steam locomotive moving
polycounter lvl 10
Last review :
Hi everyone,
My project in this thread is to create a steam locomotive, and then, animate the wheels mechanism. (It's a personal project for my porfolio)
This is the reference: the "DRG Class 24"
I choosed this model because I has a Markl
Hi everyone,
My project in this thread is to create a steam locomotive, and then, animate the wheels mechanism. (It's a personal project for my porfolio)
This is the reference: the "DRG Class 24"
I choosed this model because I has a Markl
Replies
I must yet model the reverse lever and its command... but the harder is done !
You can see a little animation of the mechanism here :
[ame="
I began the high poly of my locomotive, and this is the result at the moment.
I'm satisfied with the wheels. I modelized in separated pieces for more facility and get perfect joints without artefacts. ( The difficulty was to create the reinforcements properly)
This is the front door of the boiler. Some others parts must be added... but I'm already happy with it !
I'm very excited to go further
See you soon for the next step !
In a few days, it can be finished !:)
It remains just the brakes, the command panel and the "tender" to modelize :poly121:
I'm very happy to be close of the my goal : find documentation and large pictures was not easy. It's easier to find information of the last car of this year ! ^^ Therefore, I imagined some hidden details, but it looks quite good
I actually makes all details, because I want a beautifull high poly :poly124: and I don't know yet the size of my future normal map... I hope a 2048 for the body, an other which tiled for the pipes, and an other little one with alpha blend for glass and thin pieces like valves or maybe the sticks of the wheels... What do you think about that ?
Do you have any comments or tips for the future?
[ame="
And you can see a turn around here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JngKIRu3PDo
Was busy with a locomotive myself too a time ago so it's nice to see another one ^^
What kind of locomotive do you do ? Can I see some screenshots ? :poly124:
Yes sheckee, I'm already working on the lowpoly and the baking. And my first results are quite good.
I will post the result soon.
My goal for the low poly is something like 60 000 triangles.
This is the tender and the locomotive body with uv's and wireframe.
Each UV set is a 4096 at the moment. I planned two other uv sets: one for detached pieces and an other one for the control pannel.
Finaly I will use 2 other little textures: one for the pipes and an other one for glass with alpha.
Bold edges : UV borders
Light green bold edges : harden edges
I hope you like it !
C & C are welcome !
I use a 2048² for each separate pieces except the pipes.
For pipes, I mapped its UVs on a flat place of my locomotive body (colored in blue on the screenshot), like that I spare a texture
The challenge here was to connect each part with the locomotive body. I didn't want to have a juxtaposed effect. I searched some tips to hide that.So I used a lot of "coin shape" to minimize the impress of low poly in the interpenetrations. The eye is focused on the rounded specular and don't see anymore the edges of a 6 faceted cylinder! :poly124:
An other tip in this set of map was the wheels.
I modeled in my 3d model a very interesting detail : The specular highlight created by the connexion between rim and spokes. I had to transfer these in my normal map. The best way I found to do that was to create a low poly for rim, an other lowpoly for spokes but I baked them together.The hub is a separate piece too. ( The three low polys are not welded, just juxtaposed.)
Some images of my actual baking :
The next step is continue to clean the normal map, and remake the bolts ( because some baked bolts are a little bit ugly ^^ )
See you soon for the next step of this amazing project
It contains all separate pieces except the pipes.
It's already symmetrical and overlapped for the two sides.
Final map will be a 2048², but I work with a 4096².
My technic to pack it :
Step 1 : separate :long and thin pieces, round pieces, square pieces and rectangular pieces and then group bizarre pieces.
Step 2 : to each groupement, class the pieces from the biggest to the tiniest
Step 3 : you have now the best overview ever on all your pieces and you can begin to fill your UV square.
Step 4 : observe and always choose into your groups biggest and the more difficult piece to arrange.
Step 5 : be patient and continue like that ; it's beautiful ! xD
Step 6 : Always arrange in a square form tiniest than your total UV space. Personally I begin in the bottom left corner.
Step 7 : If you finish with a tiniest beautiful square than your UV space, you can now scale it to fill all the UV space !
Step 8 : be happy, it's a good job !
Thanks wbronchart
I think it's a very important part of the work.
For me video game is " make a lot with almost nothing" or "Less is more".
I can easily improve my texel ratio of 10-15% when I arrange like that. And yes it takes me some time, but if I compare to the entire spend time on, the process: It's less than 1%... So less than 1% of time, to gain 10-15% of detail density > I think it's a good opportunity to improve the model
A lot of time without posting, but I had some difficulties to integrate my model in Railworks, especially with the normal map. Normal map is managed by the kuju shader a little bit differently that other shaders in common engines.
So, i had to rebake my model until I corrected all artefacts.
I will not have this problem in my further trains, now I understand how it work ! ^^ But the first time, it was a little bit strange.
Take a look on my first try in the Railworks engine:
It looks like a Gouraud shading ... But this normal map was already tested in other engines (like Maya, 3dsMax, Marmosset, Unity) and worked perfectly...
It seems the Kuju shader compute normal with a mathematical aproximation ... And the result is a normal map very flat. To correct this I had to break the normal of each corner and the boundary of each coplanar faces. In fact, my low poly have a lot of hard edges, and it looks like a low poly which don't use normal map...
So after something like hundred rebaking, i get this !
Now it's almost clean as into Marmoset.
You can see here the final result of the new normal map :
And here the result of the normal map and the ambient occlusion map :
The next step is edit a little bit the normal map with photoshop
Enjoy!
This is the one I'm working on (union pacific big boy) http://bert-ruiter.nl/item/bigBoy/bigboy_140714.png
I'm wondering, what exactly for kind of geometry do you have between the wheels? Just a box? In the reference I'm using that space is always black due to the shadow / photo :P
Bakes turned out really nice, just as the uv's!
I had this blueprint for beginning, it shows the profile of the frame with the rectangular holes.
After that, I read in some documentation that the frame was build with several metallic beams, and so it is normal to have some holes. This document explain too that the loco has suspension, but they are always hidden on the pictures.
So, my advice is, if you dont found picture, dont hesitate to search written documents, some times the answer is hidden in sentences !
Finally, i used a simplified mesh, just a box with the match profile :
I imagine that is already a lot of work !
I need to see more
The texturing is now done ! I used the awesome beta of the Quixel suite
Ddo is very very impressive and quick when all your maps are good quality.
Take a look underneath :
This is my result in Train Simulator 2014:
And now the result with a full PBR pipeline
C&C are appreciated !
Thanks for reading.
ty for sharing
I finished my little diorama !
The project is now ready for my portfolio.
I know a good presentation is all, so I wanted to do something interesting to present my train. But nothing too big, because the master piece is the loco and big environment takes a lot of time.
So I began to think about something quick and efficient... And I had the idea of an abandoned track in summer !
To begin, I took a good picture of a track in summer, and I tried to reproduce all plants I saw.
After some hours, I have got this:
And now the final pictures of the locomotive on the track :
Some close up, to appreciate the work on details :
I will to create a video with turnarounds soon. Probably the next week!
Thank you for seeing and reading!
See you !
i'm very happy with your feedbacks!
The locomotive is now available on Steam thanks to my associate Bernd Diehl and 'Romantic railroad' ! He created all the non-graphical content to get a fully interactive locomotive in game!