Po&N Sd40-2S

Outstanding! Excellent work, now if only I could get that metallic look on other engines...Sniper, you've topped yourself again. Off to modify a few consists!!

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I agree - a worthwhile addition to my flet of locos.Bill

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Sniper you think you could do that nose in the CSX and NS scheme?

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Oh feldercarb, they're up already? I just uploaded them Sunday, wasn't expecting them until later today or tomorrow. Nels is getting too efficient for me to keep up with him, I didn't even do the GRAND ANNOUNCEMENT! yet, and here I am in this ratty old bathrobe with my hair up in curlers. I can't take credit for the metallic look, that was Train Artisan's genius, and I suspect it has something to do with the 6 megabyte shape file that won't compress with ffedit. For some reason even with specular lighting disabled I get that reflective sheen from some angles. Marc from 3Dtrains (HACK) did a weathering tutorial over in the skinner's forum a long time ago, I'll have to hunt that up. One trick I used for the cabview was the lasso selection tool in PSP-7 (best 100 bucks ever spent on a graphics program!) to drag a selection around irregular shape areas to edit with the assorted color adjusting tools.After playing with the color balance, while the area is still selected you can fiddle around with other settings like brightness & contrast, hue saturation & lightness, all that stuff. For CSX just fiddle with the color balance until it's blue, then go to hue saturation & lightness and lower the saturation and increase the lightness until it's about the right shade of blue. NS is easy, lower saturation, then brightness or gamma until it's black (actually dark gray so the details still stand out).
I did the same thing with the gauges, dragged a circle around them (ratwin from the file library helps with fine mouse control for the cursor) and increase brightness & contrast, then sharpen. (GREAT cabview, apparently taken directly from a photo, but if it was a movie you'd be hollering "FOCUS! FOCUS!" at the guy in the projection booth!)
I tried adjusting hue/saturation/lightness for the whole thing to make it more gray than brown inside, and quickly discovered that you'd have to redo all the control bitmaps the same way to match. Immediately restored from a backup and left the overall cabview color alone, didn't want to get into that!Another thing I'm playing with recently (practice makes perfect, I don't consider myself as a skinner by a long shot, but I'm getting there) is dragging rectangles around the maintenance access doors on the sides and fiddling with the color adjustment settings for that look of having a few doors replaced with slightly (or drastically) off-color doors.
So the obvious question, why am I screwing around with this instead of working on the long overdue V6 of the route?
Well, construction is hard work, sometimes you just gotta take a break.

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I agree, too! Very nice addition to my fleet as well! Adding more consists for my PO&N6. Thanks!
Ken
Keep Amtrak
"United We Stand."
"Love America or Get Out!"

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Forgot to get back to you guys, here's Marc's weathering tutorial:http://www.3dtrains.com/guides/gp9/gp9_guide.shtml

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