Railworks America

I'm working on an FEC repaint of the DTG NS SD70M-2. The NS paint scheme uses two colors for the primarynumber_x textures. The FEC repaint would need three colors. I know some of the SD70ace models use three color mapping, so I see how to layout a three color texture file. My question is, can three colors of dynamic cab number textures be hacked to the .bin files without access to the original mesh files? For that matter did anything I say make any sense? I'm treading into territory I know very little about!

Why do you need three colors in the number file?

buzz456 wrote:Why do you need three colors in the number file?

The front number boards are black, the side numbers are blue, and the rear numbers are white.

I don't think that's possible.

I think it can be done, but you need to be the one making the numberboards. When you place the placeholder texture in whatever program you are modelling in, usually the face gets mapped to the center of the image that will then be replaced in game for one digit. But, in some examples I've seen like "building a loco not because it's easy" the face mapping goes to one side of the place holder texture, and the game texture shows 2 different colored numbers, one side for the body and to the other side for the number boards. What would happen if the in game texture showed say 4 quadrants of different colors, and the face was mapped to those quadrants, say black in the upper left, blue in the upper right and white on blue in the lower left? I think that the place holder texture mapping corresponds to the in game texture replacement mapping location for location.

Look at some of the number board textures for the default cars and see that on some there are 2 numbers on the texture. The thing you can't see is the face mapping from the original model, so you can't see where the mapping corresponds to on the texture. Also, I was looking at Michael Stepan's low poly yard cars and they have some interesting texture mapping and names for those textures. They "autonumber" themselves in differing livery when placed in game, becuase the model references a "number" for the whole carbody texture. Pretty neat.

Can anybody confirm what I'm saying, I have not had a chance to test this myself yet.

Danpmeyer: Forget about anything to do with numbering for a minute - you're describing a single texture with four areas, and mapping quads from different parts of the locomotive to different parts of the texture. Of course that will work :)

Autonumbers aren't complicated at all, all it is is normal texturing techniques with special naming so the game knows how to swap texture files out.