Here’s something i’ve been at since march, the Pennsey T1. For my reel i wanted a big old mechanical beast to show off, and one thing led to another, i got in over my head and ended up with a nearly bolt for bolt, pipe for pipe recreation of the big T. It’s not literally perfect, but it’s damn near close. Seeing as i’m nearly finished with the locomotive itself, i figured post it here for some feedback.
My aim is to get a job at Turn 10 or some comparable studio, then save up for an engineering degree. I’ve been told by serious people that this is good enough to get places, so we’ll see how it goes. i have a whole animated reel in mind, which i’ve storyboarded out. Its companion piece is also on this level, but that’s another story for another time.
So yes, please tell me what you think, if there’s anything that needs work, if you don’t think this is turn 10 level i’d very much like to hear why. Please be cruel, featherfooting around things never got anyone anywhere, so have at it.
My current plan is to have it blast by a railway crossing that my other project pulled up to, and have the T statically run on the
, so i don’t have to model a mile long stretch of forest or whatever just to show off the rigigng.
It’d be nice to do a static render based on This though. The warm backlighting through the steam and volumetric light coming off the headlight makes it feel like a painting, i think it’d come out pretty cool as a render
Well, as soon as i finish plumbing the FWH and brakes, it’ll be good to texture. Then i’ll do a less detailed tender, because frankly who cares about the tender, and do up some ok enviroments and do the render. I have to run some tests between cycles and vray though. Depends which gives me better smoke and steam results
Some folks asked for more photos so i took some more
This awesome project needs to go immediately to The Gallery!
As far as “smoke and steam” are concerned, remember that you don’t have to render everything at once and to use only one renderer to do it [all]. Good ol’ BI does some really good smoke, especially if you subsequently play around with it in the compositor (various overlapping layers with different frame-offsets, alpha, defocus, etc.). It is also good at the highly directional lighting that suggests late-light and photographer’s flashbulbs. These can be “comped in” to very good effect. You have multiple rendering approaches at your beck and call.
Well thanks. I still want to make the renders as down to earth as possible so i don’t have to juggle a billion versions in a billion programs in a billion layers. Plus i want the exhaust steam blasting up through the exhaust nozzle and through thick smoke in the smoke box, it’d be pretty hard to match up the blender scene with say, maya’s fluid sims while matching the lighting, camera settings etc unless it was vray, in which case what’s the point of going to maya
If there’s any shots in particular anyone would like to see, let me know and i’ll snap some
For smoke and steam, what about animated .PNG’s set to planes? You could find some good alpha’d footage online. I think for your purposes it will be lighter on the CPU as volumetric stuff.
No i want a shot of smoke flowing through the boiler tubes, around the smokebox baffling and up the stack with the exhaust, alpha plane cheese wouldn’t begin to cut it
Well thanks. Getting the sheet metal surface breakup was the hardest part, that took a day or two. I’m still split on the orange peel on the paint though.
Pictures from afar look perfectly smooth, like they buffed it to car paint levels of smoothness. But all modern photos show pretty distinct orange peel up close. I tried replicating the density of the orange peel with a tiling bump, but that just made the whole surface light up with aliasing, no matter how subtle the bump was. And without the orange peel, even at that scale, the surface comes off as really fake and CGish
