaint folder. In a nutshell though each repaint has it's own folder with a new blueprint in it ( it can be a copy of the default blueprint with the paths edited ), a copy of the shape, and a copy of the texture folder with your edited textures in there. If you have access to the GP9 pack then that's set up reasonably neatly for repaints, if you want to check what each livery folder contains. The default ES44 is probably worth studying also - the default SD40 and F7 are a bit confusing because they've had new models added, and there's been an attempt at back-compatibility with the old ones.

[Turbine777]

Haha, yeah I know bump maps are technically normals and I already said that I did open them in RSBinTool to look through the abcxyz files. I just wanted to be sure there wasn't something I was missing but it won't be hard to figure them out once I know how to see what I paint in the sim. That parts sort of a little important. The folder structure makes more sense now and I'm just use to several other programs and graphics engines. I was mainly looking for where I could find out the basics since I know you weren't born with knowing and must have read something somewhere, and the original poster seems to pass it off like everyone knows how it's done which kind of makes me think then there must be a "Tutorial #0" somewhere if this is #1. I googled rwtools and came up dry as well. I'm sort of needing to know in detail so in a nutshell is nice for talk over coffee but sort of leaves me nowhere if you know what I mean. I'll wait for input from someone else and hopefully someone will link something useful as a starting point.
Thanks again
~Dan

Edit: Found it. There's a pdf in case anyone else needs to know here, at RSTools.info. There's a pdf to the left under tutorials. Tutorial is called "Reskinning & Packaging default rolling-stock".

[Kali]

Well, I'm sure there actually is a step by step tutorial somewhere but I've no idea where - maybe at the uktrainsim forums although I can't think where there either. I would advise taking the RWTools tutorial as informational, RWTools itself sometimes doesn't clone folders properly. What prevents writing a proper tutorial for this is the myriad of ways rollingstock can be set up - in the end we've all basically had to learn what files do what, what files aren't essential and what parts of files we need to edit rather than rely on a fixed procedure.

[Turbine777]

Sorry Kali, not looking to argue the point here, but you just explained nothing that says a procedure could not be written, you just said it would be difficult. I guess I just can't believe you figured it out on your own, or anyone else. It's not rocket science but there is still A procedure to it all. I've been writing tutorials for many years and it takes a lot to write something and throw it to the wolves saying; "Prove me wrong, I dare you", but I do quite often. That of course isn't the point of doing them. Educating people is but you know how the internet is. If you don't know, that's fine, but the answer isn't that there isn't an answer or that it has to do with the myriad or complexity of the amount of ways something can be set up. I'm talking about repaints here, not Scenarios (which by the way has tons of tutorials and is a much more complex beast then repaints).

Thanks for the advice on using RWTools as information, that's the plan. I don't plan on using the clone function if I don't need to, but more to find out what I need to clone. You mentioned something along the lines of not having to clone something if only doing the engine. I'll either just clone everything since if no one tells me otherwise, or should they want to actually help, they could better explain that part, or I'll learn on my own which is fine too. But I will repeat, you learned from somewhere and that's all I'm after. If you learned it all on your own or were born with it, well then I guess I'm just done for

Anywho, thanks again.

[Chacal]

You need the developer docs that are available on the railsimulator.com web site, under "support".
The installer gives you a series of pdf files. Most of what you need to know, etc, is in there somewhere but it is a huge read. Look for introductory documents.
It covers everything: setting up folders,modeling, making a route, sounds, driving trains, etc.

For your immediate needs, the tutorial you found is even better. I had never seen it.

[Turbine777]

You need the developer docs that are available on the railsimulator.com web site, under "support".

Very cool, thanks Lisboa. That's exactly what I'd like, even if it means I only use them for reference. Much appreciated. I'll play with the one I mentioned for now, but having the others is something I'd prefer to better learn. I don't mind reading as long as it's what the doctor order. Besides, CTRL+SHIFT+F is one of the best shortcuts ever!

[Kali]

The dev docs are online also at http://railworkswiki.com/ although for some reason they're missing all the example images. They are written from the point of view of someone who wants to create a new asset rather than modify an existing one, bu tthey're of some use when you're trying to learn what all the different files do.

The problem is - and this is why you can't give a fixed procedure for everything - is that the only thing that matters to the game is the blueprint, and even that just has to be "somewhere in the assets tree". The blueprint itself has references to most of the files that make up an asset and they can be ( and having seen some really wierd asset folders, actually *are* ) anywhere. However read the art guidelines, there's a recommended layout for asset folders there that most people seem to follow somewhat.

* Blueprint: xml document compressed as a .bin file, you can use serz.exe in the RW root folder to de/recompress it or just open them in RWTools. This is what defines all assets - no blueprint, an asset doesn't exist. Certain types of blueprint - including engine and wagon blueprints - can reference other blueprints.
* 3D shape: a GeoPcDx file ( also xml and you can open that in RWTools too ), contains a list of materials with relative paths to textures, and all the vertex data that makes up a model. By convention the textures it references are in a folder called "textures" in whichever folder the shape file is in, but it is important to note that they don't have to be, and fairly frequently aren't. Materials generally refer to one particular texture filename, so you can't go replacing most of them at runtime - if you want a model with differently painted textures, you'll need to make it load different texture files, and the simplest way of doing that is to copy the 3d shape to a new folder and then make some new textures, throwing them wherever the shape is expecting them to be.
* Texture file: TgPcDx file, is basically just a .dds file.
* Animation file: .ban file extension, usually you can just leave the references to those alone.

So technically all you need to do to make a different version of an asset is clone it's blueprint and change the display name inside, but then all you've done is have two identical assets with the same name. If you set up a new shape/texture folder then you can change the path to the shape in the blueprint, and it will load your copied shape, which itself will load it's own textures.

[xianggang]

is there a other site that offers the required download? I can't take UKTrainSim anymore.
Or maybe if the file is small someone can send it to me?

[SabreRZR]

This tutorial from Marleyman has helped me enormously, although I must confess there are a few engines like the SD-40 which are a little tough to get it right if you're a newbie like me.
Hope this helps all future visitors.

http://www.uir.marleyman.co.uk/uir/reskins/Paint%20Your%20Wagon%20a%20Railworks%202%20Re-skin%20Tutorial.pdf

[NS9030]

ok so I got all the way to where Im done repainting and have it as a DDS file but I can't get it back to a TGPCDX file, how can I do this?