FROM PLASTIC TO FANTASTIC Hi everyone, I wanted to share a look-development project I’ve been finalizing for the Great Western Express Class 166 to completely strip away the engine's default "gamer plastic" appearance. Out-of-the-box, the default factory rendering pipeline gives the train a glossy, translucent look or an over-saturated, highly fluorescent high-vis yellow tint that glows unnaturally under standard daytime sky frames. To fix this, I threw out the default settings and spent a total of 70 minutes on my desktop workbench fine-tuning the exact color-space properties and ambient light falloff of the front safety panel against a real trackside photo of GWR unit 166202 under a flat, overcast sky. By manually hardcoding custom coordinates—specifically utilizing a dense, warm industrial Chrome Yellow mix (RGB 255, 174, 66) and tightly restricting the uncalibrated ambient True Industrial Paint Texture: The yellow warning fascia now looks like thick, matte, solid industrial paint that realistically absorbs daylight instead of acting like an emissive video game light bulb. 2. Natural Carriages & True Fabric Weave: The dark green passenger seating upholstery has completely shed its greasy plastic sheen. The lighting decays across the interior surfaces naturally, making the fabric look like actual, thick commercial transport cloth where the light catches the seats. The interior walls hold a clean, natural exposure line completely free of global color bleeding. 3. Lg: Real-world commuter literacy . Take a look at the side-by-side visual contrast below and let me know what you think , top pic is the 166 from TSww second one is a reall Clsss 166 GW as a comparison I forgot to put the had ups diaplay
Would you mind claiming the free starter pack and make the changes on the TSW7 GWE? The route have already been overhauled and its likely that most of the players cannot benefit from a mod of a game that's several iterations before (it would be 200% incompatible).
Theres are no tecture mods no assest mods no extra polygons nothing just attention to detail understanding phometrics , material properties etc , stock Class 166 from plastic to fantastic
Maybe a before and after picture helps more. Also, the indoor sections looks like it has a noise filter applied to it.
I can upload a default and afterr. Do you not know what the stock 166 looks like like washed out plasticy , i will do finement on what you see as " noise filter" .Im not done yet , never was some more fine , turing , ibe manage to get of rid of the plastic , shinny look all over the trains in tsw UE creates not walk in park my friend.Tunning continues i thiught show wgats possible
Yeah, I can't tell the difference either. The interior still looks very clean, with no weathering at all.
I didnt saything about whethering , wjo said anything about extra weather im not doing textures i dont use ue4 , in passer compartment its hard see due to dgt modeling and problem with roof mesh eith the 166 especially in sim , externally you can tell.Im installing ts7 starter and will try with that see if its any better better my piipline has worked well in other sims fernbus , xplane.vThe bottom pic is front facia im got almost match the real 166 in tsw2
I have in 20 mins wirh custom piline in sim and many tweaks , finesse abd expertise turned plastic look into phot look real time gi too .Bottom 3 were tweaked a bit more later than the top but thats the only one i have in the buffers starting off at the station .the rail is still in canny valley in that pic . but when i boot up nect times its rectified after several tweaks , sky very high , shadows , the rl time specular, diffuse pipeline does the rest fps in 40s.I have used no mods , no aftermarket anything , stock tsw7 starter , i already owned tsw2 , This what ppl expected with UE sim not plastic looking bleached out colour shaded trains So i decided fix in myself starter week n half with bccs 2011 wabted fix sky turn down blinding clear night bug usual things did not woek ebded u creating 7 stack wirh 4 piplines and turned it photoreal impressive lolking simv, my pipline ive manged to lean my stack soen to three .I have 4 sims , 5 including TSW7 now
For true comparison: No mods, no retextures, no custom liveries of any kind. Just TSW 7 on full epic settings. Doesn't look so plastic-y to me. Very clean maybe, that's just a licensing thing, but definitely no worse than any other TSW train. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Im on about the plastick default use lok if you actually analyse the trains the ppl etc is has that unmissible UE lastick look , its called Unreal because nobody would belibe its real in million years
This is what you call unreal tsw7 with my pipeline , finess and expert tunning it dint woek in tsw2 because the internal light is messed up there provlem with meshes inside some trains ive done thos 5 diff sims its lean abd performance is good doesnt require no rt cores etc .Last one was done fiest starting at station.If tsw2 lighting and meshes abd things were broken this would of tge result there too , Those first pics were from tsw 2 because thwts whwt i had who said anything about ts7 , the previous poster notived , he get tsw 7 starter and thwts what i did. If you think vstock TSW7 looks real , its same with fernbus the bus etc
Idk, if we're critisizing the look of Unreal in general then if you ask me this looks pretty good. Now forgive me, I genuinely mean no offense or disrespect when I say this, but I think I and a lot of others have no idea what you are even trying to say here. What have you actually 'changed' in your examples of the Class 166? What are we supposed to be seeing which makes it look more photorealistic? To me when I look at the images you have posted I just see the exact same train - model, textures, lighting and shaders, everything, - that I have been looking at since I played TSW 2 on my old PS4. I genuinely cannot see any difference and don't actually know what difference I'm even supposed to be looking for?
