Oh, I Know You Love My Little Updates!

This is somewhat close to where the camera ends in the final shot.



This is just another angle, showing the new brackets and maybe some other new stuff. As I model this, I re-look at lots of pieces of geometry and I worry that I'm going to have to remodel tons of this thing when it's time to UV map & texture. I may be wrong. But, let's face it, I am not "Mr. I've Been Poly Modeling For The Last 10 Years." This thing has got to be full of rookie mistakes. I just hope they're not so large as to be deal-breakers on down the line.

One or two more posts and I'm moving on, I think.

Cheers.

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.

Another Tiny, Tiny Update

So it's a....steam engine tractor-y-type thingy now!?!

Yeah. So get over it already.

I'm somewhat embarrassed that my updates are so freakin' tiny, like "hey, I spent 15 minutes modeling, check it out!" That's what they feel like and, in many respects that what they are. I've been prohibited by various personal issues (none bad) from working on this much at all lately, hence this cool object - one object in an entire scene of objects - is turning into a Sisyphean hurdle. I should be able to knock this sucker out in a couple days, tops, with room to revisit it later for tweaks.

But this is the pace it's coming along at. I have to just deal with it, model when I get time, try to make more time and stay positive that his project is, indeed moving forward. And I have to keep posting. This blog is a great tool for me to gauge how the work is going and unless I'm using it, ain't nothin' getting gaged.

Oh, and why am I still working on this when in my last post I said I was moving on? Well, me & James, we talked and coming out of it, it seemed best to take this sucker closer to final before moving on. So, in three or four months, I'll have a finished model of the steam engine/clocktower. Hooray three or four months! (That's supposed to be sarcasm. Let's hope that time bears out its un-seriousness.).

Don Ho Loves Tiny, Tiny Bubbles...

...and I apparently love tiny, tiny updates to the clocktower.




I'm officially making the decision to move on. The clocktower isn't done but right now I feel like it's as done as it needs to be, given how "undone" so many other parts of the scene are.

A quick to-do list for me when I return to this is as follows:

• Add more steam engine elements to the top of the train car.
• Add tubes plugging this whole assemblage into the pavement surrounding it.
  
• Add detail to the body of the train car.
  
• Remove polys that no one's ever gonna see.
  

Those refinements are all well and good and I'm happy to do them but I've spent enough time working on this and I've been away from the scene proper for far too long. I need to spend a little bit of time with the big picture, to make sure that all this modeling has someplace to live.

Cheers.

I Am Taking Too Long...

...to finish the clocktower.

Nevertheless, here are a couple more WIP's.




I'm just trying to streamline it a bit and have it make a bit more sense. More of the pipes are actually connecting to tanks and boilers and whatnot and the smokestacks all connect to something that, in some world, might conceivably create smoke.

The uber-basic peaked roof is a stand-in. That's what I've got to sort out next. After that, the train chassis gets a 2nd pass. Then I'm moving on to a building or something else in the scene. Frankly, I need to kick my arse in gear and put this sucker to rest.

So, this is the deal. I'm loving the occlusion renders and the more time I work on just the model, the more I like it and want to tweak it out in dozens of different ways.

Oh, and one thing RE the two frames above, they show a slight difference in how the back of the clock mechanism is treated. In the top one, the clockworks are fully exposed. In the lower one, I've built a back plane for the clockworks. My thought behind that was that it might mellow out the complexity somewhat and allow the clock faces to read as coherent shapes. I don't know if it works at all.



But I get a little bit worried when I throw it into the scene. I've got to take into account that the level of detail on it vs. the rest of the buildings is huge, but sometimes I wonder if it doesn't fit.

In the last three frames I threw on textures that were already in the scene, but that are by no means final textures. I guess that helps a little bit. Still, the whole structure is so spindly and intricate and....just plain odd. Of course, it's supposed to be odd. It's a different object than all of the others in the shot. But there's a line between being different and being part of a different world. I'm afraid that I'm really close to that line.

One last note is that the camera move may need to change a bit. The last frame is not from the active camera and it's really the only one that lets us see the tower.

