Texturing Novice Queries

[dineshmanohar]

Hi all,

I am newbie to modelling. I came up with the following WAP-4 model for MSTS/OR.

render.jpg

I am a complete novice on texturing. So to begin with I have the following queries in mind:

1. Are there tutorials to follow to skin a locomotive as realistic as possible from scratch?
2. I use blender for modelling. Does MSTS support materials or only an image texture work?
3. In such a case are there methods to transport materials developed in blender to MSTS.
4. I recently came to know about substance painter. Is it possible to use a substance painter for texturing a locomotive that is suitable for MSTS/OR simulations.

Thanks

[scottb613]

Hi...

Well - I don’t use Blender - but texturing things is kind of my niche - I spend a great deal of time working on textures for my models - probably more time than I do developing the shapes...

No - neither MSTS nor ORTS supports PBR materials - just textures... If I were you - I’d forget MSTS entirely as it degrades textures horribly and you have to introduce noise and such to prevent banding on gradients... I very happily left that behind...

If you do textures for ORTS only - just use DDS textures and you can export them directly from either PS or PSP with the NVidia plugin...

You want to minimize draw calls as much as possible - if you need tutorials - You may need a bunch more info than this - I’m on my iPhone - I’ll try to put more information together when I get in front of a PC...

Nice model !

Regards,
Scott


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[dineshmanohar]

Hi, Scott. Thanks for this starting point. Will look forward for more when you have time.

Regards
DM

[longiron]

One thing that Blender does well is render an extremely high poly model and use those detailed textures on a much lower poly model.

1. Try these tutorials - https://msts.steam4me.net/tutorials/index.html#models
2. MSTS only supports a proprietary texture format - ace. While OpenRails lets you use DDS texture format. The texture basics are here: https://msts.steam4me.net/tutorials/index.html#textures
3. As Scott indicated MSTS/OR only supports textures - no bump maps, etc
4. You can use substance painter - however the MSTS texture MUST be a power of 2. And each individual texture is a separate draw call. So most models use a texture sheet like these: https://msts.steam4me.net/tutorials/...ncer/pop4.html

[dineshmanohar]

Brilliant. Thanks longiron