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):
This is my 3rd work in progress posts. I have got most of the boiler area finished. I still have to add some hoses that run along rhe side of the boiler, and a kind of cylinder thing near the cabin. The final thing will be the front strut things that go from the front of the boiler to the flat bit in front of the boiler. I don’t know the names of these parts, I hardly know anything about steam trains. 
I model what I see.
After I finish those details, I’ll finish the front of the train and the inside of the cab. I don’t have any reference photos of the inside of the cab of this kind of train. There is a little detail in the drawings, but not much. I’ll have to go my own way and invent a lot of it myself, or go by some references of photos from other trains so that it isn’t total fantasy.
The wheels will come last. I’ll need to spend some time studying how they work, because I want to be able to animate them. I can make the shapes of the wheels and other parts from the drawings with little trouble, but if I want to animate the movement of the parts, I have to study how to rig it so that if I move one part, such as the main piston, everything else moves as it should without me having to touch it. It will be a big job, but I’ll learn a lot from it.
Here are the latest pictures of my steam train. Most of the shape is done, but there’s still a very long way to go.
Click on the images below to see a larger size.
This is my current long term work in progress (wip). I wanted to model a steam train, it’ll probably take about 2 months to finish this in my spare time. I’ll make other smaller things from time to time, but this is a long term background project.
I found these blueprints below, which is of a steam train with a very interesting shape. It is a steam train made by the now defunct Baldwin locomotive company.
After completing a fire hydrant in 3ds Max yesterday (following a tutorial), I decided it’s about time to stop having my hand held and see what I can make on my own, just looking at reference images.
I’m interested in making models that eventually could go together to make a grunge street scene. I thought I could start with a garbage bin. I looked in Google images to see if there was something interesting to model. I found this bin photo below:
LittleB calls this character Jeanie, it is modeled from Igor.
For a full HD size image, click here. After the image opens, click on it to make sure it is full size. Firefox first loads it so that it fits the window, but click the image to make it full size.
The texture on the background is not big enough for this full HD demo, so it looks stretched, but that is easily fixed by using a larger version of the image.
I did an animation. It took about 10 minutes to put together, once I made the character, but it took a whopping 40 hours for my computer to render the just 24 second clip. If Jeanie spoke, I would have to render another copy with a white mouth, making it 80 hours for a 24 second clip. That is just for a a small 600 x 336 pixel clip. Blu-ray 1080p is 1920 x 1080. The 1920 x 1080 still I posted above (full HD) took 18 minutes to render. So let’s see, I’d get about 3 movie frames an hour at 1080P, so it would take about 8 hours to render 1 second of video. This 24 second clip would take 192 hours or 27.4 days to render at full high definition. If Jeanie spoke, it’d be double that. If only I had a render farm…. Well, I do, but it is only 2 computers big making it only twice as fast. Half of 27 days is still pretty unacceptable.
Video: (I have a high quality version which is really sharp, but since it’s over 250mb in size it’s best I post this blurry low resolution 4mb thing)
I made a 3d milkshake cup today and decided to upload it to TurboSquid. turbosquid.com is a website that 3d artists use to sell their 3d models. People who need to buy models to use in video games they are making, or any other 3d projects such as movies and commercials, can buy these models. The 3d artists take a small cut of the sales, while turboSquid takes most of the money (unless you are an artist who has made a huge amount of sales). I would never give turboSquid most of my earnings after I did all the work. I am therefore selling my milkshake cup for FREE!
Unwrap UVW is a way of getting photo realistic renders of objects in 3ds Max, and other 3d applications.
It was my first time trying the Unwrap UVW modifier yesterday, I chose a very simple shape to unwrap – a box. The box was made using the dimensions of my Sandisk compact flash card. 3ds Max then mapped the faces of my “box” to make a template that looks like lots of rectangles, one for each face of my box. I could then open this template in Photoshop, and anything I put in those rectangle faces, would show up on my final image as a “skin”.
I photographed my compact flash card from all sides. I then, in Photoshop, pasted the photos where they were supposed to go on the template. I imported the template back into max, and 3ds Max applied this “skin” I made for my compact flash card to the box. Since 3ds Max made the template for the skin, it knew how to apply it, so instantly my compact flash card looked like it does in real life. Well, except that the photos are a little grainy because of low light, and I couldn’t be bothered looking for the batteries for my good flash.
Here it is, I hope you can see what I was talking about:
This is a follow up to my last post where I said I was getting back to using (learning) 3ds Max, and as you can see from the image on the left, I am not happy today.
In my previous post I showed three chess pieces I made – a pawn, a rook and a bishop. These were made following tutorials that were designed to introduce various methods one step at a time. 3ds Max is a difficult program to learn, I think mainly because there are so many hundreds or thousands of things that can be used (clicked on). It requires years of use to become competent enough to know how to do anything you want, just because there is SO MUCH to learn!
I am labouring the point of just how hard this software is to use, so that you won’t laugh when I say it took me NINE HOURS to create the knight, from a stupid tutorial that said at the start that it would take about ONE hour. It took me nine hours! That doesn’t include the sorry excuse for a horse that I created on my first attempt, which I abandoned almost halfway through, after 4 hours!