Water, water, everywhere…

This time I’m going to address Derek’s WaterScenery.fx shader post. Fortunately, we’ve covered several needed items already; how to invoke the equivalent of the 3DSMax “Z Buffer Test Only”, using more than one shader slot, and setting UV arguments. Take a look a Derek’s example, start Blender and press “F5” to make the Material panel appear in Blender’s Button window. 

Through a glass, not so darkly…

This time I’m following Derek’s TrainGlass.fx tutorial. I’ll need to somehow enable  “Z Buffer Test Only” for the material, set “UV Arguments” for the first time, and figure out how Blender specifies specular power.

Derek explains the material properties involved and the appropriate UV arguments for three different glass effects. My job is simply to show you how to twiddle Bender and Bigex to yield the same results as Derek.

As Derek explains, the TrainGlass.fx shader requires two texture slots to be filled. The first containing the glass texture and alpha channel, and a second dummy slot for the convenience of the shader code. The dummy texture can be anything, and as the engine will have already loaded the glass/alpha texture the simplest thing to do is reuse the glass/alpha texture. No additional GPU load required.

Button, button, who has the button?

I was trying to recreate the example in Shaders and kuju materials – Part 2 – Texdiff with Blender and Bigex when I realized that I couldn’t find Blender’s equivalent of the Transparency selection of “TRANS” or “NONE” in the Kuju material options box in 3DSMax. Well, there is none, so we will have to divert before returning to Derek’s example.

HenningBR218 has been quite clever in building the use of the IGS_ExpModFile.txt into Bigex. Entries in this file are used to translate from the shorthand shader names used in Blender to the full names needed for export. It can also “edit” the exported igs file on the fly to emulate what can be done in 3DSMax.  Using this “modification at export” function of Bigex enables you to set any of the IGS data fields to an arbitrary value. This way you can achieve any visual effect in RailWorks.

Each material in the IGS file has a data field called “AlphaTestMode”. With HenningBR218’s help I found out that setting the “TRANS” option on a material in 3DSMax resulted in the setting of the material’s “AlphaTestMode” to a value of  “1”, a setting of “NONE” resulted in  “AlphaTestMode” being set to a value of  “0”.  How can we access this field with Blender/Bigex?

The Emperor has no clothes…

There are no pre-defined Blender materials for RailWorks so we’ll have to define them as we go along. However, I’ll describe a scheme later on that lets us have a RailWorks materials library for Blender.

I’m assuming that you can start Blender and have a basic understanding of the Blender window system and GUI. Pull up an additional browser window pointed to Derek’s first post on shaders and follow along.

RailWorks Ramblings…

I dabble in creating models for RailWorks 2012 using Blender 2.49 and the Bigex exporter written by “HenningBR218”. I’ve also built quite a few MSTS models and some for RailWorks using 3DCrafter. I’m going to try to describe how to use Blender and Bigex to emulate what can be done with 3DSMax and the RailWorks Art Plugins.

You won’t learn how to create models with Blender, UV map, or create textures here, there are plenty of tutorials on the web and forums for you to learn with from those more talented than me. Part of what I intend to do is mimic some of Derek Siddle’s great tutorials on his Art of RailWorks blog but with a Blender/Bigex slant. Make sure that you read Henning’s Bigex manual, there is a lot of information in it and helps explain the jargon differences between Blender/Bigex and 3DSMax.

One of the hardest things for me in using Blender and BigEx to create RailWorks models has been wading through the jargon of both 3D CAD packages, trying to follow a tutorial based on 3DSMax but using Blender. Thanks to HenningBR218, many posters on the forums, and great tutorials like the ones from Derek, I’ve learned a lot. I’ll start with Derek’s “Shaders and kuju materials – Part 1” as soon as I get Derek’s OK to reuse some of his images.

Update:

Derek has kindly allowed me to reuse material from The Art of Railworks. The next post covers Derek’s  “Shaders and kuju materials – Part 1”.