For two things the correct shading , depth , strength of colour on the trains and carriages .Two the way specular and diffuse rl t shows in those images. photorealism isnt about loads more pretty who just slapp shaders together , you have to eye an analytical to see it . Many simmers abd gamers have been used to shiny or bloomy or blown out sky better , im taking about photorealisn , not fancy graphics i hope this makes sense .I see the screen as the lense For eg the bottom picture the way light bounces off those carriages is exactly what i e seen in real life.The third zoom in those pics of yours the quality really starts to fall and it loses s realism , depth etc structure . Zoom right the way in those images i posted my visua work it just goes little blurry like a photograph when zoomed it but smooth .Simplest way i zan explain it. Q question have you been on real train and at few stations you thwt pays attention sees. Last point your comparing a sunny day to a overcast one . Anyways i hope thwt helps im not using dlls or blurry taa with my phometric pipline shadows , high sky very rest epic in high 40 s
I think I get what you mean now. To me in that respect the problem TSW, and indeed most other games or simulators have, is to do with how light interracts with surfaces. Things like a distorted reflection shining down the side of a metal surface do wonders, see for example this shot someone posted from a thread where they were testing a DLSS 5 hack on TSW: DLSS 5 though is only somewhat capable of these effects because it isn't a simple reshade or upscale, it's AI completely reinterpreting frames and details. The problem is that you are never going to achieve that kind of real light rendering with shaders or anything like that. To reach that kind of light interraction with surfaces requires ray tracing or even path tracing which is orders of magnitude beyond scope or likely even possible for TSW. To this day I think the only game which has truly achieved such lighting detail would be Cyberpunk 2077 with its path tracing. And while I can definitely commend the effort or intention, I think that unless you go the DLSS 5 route (which I personally don't like anyway because the AI is effectively overwriting and ruining the artist/developers' original vision, but that's just my own opinion on a whole different conversation) then I think this is probably a bit much to be asking of a game like TSW. It's especially too much to be asking of the Class 166 which, while it did recieve some updates as part of Liam's GWE remaster, is still fundamentally an asset which was made almost a decade ago now. The Class 70 which was the interior image I posted came out mere days ago and yeah, there is a massive difference in that respect. The same goes for this also far better looking interior which Just Trains made for the 47/3 in their most recent route release.
Im talking about the engine UE etc or game rt dlls , requires rt cores it lie Nvidia have ben lying gor years my pipline runs way better than rt no dlls required natibe 4k you cp2077 it can run and look better than thats goib to be my upcoming project il give an explore heres fern bus as it should be xp12 when all the photometric cour are visually in tune. I qill be doingvideos to youtube yhe diffrence is so much bigger in motion Just some of the others done.Uscaliing from 1080 p no thanks the performance terrible. The limit isnt skill or finesse its time and enthusiasm so at one point it was simmibg ethusiats themselves runing tge studiod till somdout t Stakeholdera , shareholders , those dnt ****** if trauin is reakistic the physivs grat , fernbus after doing the photorealism engineering and finssing its not a 2 min job ir walk in park then requires the the weight , turn radius ,length etc and when you in put tgat you get coach that handles like the real thing and can tip ober.They use UE because its easier they can slip asests pull them out this why all UE sims have plastic , bleach look including Fern Bus bus i scuvved , fettled and finessed that away with skil.Oh tgat other point ah yes default the train in tsw do not have rovust grounded metal lookl
They chose to use UE for two reasons. 1: at the time they began working on TSW it was the best engine for handling a game which covers very long distances at a 1:1 scale. 2: It is one of the better engines out there for console development, as TSW from day one was always designed to be eventually available on consoles as TSC which came before it was never able to. The console problems that have come to exist since then are more hardware and optimisation related, but their choice of engine still remains pretty solid for their intentions with the game. Beyond that, I'm going to leave this subject and conversation now. Considering I am someone who thinks that TSW looks almost perfect as it is especially with 7's epic settings and new lighting, and that I clearly do not have the same eye for lighting details as yourself, I'm probably not the right person to be carrying this any further. Best of luck with whatever you're trying to do!
Same here. It's not even clear what this 'pipeline' is, whether it's actually changing something in-game or doing some post processing on what's being output to the screen. All I can see in the screenshots posted is that it's overcast weather and everything looks duller. Also flghttrainsm#6320 part of the problem is that your posts are incredibly difficult to read, because they're so full of misspellings and often not in proper sentences. It's clear that you used AI to help you write the opening post, can I recommend you use it (or even a standard spell-checker) on your other posts? I'm saying this with all due respect, because I can guess the cause, but it's not helping you get your points across better.
Of course the average causal gamer / simmer does not get it .If you dont get it you dont get it . Why should i everyone the pipline this gas taken work , instead whinning i actually did something about and who UE sims should be not the standard leached out plastic look same fernvus , the bus etc .I will aay what said the other member go to train station go and observe analyse a real train , the lighting , shadowing , shading , colour hue , depth and strength of that colour , its not rocket science. Yes my typing on my phone is subpar i have dsypraxia.Eveb so if you read take min think about what im saying its not hard to grasp
Your example picture of the 166202 is to dark, no details in the shadows (see the part under the carriage for example). So if you have used this picture as example, the outcome of your "pipeline" can't be that realistic. Your in game screenshots are also to dark as expected. Besides that, I also do not want photo realistic, as photo camera's can be pretty limited in the dynamic range. TSW, TSW2020 and TSW2 routes are also pretty limited with the dynamic range and screenshots of those routes can look like a photo, with the limitations of camera's included. Starting with TSW3, the image can look over saturated, however I think it's closer to real life then the pre TSW3 routes.
TSW lighting can be very bad, on that we all agree. Often too bright and washed out. I suppose that is what you are trying to fix. This "pipeline" of yours I suppose is something post processing, but people expected some actual Class 166 modifications, which I assume is the cause of confusion. Also the fact that you seem to be focusing on the 166 for the sake of this post, but this seems to be a general modification affecting everything, not only the class 166. The colors on your earlier screenshots seem better, that's true. But your later screenshots in the overcast weather seem way too dark for sure. Anyways, a big issue with TSW is that alongside bad light properties, material properties are also quite incorrect for most of the time. That's why many things shine incorrectly and feel plastic-y. Not something you can fix easily just by playing around with the colors.
