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.