some minor confusions while i work out how to make wagon mods (SOLVED)

Not really sure what prompted me to want to make mods, I've never been particularly good at art, or had the patience for it either, but I decided I wanted to expand the rather limited library of mods for New Zealand (my home) as best I can given rather limited technical documentation on the wagons/locomotives here (least not without paying for them which seems absurd)

anyways, getting to the point.

I've "mostly" succeeded thus far, the model actually looks pretty alright, the texturing I'm not so sure on, I'm no artist but the model editor does a good job of refining the flat colours. the cargo however is where I'm struggling.

for the record, I'm doing a logging wagon, based off the chassis of a container wagon that I might do separately later

initially I struggled to even load cargo onto it because the model editor doesn't create a "cargo bay". I eventually worked out I can add the entry manually via the lua copy/pasting the lines from one of the basegame wagons then tweaking the BB as needed.

but now my current problem is how the cargo appears on my wagon

Setting the child-id to 0 causes the cargo to appear in the correct spot (though in honesty I'm going to need to do a custom load if I want to make things look appropriate, but at this stage I'm more concerned with getting the wagon functional and out there)

So uhm, how exactly do I fix the cargo. (I'll try find a way to get a screenshot posted here with the aforementioned "enormous cargo")

I feel stupid for needing to ask, because it's probably painfully obvious what needs to be done but I don't really have the patience to trial and error anymore and just want the mod done.

Nah, I've tried to crop the screenshot or reduce the resolution but the file size won't go down so I'm not going to be able to share a screenshot, so hopefully you guys/gals are able to work out what I mean. *shrug*

*edit* I realize that for whatever reason there's a section missing from my post that was actually explaining my issue *facepalm* so the issue I'm having, and unable to attach a screenshot of is that when changing the child-id to anything not 0 the cargo appears large and very far off into the distance, the transport fever website or any of the modding guides I can find don't adequately explain some of the specifics of making these wagons function so I'm unsure how to fix the issue and make the cargo appear in the cradles properly, whilst actually appearing in-game (and truth be told I WILL need to make a custom cargo load at some point which I anticipate as being as labyrinthine as setting vanilla cargo loads

Finally found the solution.

after banging my head against the wall on this one I remembered saving this thread Does the scale of a mesh matter? (MDL file) (solved)

thinking "well surely this will be useful at some point" and indeed it was.

checking the model's lua file I see this line.

transf = { 100, 0, 0, 0, 0, -1.6292067812174e-05, -100, 0, 0, 100, -1.6292067812174e-05, 0, 0, 0, 0.32993429899216, 1, }

which did indicate an issue on the blender side of things

resetting/applying the parts scale didn't seem to work, but it got me onto the right track, fiddling with some of the FBX export settings (Blender 5.1) i found that ticking

-Use Space Transform

-Apply Transform

And setting to Apply Scalings to (FBX Units Scale)

resulted in the cargo bay applying correctly with correct rotations. Though the axle's did have to be rotated and position tweaked manually (made a few attempts to fix that via blender to no avail) not overly an issue....

For all Intensive Purposes I got my wagon working properly, it's hardly a showstopper. textures are meh and it needs custom cargo but I'm fairly happy with it. can revisit it at some point and refine it.

New Zealand Rail's "FE Log Wagon"