Rolling Stock skinning ideas

[CeeBee]

Those green ones look pretty nice :)

[Gumboots]

Yeah they're pretty good in green. TBH I'll probably end up doing a few colours just for fun anyway.

I've had a bit more of a play with them. The proportions got tweaked to make them a bit more realistic. They were really too long before, and needed a bit more curvature in the sides. I've also added roof vents to give them a bit more feel and got the styling nailed down how I like it.

luxury_innit.jpg

The windows on the rear of the salon car look a bit off at the moment because I've been experimenting. Since I was having to design this critter myself I got to thinking about ventilation and views and all that. This is too early for observation car platforms and vestibules but you could have had an opening window in the luxury car. So, as an old carpenter who has seen more windows in more states of repair than he cares to remember, I thought about how I'd do them.

Casements are good for most things, but would be a nuisance on a moving train if you only had access from the inside. Too difficult to open and close, and to secure when open. You'd probably either break the glass or fall out of the train. Bifolds rock when they're in good condition, but require fancy hardware and feel too complicated for a pre-1850 railway. Hoppers are good for ventilation in the rain but horrible for anything else.

So that really leaves the basic single hung sash as the best option. Not my first choice for a modern house, but if I was building a salon car in the 1840's and wanted to encourage rich customers to part with more cash, a single hung sash would be a good thing to have. Easy to make, and don't even need counterweights if they're fairly small. People usually end up propping them open with a stick in old houses, because invariably the old counterweight cord breaks and they can't be bothered disassembling the framing to fit new ones.

So I'm going to tweak the skinning so it has a nifty single hung sash in the middle at the back. Perfect height and size for a clear view out the back when you're sitting down, and would make a handy escape route if you got derailed and the car was on its side.

Now this is very much uber-posh top of the line stuff, so as RoR pointed out it's not going to look right if you're shunting pax between mining towns, but that's just a few layers in Photoshop and they can easily be skinned as something a bit plainer. I'll experiment with skinning a composite first/third car just to have something that's more widely applicable. This isn't period-correct AFAIK since in those days, at least outside the US, third class cars were usually open cars with bare wooden benches thrown in and a different paint job to put lipstick on the pig. They didn't have glazed windows and you were lucky if you even got a roof. But we don't really have to be obsessively period-correct (it's only a game, right?), and since composite first/third and second/third class cars with windows were fairly common in the 1850's I think there's no harm in fudging things a bit. These things are long enough to have four compartments: 1x first, and 3x third. Which would be a more realistic balance for people who worry about such things.

[Gumboots]

Ok, composite cars.

One first class compartment, one smaller second class compartment, and two minimum-width third class compartments. This isn't fully finished yet, just a quick go at it to see how it looked for balance. And, after doing it and looking it over I realised something.

The front of the car is not the logical place for the first class compartment. You'd get a smoother and quieter ride in the middle of the car. Further away from coupling noise, and less pitching over lumps and track joints. So really it should have the second class compartment up front, the two third class compartments in the rear, and the first class in the middle. Which is easy enough to change since it's just Photoshop layers and not a real car.

meh.jpg

[RulerofRails]

Did you try the green color in-game? It may be hard to see especially at night, in which case the Yellow may be better.

[Gumboots]

No I haven't got around to trying them in the game yet. The night visibility won't be a problem, because all those windows will glow like crazy.

I'll check for visibility around dusk and dawn, when the game turns off night glow but ambient light levels are still low. I think it'll be fine, but it's easy to change.

Anyway, I reached the point I seem to reach in all my "quick adjustment to default stuff" projects, when I realise it's lost the plot and I really should re-jig everything to get it to make sense. The standard car and salon car were using different UV mapping where they didn't really need to, and leftover bits of default mesh were at odd dimensions, and/or weren't really necessary, old bits of skin were getting in the way of what I really wanted to do, etc etc. So I said rude words and just rebuilt the entire model from the ground up and re-mapped all the UV's. This way it's less drama for me to finish them off now, and less drama do variants and skins in future if anyone wants to.

I've just finished that process, but haven't got around to moving the Photoshop layers yet. The combination of new mesh and old skin is awesome. I'm calling it the Mad Max Greenhouse And Thunderbox On Wheels.

Mad_Max_greenhouse_and_thunderbox_on_wheels.jpg

So I'll fix the PS side of it and then see about giving them a test run with proper game files. I figure it'd be good to have five variants, since they're so easy to do and I'll probably feel like using different ones at different times.

1/ The salon car, obviously.
2/ First class car, three compartments, with all the shiny bits.
3/ Second class car (basically, just switch off a few layers in PS and change some letters).
4/ Combination first and second class (first class in the middle, second class at each end).
5/ Third class car (with four smaller compartments, basic lining, smaller windows, etc).

That should cover all bases.

Edit: D'oh. It'd be perfect for a mail van too. Might as well.

