Adding Lanterns

Tonight I played around a little bit, adding detail to the front of the train car. All three lanterns won't wind up on the final model. They're on there now so I can look at different sizes and placement. I'm liking the shape of the top one the best. It's really the only one that has much of a shape. The other two are closer to the reference materials I've been able to find but they really don't stand out at all as being interesting to look at.

One thing that may end up being an issue is, what's the source of the light coming from these? James and I had talked earlier about every streetlamp having its own steam generator. That could be overkill on these lamps, but maybe something as simple as a pipe from the main boiler to the lamps would be enough. I'll give that a shot and see.

I think next steps are re-addressing all of the wheels and then figuring out axles & transitions and things. A lot of that will be hidden, but it needs to be addressed, at least a little bit.

Cheers.

Adding A Cattleguard

The cattleguard is the big addition for this post, not a very big addition in general, but it's what's new. It was a tricky thing to build and I'm not sure that I'm going to keep it in its current incarnation. I may rebuild it after looking at some good train reference.

Obviously there's only half a train here, but once I get it in a good place, I'm planning on mirroring the geometry over to the other side.

Okay, more to come.

2nd Pass At A New Train Body

So the deal is that I had to rebuild the geometry of the train base. The way I'd built it before, relying pretty heavily on the Bevel Plus tool, wouldn't support the level of detail this shot is going to need.

Today I rebuilt the body about three times, trying to get a decent base mesh. It's not that complicated of a shape, but I was having a fair number of issues with it. Here's the wireframe-on-shaded.

I'm not entirely happy with what I've got here, particularly the lower wheel supports. The smoothing on them is rather unattractive. But I've got an unsmoothed copy saved if I feel like I can't save this one. The railing was just done on a lark. There will be a railing, but probably not one with the snaky endings you see above.

Progress does indeed progress - very, very slowly. I'm dying to take a week off of work and concentrate on this project only but I don't think it'll happen too soon.

Train Base Tests

Two build-outs of the train body, still grasping for what it's gonna look like.

I have found some inspiration, however, in the form of The Lore of the Train. I found it at my local used bookstore (The Iliad, one of the top three used bookstores I've haunted) for a measly $10. I wasn't looking for a train book but there it was. Alas, I have no scanner, but trust me, it's filled with brilliant line orthographic line drawings of some really incredible trains. I am using an illustration of The North Star, built in 1837 by Robert Stephenson and Co. as my main reference as I move forward and I think that it's really going to make all the difference.

The model above needs a ton of smoothing and more detailing but I'm really happy with this mini-breakthrough. Next steps include changing the wheels, adding another railing, adding elements to clearly delineate the front from the back and more and more detailing.

Gonna call it a night for now but expect more updates this week.

CB15 WIP 3

So, continuing from the last post, here is the window in position. From this render, you really get a sense of the variety of detail levels this building includes. The first floor of the wall facing the camera (the one with the ornate wrought iron widow covering) will be detailed to a fairly high level. In other areas (almost everywhere else) the building is only seen from a distance, making additional modeling detail unnecessary.


Due to the very high poly count of the window, it was modeled in a separate scene file. While I was putting the window together I set up a small backdrop to test how things were progressing, and how well the window would work in context. Here are a couple of those test renderings. Again, these are only tests and do not represent the look of the final scene.

CB15 WIP 2

These pictures are elements of the wrought iron which will cover the window the camera passes through. These are a great example of what I was talking about in the previous post regarding the challenge of having multiple levels of detail within a single building. In the case of these elements they will be very close to camera, and as such they are extremely high resolution. I have included a snapshot of the mesh to illustrate this point.

The second picture is an example of what this might look like with texture and lighting in place. This was done to insure that the model would hold up to scrutiny in its final form. Just something quickly put together for test purposes.

CB15 WIP 1

This is a sample of the next building underway in the project. This building is the one the camera passes through before revealing our heroine. After panning along the front of Building CB14, the camera enters this building from the small square window visible in the second image. It then briefly arcs through the building's first floor and exits through the wide bay window at the front of the building. This building is interesting because it contains many different levels of detail, according to which parts are visible throughout the scene. Some elements exist only to create interest when the building is seen from far away, while other, more detailed elements will be seen up close. So the challenge is not to over develop elements which will not be seen in the shot.