I have added the cover for the engine and the steering wheel. This just about completes the chassis. I have seen a lot of photos of model T Fords at this stage (plus or minus a few parts). There are so many of these photos, I’d say that over time the other bits simply fall off. Whereas these days you might see the odd lonely shoe on the side of the road, in the old days there were probably bits of model T Fords littering on the roadways until all that was left was the chassis.

Here are some photos of what I mean:

Below are images of where I am up to. Note that the colour of the car is blue to make the details easier to see. The final car will be black. The references for all of the model T’s that match my blueprints show a varnished wood panel under the windscreen. I can adjust the colour/saturation of the wood at the end if I need to.

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I have finished the radiator, I knew it would be tricky to work out (and by crikey it was!), but I have managed to get something that looks like a radiator. I also made up a simple gear box so that the drive shaft has something to connect to, and I modeled the bottom of the engine. These are things that can be seen in the side view of the blueprint so they should be made in case the car is seen on the side view at a low angle. I am not sure that I’ll ever make the engine, it can’t be seen. The model T has a fairly simple shaped engine (see below) but I’ll only think of doing it at the end after I see how the poly count is.

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I have worked more on the chassis, and included the fuel tank which won’t ever be seen, but wanted to model it anyway. I have a lot of reference photos so it isn’t hard to make the parts or see how they connect together.

The images below show where I am up to. It’s not easy to render black and make the parts stand out clearly from the shadows. There’s not much that can be done about it.

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I am quickly into another model, this time a Model T Ford.

Here are the blueprints:

Click the link below to read more:

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I have done as much as I can on the steam train. In the future I’ll finish inside the cab and make the tender. I’ll also create a railway scene (and some railway tracks!). That will be in the future when I have a computer that can handle it. The software crashes are too frequent so I am going to leave the train at this stage:

It’s time to look for something new. I don’t know what it will be, but I hope I can find more reference pictures than last time.

I’ll upload some more images of my train soon to my gallery. I need to create a gallery for my 3d models in my photo gallery. I’ll post a link to them here when the images are there. I’ll see if I can squeeze a little more out of my computer to get some rails under the wheels.

Well, I think the outside is finished, maybe a couple of small tweaks. I noticed something odd about the shape of the top green part of the headlight. Looks like I might have pushed an edge out of line at some point, probably not noticeable in the images below, but it won’t take me long to remake it.

Here are a few renders of the outside. Sorry I don’t have more close-up shots and different angles. Each of these images took about one and a half hours to render, and that’s with 2 computers rendering! I don’t know if I have the computer power to build the tender in this scene, I am up to just under 4 million polygons, and MAX is crashing every few minutes. I only have 2GB of RAM. I should have a minimum of 8GB RAM, but that would also mean running a 64bit system, which I don’t want to buy until next year. In the meantime I need to keep my scenes as much under 4 million polys as possible! I think I am reaching my computer’s limit!

Click on the images below to see the full sizes. Click on the image when it opens to make it bigger again if viewing in Firefox.

Shady side:

Sunny side:

I’ve got to do around the back of the train and the inside of the cab. Reference images are scarce, so I am not going to mess around with it. I am going to model the inside to look like it does in the back view (below), add a couple of gauges and be done with it. Otherwise I’ll spend hours and hours looking for photos on Google and come up with nothing. Already I have had a fair look.

Back view:

The side view shows a few extra things in the cab:

I’ve also been experimenting with turning on the light in the head lamp. It should be fun to come up with some evening/night scenes with a little fog to show up the light beams. 3ds Max crashes a lot when I adjust the lighting it is very RAM intensive. Bloody thing.

I have added a lot of the undercarriage now. I still need to add some suspension where you see gaps between the boiler and wheels.

The back end of the train is not finished, ignore it. I haven’t got the pole in the right place, the one holding the end of the hose/pipe. I’m getting to the stage where I am tired of having to work out from lots of references where every little thing goes. I just want to put it where it looks good and go and have a whiskey.

Here is the shady side (click on it – After it opens, click on it again to make sure you are seeing the full size):

Here is the sunny side (The John Deere steam train ):

Hopefully I can finish all of the things that are missing under the boiler, plus everything in the red boxes below, over the weekend so that I can start on the inside of the cab next week. I have no idea what the inside of this train is supposed to look like.

There sure are a lot of parts in this train. Never a day goes by where I don’t wish I started with this:

The wheels are done. They didn’t take very long, because I only had to make one wheel and then could shift+drag copies. By “shift+drag” I mean I select the wheel with the mouse, hold down the shift key, and drag the wheel to one side with the mouse and I have a copy.

Here is the result (click on the images):

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