[Gumboots]

This rationalising stuff works a treat.

I've roughed out skins for 1st class cars, combined 1st and 2nd, 2nd class, 3rd class, and the mail van. They still need a bit of detailing but they're generally on the money IMO, except for the mail van. I feel that needs a little something extra. Will play around with windows and a few other bits and see what works. Haven't done the salon car yet but it won't be hard.

first_and_combined_cars.jpg

2nd_and_3rd_class_cars.jpg

mail_van.jpg

consist_1.jpg

This should be a good base model for Euro/UK coach stock right into the early 20th century. The nutters kept using these things for ages. The later ones were longer and had an extra axle in the middle, but that's just a matter of stretching the mesh and throwing a couple more bits underneath. Piece of cake.

[Gumboots]

w00t! I just found a genuine composite 1st/2nd class carriage from 1838.

And, it has the first class compartment in the middle, with the second class compartments at each end. Where the ride would be rougher. Like I surmised. I feel clever now.

Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway 1st 2nd Class Composite carriage

[RulerofRails]

At first glance the mash-up looked like a coffin car to me.

Interesting that you found real composite cars. Good design instincts on your part. It's good to have this for later reference as no doubt someone will ask about them in the future.

Sorry, don't have a good idea about the mail cars. Because we will often see more than one car per train they can't logically represent "Post Office cars". Perhaps RT3's "Mail" car is best described as a hybrid between this and a Baggage car.

[Gumboots]

At first glance the mash-up looked like a coffin car to me.

Hadn't thought of it that way. I could trick it out in blue and gold and call it the King Tut Special.

I agree about the mail car. Baggage cars often did carry mail, at least in some places. Or mail cars carried baggage. Whichever way you want to look at it. Anyway I figured out what was wrong with it. It's the old "don't put two windows side by side on a large wall because they'll look like an idiotic pair of eyes". Well known in building design, but I'd forgotten about it. Easy to fix.

I had a brainwave about buffers too. The ones in the earlier shots had the body of the buffer made out of a cone with the tip alpha'd out. This was a compromise between looks and poly count (like everything) but I wasn't happy with it. So I was looking into how early buffers actually functioned and this gave me an idea.

The early ones have an iron rod running back towards the middle of the car, like this:



After looking into it I found a diagram which shows the mechanism.

London_Birmingham_2.jpg

The buffer block at each end is just a solid wood block with a hole drilled through it, which acts as a guide for the iron bar. The inner end of the iron bar reaches back to a large transverse leaf spring hidden under the centre of the car, and this is what gives the shock absorption. There also appears to be a second set of springs dedicated to giving shock absorption for the drawbars. Which is all perfectly logical now that I see it, but hadn't occurred to me before.

So I had been thinking about running the buffer rod back to near the centre of the car and using alpha to skin the early style of frame with cut-away side sections. Then I thought hang on, why stop there? If there's space on the skin (and it turns out there was) the better option would be to make the mesh for the buffer rod continuous from one end of the car to the other. In terms of poly count this literally gives you two for the price of one. So then I thought well hey, I can do that for the buffer blocks too. That saves even more tris, because that's where the majority of them are. If I or anyone else wants to skin the early style cutaway frames, all that's needed is to alpha out the section of the block mesh between the front and rear cross beams.

buffers_1.jpg

So this works. To save space I used a much smaller scale for the buffer block skinning but it's still workable for detailing. The test layer style has a 3px stroke at each end of the visible block, and is sufficiently clear to be useful. The limits of the alpha'd chunk in the middle are chosen to match the length of the car's frame (has to be worked out in whole pixels). The result is a low-poly buffer that's compatible with any style of frame, and looks a lot better than what was there before.

[Gumboots]

Hey I just found out something, fortunately in time to stop me doing something stupid.

So I had modelled low-poly "roof vents" for these cars, on the assumption that the funny-looking small things up top in the old photos and plans must have been roof vents. I figure they were probably a variation on the basic mushroom vent, or something similar.

Nord_Belge_1860.jpg

Umm, no. They are actually lights. I know this because I just found a good cross-section of an express car from roughly the same period (haven't checked the exact date yet).

not_vents.jpg

They are clearly not vents, since the actual vents are also shown. The only logical explanation is that they are old oil or kerosene lamps of an unusual form, with the lens at the bottom of the lamp and the fuel tank above it. I assume they used this type of lamp to keep smoke and fumes out of the interior.

This also explains why a lot of the old European express cars had a catwalk along the roof. I thought it was so the crew could get from one end of the train to the other if necessary, but apparently they generally used the low-level running boards (each side of the car) for that. The roof catwalk would have been for the poor mug whose job it was to get up there and re-fill all the oil lamps.

So it's good that I found this before I got into finalising the skinning, because I was just thinking about how I'd do the air holes and drainholes for the "vents". Which I obviously will not be doing now.