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):

Read the rest of this entry »

This is my 4th update for my 3ds Max work in progress, a Balwin steam locamotive. If you missed the other posts, click on the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Click the link below to see the rest of this post:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this very interesting website with photos of decaying things from yesteryear, such as old steam trains, machines and buildings. I highly recommend that you take the time to check it out: [Link]