Sithlrd98 Mods and stuff

buddybud · February 15, 2009, 06:21:36 PM

Yo jayson....looking good.

your alpha job so far seems to be working out and regardless that you're new to photoshop the results are outstanding. There must be a "creating texture alphas" tutorial around somewhere if you want to fine tune or tweak your results. Either way your doing good work here.

Cheers.
Bud

sithlrd98 · February 15, 2009, 06:42:31 PM

Thanks Buddy....
Does anyone know a way to alter multiple textures at once , so that I can get a better feel of what I'm gonna end up with? What I have been doing so far is : take a base , apply a rail texture so I can get an idea where it needs to be. Erase some of the base going up to the rail , then remove the rail , create an alpha , apply alpha then re-paste the rail. This is very tedious as I'm doing each one piece by piece and I have no idea how its going to look with the other tiles until I get it in-game.
Of course if it were easy , it would already have been done I guess.

Jayson

buddybud · February 15, 2009, 06:52:16 PM

lol...we call that "the joy of texturing".

The one way to save time is to take advantage of the psd format as opposed to the jpeg format or others. This way you can reuse your layers and masks..kinda like making a template.. You'll find with alphas that they tend to be repetitive after awhile and quite often you can easily just tweak one alpha for another. Of course when complete you would save your separate files as jpeg once you want to integrate them into a mod. Does that make sense? lol.

sithlrd98 · February 15, 2009, 06:58:24 PM

Yeah , it does. I have not been saving as a jpeg , only .png , but I think it would be smart of me to also save as .psd so I could mess with the layers. Since this is my first attempts , I'm trying to get perfection with out experience , so I'll just learn as I go I guess!

Quote from: buddybud on February 15, 2009, 06:52:16 PM
lol...we call that "the joy of texturing".

Oh , joy!

Jayson

Andreas · February 16, 2009, 03:34:31 AM

Hmm, I dunno... It looks odd. What I'm used here is some dark basalt (?) ballast, and the rest of the embankment is simply grass or similar. Here's a pic that I took last week or so:

sithlrd98 · February 16, 2009, 03:16:00 PM

I am still very much open to suggestion...give me a texture ID and I'll run with it. I still haven't been able to figure out what PEGS alt.rail texture is. I PM'd him and haven't heard back. I honestly don't use rail that much , live no where near rails , so I have no real idea of what anyone wants. So far , I used SG ID#0x35ea4150 , which was suggested and it's too green , PEGS 0x1DA44009 , also too green and now the present one is PEGS 0x1DA44359.

Anyone have any other suggestions , let me know

Jayson

Nardo69 · February 17, 2009, 09:53:49 AM

Hi ...

I should've come earlier but sometimes I need to be called ..

About the material for the stones:

It actually depends on the local materials and the trabsportation costs for other material.

The stones have to be broken (no pebbels stones!) and as hard as possible so basalt stone is top choice if it is available. The HzL - a private railway company around Gammertingen between Stuttgart and Lake Constance (Bodensee) for example uses the local lime stone and because of this their railway bad is rather white. In North-Eastern Germany especially secondary railway lines with light roadbed used to use sand instead of stones with quite some maintenance problems today so that these lines where either closed or redone eith a "classic" broken stone railbed.

Dust, rust and oil do color the stones darker (even the oil pollution became much better the last years)

So for the broken stones itself I would recommend a dark brown color. And this railway bed (correct? german name is Oberbau) isn't too irregular; in terms of the SC4 "scale" you can create a parallel line / curve as outer border for the railbed.

The irregular shapes are the underground / foundation / substructure (which one? German technical term is "Unterbau"). It consists of broken stones but at the border may mix with the soil. Sometimes but not always the color is different.

You can see the border between "Oberbau" and "unterbau" rather good in Andreas' picture:

Just follow the bigger broken stones and you see a kind of line just parralel and below the rail. below that line stones are smaller and there are plants.

sithlrd98 · February 18, 2009, 06:52:51 AM

That's a lot of good info , unfortunately it doesn't give me much to go on , except that it is looking like I'm either gonna have to make some new textures , or judging by the lack of other suggestions, there isn't much interest in this project. I'm gonna try and see what I can come up with and take it from there.

Jayson

Dark_Jedi06 · February 18, 2009, 07:58:06 AM

I am very interested in this project.