Hmm. A lot of second guessing, a lot of thinking that sometimes your babies are monkeys. I'll explain what that means a little later.

Clocktower Updates

I'm too tired to talk much about these. They show some improvements but also need work. I'll get on that as soon as I can.

Modeling Clock Faces

I jumped from the rough clock face Illustrator designs into the modeling and I'm okay with the results. I'm not through the moon, though, as the scale on them probably needs some tweaking. It's hard to tell how much of the detail I've put into these is going to show. If it's just going to get lost, all those beveled edges and extra gears are gonna have to go.

I'm also wondering if the style I picked is too complex for where the tower sits in the scene. I'd been thinking that as it's so large (to scale the clock face is a good 5' tall), I could use one of the more detailed clock concepts. I'm not sure that that's the case, looking at this first pass. Still, I don't have the back of the clock faces figured out, nor are there any textures on these. There's probably a lot I can do to make these current designs work a bit better in the scene. I will try and do some of that tomorrow. No promises, though, as it be a holiday and all.

Cheers.

Oh, one shout-out I wanted to toss out was to Davvey, over on Highend3d. I used his pretty amazing Gear Generator MEL Script for some of the cogs in the clock face. I didn't dive too deeply into it but what was great is that it gave me correctly interlocking teeth on a couple of the cogs. Thanks, Davvey!

Clock Faces, Round One

I'm too tired to type much, so I'll let these incomplete clock face explorations do the talking.

Cheers.

Thinking About Clock Designs

Based on James' last post, I've decided not to stress about the base of the tower. I did a little bit of new modeling, concentrating on the actual clock part of the clock tower, then decided that I needed to go back to the drawing board. Literally.

So instead of pushing around polys and CV curves, I spent the better part of the night surfing the web's best watch porn site, The Watchismo Times and making sketches for the clock face. I've got some drawings that I like. I'll turn them into Illustrator art tomorrow and pick one or two to move forward on modeling. The clock face is, in some ways, the focal point of the clocktower. As such, it should look damn cool.

The images over on Watchismo are so freakin' good, if I make something even 60% as good, we're gonna be stoked.

Cheers.

Clocktower Screens

I feel like I've been modeling my arse off and that I still have soo, sooooo, soooooo much more to do on this.

I did take the last three days off of modeling. I've been working from home, which is great in a ton of different way, but it makes getting work done after work that much harder. After sitting at my one desk for ten hours, I really don't want to sit here for another four. I love my desk, and my home, but I need a break from it sometimes. What I need is a decent laptop, so that I can leave this room and spend the evening modeling in the living room. I am accepting donations for the laptop fund. It's currently at $0.00.

So, about the screens.

I'd been unhappy with the legs/feet of the clocktower when I first posted shots of it, so I went in a different direction with it. After looking at a lot of steam engine photographs, I thought it'd be interesting to have the base of this thing be an old, rusty train engine. I'm not even 50% done with the modeling of the train chassis but I'm not sure that I love it. It may not be the right solution for this one piece. I'm gonna spend the rest of the night away from it and see what I think of it tomorrow.

What I'm finding is that not having done proper concept art for the 'tower, modeling is going very slowly. Every piece that I'm building I'm figuring out as I go along and I feel like I'm probably not getting the absolute best results I could ask for. If I don't like the train parts when I look at this tomorrow (and after talking about it with James), I may hit the paper for a while.

Cheers.

Been Doing Some Modeling

I've walked away from the camera, for the time being. Instead I've been working on the clocktower, which is the central feature of the plaza we see in the first shot.



The first two stills are from the active camera view, the third is more of a "money shot" to show off some of the upper parts of the tower. It's still far, far from being finished. I had a couple of concept drawings to work off of, but they were unspecific for some of the features so I spent a fair amount of time trying this & that out as I modeled.

The obvious question is, do the gears work? Uh, yeah, they'll move and all but they won't really "work," so to speak. No gear will actually be driving anything else but they'll all move as if they have real purposes. That's the plan for now, at least.

Tired. Goin' to bed now. More screens in a day or two.