Basic tips for route builders

Here are a few basic tips for route builders which i hope will be useful.

When starting a new route, first lay down your track, build the railyards and railstations, then place the trackside objects (catenary, signalling) and after these steps are finished place the scenery objects (trees, buildings, textures). The reasons are:
1. Your FPS rate will remain high while you place the track and the trackside objects and its quite important to have high fps rate when working with tracks;
2. Its much easier to move a tree or a building than to move, rethink or rebuild a yard or railway station;
3. You don't want to mess the splines from the catenary with other splines like grass;
4. The infrastructure can be seen better withouth interferences from vegetation or other objects;

How to make a repeatable texture

In this tutorial you will learn how to make a repeatable texture for a retaining wall. This is a simple tutorial in which you will find out how to make a texture for a spline. These objects actually repeat a 3d model, so the texture should be repeatable also. Watch the video below to find out how it’s done.

How to make and export a tree

In this tutorial you will learn how to make a tree using alpha textures. 

You don’t need nothing more than 3ds max and the alpha textures. You must create 2 planes textured with the alpha texture. Nothing more simpler, check out the video:





Please visit first this tutorial:

How to make an alpha texture

I’ve provided you the source files for the tree. Here they are: tree.zip

How to make an alpha texture

In this tutorial you will learn to make yourself an alpha texture. What is an alpha texture?

With this texture you can make trees, backgrounds, even glass for Trainz. This texture is useful when you want to make a complex 2d polygon. This texture helps you make that complex polygon, with a simple plane. The alpha texture contains actually 2 images: a base texture and a black & white one. With black the transparent part of the base texture and with white the solid part. Watch the next video to learn how to do it:

Tip: If you want to get rid of the annoying layer distribution of the alpha textures (intersection of alpha textures) you have to save the black & white texture with Paint as Monochrome BMP, and after you have to save it in TGA. Trainz and Max don’t recognize the Monochrome BMP for unknown reason.

Optimizing Content Manager for TRS 2006

In this video tutorial you will learn some tips & tricks in how to optimize Content Manager for TRS 2006. Please watch the next video:

In this video tutorial you will learn some tips & tricks in how to optimize Content Manager for TRS 2006. Please watch the next video:

Trainz texture formats

If you are intending to make 3d models for Trainz, you should read this tutorial first. When working with textures you must know that not all textures might work in Trainz.

In Trainz, textures must have a specific size, otherwise they won’t show. Also it is recommended to save the textures in Targa *.tga format.

The size of the textures (width/height) must be 2 at power x pixels. This is the format for Trainz textures, and you have to respect it otherwise they won’t show up in Trainz.

The series of sizes is:

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096… This is how high you should get, because some old video cards don’t support higher textures then 2048. Also, in TS 2009, the textures below 64pixels won’t show.

If you make alpha textures, you should save the alpha texture in *.bmp format.

You should keep this in mind when starting making models for Trainz. Once you will learn this you will see is not a big deal to make textures with this sizes.