An old engine that I’ve been working on for a while. Unfortunately resources about the look is limited to some pictures and videos where it is hard to figure out the individual elements, which slows down the process of modelling quite a bit. The more I look at these videos the more unsatisfied I am about my creation. I hope once I texture it the modelling mistakes wont matter that much. So far only basic materials are applied.
The materials are just simple principled shaders without anything extra, basically there are three different materials that are only different in color, they have high reflectivity and all are metallic. IMO when you have reflective materials, multiple objects and an hdri to light the scene, it adds extra detail to your object. Proper texturing is in the plans, however I want to get more modelling done before I jump into that, so these mats are basically placeholders.
The hdri is from hdriheaven. It is one of the studio light hdris and, I also turned off the camera visibility to it.
Taken from the website that serves as my no 1 source for the modelling. The description reads:
This 4000 pound engine was built by Fairbanks Morse on January 8, 1920 and shipped out from their factory on February 7, 1920. The engine is a 15 horse power fuel injected Diesel and is water cooled from an external tank. It had many commercial applications including refrigeration, irrigation and oil line pumping, but this one produced electrical power to operate an induction motor driven line shaft as well as lighting in a machine shop.
Basically I googled old engine when I started because I thought they had a cool design and give me some steampunky ideas for future projects. Little did I know that the picture I used lakced 95% of the deatails, and the ones that were present gave me a false impression. I had to redo almost the whole thing step by step.
My main sources now are videos, and I eyeball everything. There is no useable blueprint as far as I know. Therefore the model is pretty disproportionate, missing a lot of details and I have no idea what connects to where and why, but I think it still looks cool. Instead of saying that this is that engine, lets just say it was heavily inspired by that Fairbank Morse model.
There are 94957 verts on the scene currently.
I dont know how to put wireframes on all 100 objects on the screen easily. Maybe when Im finished modelling the whole thing I enable wireframes on everything.
I almost done with the unwrapping which was a nightmare, and I started rigging which is even worse. (God, I hate rigging. It’s never cooperating with me.) Only a few extra meshes are left, and I decided to simplify a few things for the better of humanity (and mostly for myself, because I want to move on).
Basically, I need to attach the wheels with that smaller side part (no idea what its called). That is going to be challenging. Probably it will take another day.
After that substance painter comes into play. Hopefully that part wont devour that much time as modelling did.
This project has been extremely draining mentally for me. And I keep asking myself wether it worth the effort at all. Sure, I gained a lot of experience, but my output has been stagnant lately. I spent hours solving difficult modelling problems that wont even make a difference if I’ve done it just by shoving two primitive pieces together.
What are your thouths about this? Does it worth it to deal with difficult meshes for hours, instead of just puting three primitives togeter?
nothing wrong to puting primitives together.the clever use of modiferers can help alot,for example mirror modifer,arry,solidify,bevel ect as you maybe know.the inset tool is very powerfull too,to keep the mesh around a screw for example clean.just inset,then make a circle in it ect.
for your materials,at your reference pic,they have a very dirty rust look.you can mix rust for example, with the new AO shader.or if you want ,you can use copper, instead the black material ,even if the real thing doesnt have that,why not.
My idea now is to lower the gloss on the green painting because its crazy reflective. I’m going to take out the paint color variations because its not working the way a thougth. Furthermore I want to add more scratches and bumpiness on the paint.
The picture isnt low res, the material is poorly made. There isnt a clear distinction between the reflection of the paint and the reflection of the edge wear, not to mention I decreased the edge wear which gives a low res render. I just have to work on the material more. But a 2K texture set for test is a good idea.
