Trainz/Tutorial for Creating a Three Plank Wagon From the Reskin Mesh in GMAX

If you've worked through the previous tutorial this one is fairly simple. If you haven't go back and do the previous one since this tutorial will use many of the same steps.

The first part is do the research. How high should the box be on a three plank wagon?

Having found out this critical nugget of information the rest is fairly easy. For the moment we will assume this to be 2'3".

We open the basic plank wagon in GMAX.



The box currently is the wrong height but GMAX allows us to select parts and scale them. So our first task is to create a box the correct height to measure the wagon against. Note this image is quite busy. First we need to be in a top view so click off the model in top (1). We may need to bring the wagon into view so use the button at the end of arrow 2. To increase the size click on the button at the end of arrow 3 then draw a square around the detail you wish to see. First verify we are using the creation tab 4. To create the box click on box at the end of arrow 5, and enter the dimensions by keyboard entry (6) and make sure we put the height in correctly (7) before clicking on the create button below.



Having created our box we need to move it upwards to the height of the wagon floor so we can see how far to scale our existing wagon top.



We press H to select the Wagon group. Ungroup it and use H again to select [top]. Now right click the scale button at the top and we'll adjust the Z value to reduce the height. The original wagon was four feet high and we want to lower this to two feet three inches so we can get a calculator out or just make approximate guesses.



Unfortunately the scaling has also raised the top from the base. So we use the move button, the one with the four arrows on it to lower the top to the base. We may find we need to adjust the scale once more. Finally delete the box we created.



We now have a wagon that is the correct height for a three plank wagon. Note we still have to adjust the textures, create your three plank wagon textures then resize them so they are the size of the sides in the CS_skin.tga file. Then copy them over.

The export etc has already been covered in the previous tutorial that moved the wagon numbers.

We can use the same basic technique to make the wagon longer or wider note if you make the wagon twice as long the textures will be a better fit if you change the cs-skin.tga to be twice the width. Note when making the wagon longer one technique is to group everything then scale everything longer. The buffers usually need tidying up and you should adjust the position of a.limfront and a.limback so that they just touch the buffer plates.