I'm not sure on the base you should use however, as far as I'm concerned I've liked all three examples you've already shown.

Perhaps something based on the alternate rail mod already produced by PEG?

sithlrd98 · February 18, 2009, 05:52:14 PM

Dark Jedi : I am trying do something similar , I have not heard back from PEG , so I don't know the exact texture.

After messing around with various textures , this is what I am leaning towards ( yeah I kinda flubbed the left slightly) . Please keep in mind that I am not a texture creator , I only apply existing textures to transit items , so this is kind of a stretch for me.

I am thinking about adding a little brown to tone down the grass a little. As usual , comments , suggestions are very appreciated!

Jayson

Andreas · February 19, 2009, 02:49:53 AM

Looks interesting - any in-game pics available? The rightmost track seems to be a bit "smudgy" and blurred, did you touch it with the drawing tools? Also (not sure if that's intended or simply a result of re-using textures), the inner two tracks seem to be wider (in pixels) than the outer ones.

Nardo69 · February 19, 2009, 11:57:53 AM

Looks good so far. I agree with Andreas.

Just the brown texture between the tracks look too yellow - it should be the same colour / colour mix like the brown stripe between tracks and the green.

buddybud · February 19, 2009, 01:55:27 PM

looking good.

Something that will help with all those inconsistencies is using the GRID settings in photoshop. Set it for 128 with thick lines every 8. This grid will help you keep things aligned and also is compatible and mimics the 16m grid in bat.

Hopes that helps....keep it up.

Bud

sithlrd98 · May 16, 2009, 06:58:37 PM

OK , this project isn't dead , its just been taking a real long nap!

I have a few questions on which direction this should go. The first 2 images are basically Davids WRRC with a base that I made. For the first question: Should I go with the first base or second?

Secondly , green or Black?

Third...which one looks best?

Please keep in mind that these are jpegs,not .png and that they are rough ideas with different techniques. I am basically trying to figure out

If the base textures are OK for these , and if so which one
If I should leave the railway bed texture alone , make them black , or try to remove them completely
Which technique would be best...straight edges or a little rounded?

Please give me some feed back as this is not just for myself

Jayson

buddybud · May 16, 2009, 11:39:57 PM

Glad to see you back at work. I like the last one with the semi transparent areas. I would however clean up the edges with the eraser tool to make sure it looks smooth when placed. ie a combination of 3 and 4 with an emphasis on 4.

But thats just me

Cheers.
Bud

sithlrd98 · May 17, 2009, 06:02:07 AM

Thanks Bud.Yeah,as far as the transparency , I also am leaning towards 3&4.I just recently started messing with this project again and am still practicing with different techniques.I am learning as I go.....

Jayson

sithlrd98 · May 17, 2009, 04:51:01 PM

Here is a cleaned up alpha in-game test , using the first base texture , and the WRRC rail-bed green.

Edit

This is my first attempt at HD textures, and unless I did something wrong , ....not sure why it looks odd!

For anyone who would like to check these out , please PM me as the file is too large to attach.

Thoughts , suggestions?

Jayson

Gwail · May 18, 2009, 11:42:37 PM

Good to see the progress here, Jayson!

Sorry to posting so late, but I've been very busy last month. As I planned to make the same (I've given up, too messy for what I had planned to do), I looked a bit for some textures. Here you are the best I've been able to find, maybe it would be still useful for you. The first 3 pics are only 1:1 samples, source textures are big (over 2500 px). If you are interested, let me know.

And here are some photos of laying new tracks, you can see the Ober- and Unterbau

.

I will PM you my email, you can send me your textures for investigations

.

dedgren · May 19, 2009, 12:22:29 AM

I think this shows real promise, Jayson. Back to you with some thoughts in the next 24-48.

David

vershner · May 19, 2009, 06:27:54 AM

Something occurred to me regarding the road textures. The NAM medium (3x3) roundabout matches the sidewalk textures of the regular roads even when they are altered with the JRJ Sidewalk mod. Presumably the roundabout is an overlay texture and uses the standard game base textures.

Would it be possible to make all the curves work like this as well? Then one mod could change all of them together.

Or maybe I've misunderstood and Jeroni included the 3x3 roundabout in the mod, but none of the other NAM pieces...?

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Sithlrd98 Mods and stuff