Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

steam locomotive moving

polycounter lvl 10
Offline / Send Message
HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
Last review :image7.png





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"
loco.jpg
I choosed this model because I has a Markl

Replies

  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    OK the rigging is almost finished and it work !
    I must yet model the reverse lever and its command... but the harder is done ! :)

    locomotive3.jpg


    You can see a little animation of the mechanism here :
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfYTQHw_HVo"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfYTQHw_HVo[/ame]
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Today, a little more than boxes !
    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)
    locomotive9.jpeg


    This is the front door of the boiler. Some others parts must be added... but I'm already happy with it ! :)
    locomotive14.jpeg


    I'm very excited to go further :p
    See you soon for the next step !
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    It starts to take shape
    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?

    locomotive26.jpeg
    locomotive27.jpeg
    locomotive28.jpeg
    locomotive29.jpeg
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g6ZpqwLU3o"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g6ZpqwLU3o[/ame]
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Yeah ! The high poly is finaly done !

    locomotive35.jpeg

    locomotive36.jpeg

    locomotive37.jpeg


    And you can see a turn around here :
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JngKIRu3PDo
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    I finished the high poly of the inside of my steam locomotive ! :)

    locomotive49.jpeg
  • BertR
    Offline / Send Message
    BertR polycounter lvl 7
    Looks really good! Rig looks convincing.
    Was busy with a locomotive myself too a time ago so it's nice to see another one ^^
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Thank you BertR !

    What kind of locomotive do you do ? Can I see some screenshots ? :poly124:
  • sheckee
    Offline / Send Message
    sheckee polycounter lvl 9
    Lovely work. Planning a lowpoly?
  • dzibarik
    Offline / Send Message
    dzibarik polycounter lvl 10
    Congrats dude. The model looks really complicated.
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Thank you guys! :p

    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. ;)
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Ok, it's now time to low poly and baking !

    My goal for the low poly is something like 60 000 triangles.

    locomotive62.png

    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
    locomotive63.jpg
    locomotive64.jpg

    I hope you like it !
    C & C are welcome !
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    After the baking of the tender and the locomotive body, it was time to bake the separate pieces in a new set of map.

    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 :)
    locomotive66.jpg

    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:
    coinShape.jpg

    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.)
    wheels_tip.jpg

    Some images of my actual baking :
    locomotive72.png
    locomotive73.png
    locomotive70.png

    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 ;)
  • Karmageddon
    Offline / Send Message
    Karmageddon polycounter lvl 7
    Very nice! I went through soooooo much Johnny Cash when I made my train. We should have a 3D train model club and hi-five each other :D
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    And now,an overview of my third set of map!
    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.
    locomotive79.jpg

    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 !
  • wbronchart
    woah, that UV is insane! Good job!
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    wbronchart wrote: »
    woah, that UV is insane! Good job!

    Thanks wbronchart :p
  • dzibarik
    Offline / Send Message
    dzibarik polycounter lvl 10
    wtf at that UV. It's a piece of art in itself.
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    dzibarik wrote: »
    wtf at that UV. It's a piece of art in itself.

    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 :p
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Hi guys,

    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:
    locomotive80.jpg

    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 :
    locomotive99.jpg
    locomotive100.jpg

    And here the result of the normal map and the ambient occlusion map :
    locomotive104.jpg
    locomotive105.jpg
    locomotive106.jpg

    The next step is edit a little bit the normal map with photoshop :)

    Enjoy!
  • BertR
    Offline / Send Message
    BertR polycounter lvl 7
    Hey man, superlate reaction ^^
    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!
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    I used a simplified frame, because it's not often visible.


    I had this blueprint for beginning, it shows the profile of the frame with the rectangular holes.
    br24-200.jpg

    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 ! :p

    Finally, i used a simplified mesh, just a box with the match profile :
    locomotive108.jpg
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Your big boy is very impressive !
    I imagine that is already a lot of work !
    I need to see more :)
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Hi guys !

    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:

    locomotive130.jpg
    locomotive133.jpg
    locomotive134.jpg
    locomotive137.jpg
    locomotive138.jpg
    locomotive142.jpg




    And now the result with a full PBR pipeline <3 :

    locomotive121.png
    locomotive122.png
    locomotive124.png
    locomotive125.png
    locomotive126.png
    locomotive129.png

    C&C are appreciated !
    Thanks for reading.
  • Carlosan
    Offline / Send Message
    Carlosan polycounter lvl 10
    amazing !

    ty for sharing
  • Geti
    Offline / Send Message
    Geti polycounter lvl 2
    Beautiful work, great attention to detail. I've got a friend who's a train fanatic, going to see if she likes it, haha.
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Thank you guys ! Especially because I spent a lot of time on this project !:)
  • Geti
    Offline / Send Message
    Geti polycounter lvl 2
    My friend liked the train a lot, said she liked the details and could see you paid good care when making it!
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Hi,

    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 ! :) It's allowed me to bring a green complementarity and some touch of color with flowers.
    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: :p

    locomotive144.png



    And now the final pictures of the locomotive on the track :

    image7.png
    image3.png
    image4.png
    image5.png



    Some close up, to appreciate the work on details :

    closeUp1.png
    closeUp2.png
    closeUp3.png

    I will to create a video with turnarounds soon. Probably the next week!

    Thank you for seeing and reading!
    See you !
  • ghaztehschmexeh
  • thompsongast
    Offline / Send Message
    thompsongast polycounter lvl 4
    Just wow! Awesome work! Thanks for sharing this in the FB group as well :P
  • nathdevlin
    Offline / Send Message
    nathdevlin polycounter lvl 12
    Congrats on getting this finished. You've done a great job of observing and recreating all the details accurately. The detail level is consistent across the model with both geometry and texture usage. You can tell you enjoyed making this model :P
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Thank you a lot everybody !
    i'm very happy with your feedbacks! :)
  • HiernauxNicolas
    Offline / Send Message
    HiernauxNicolas polycounter lvl 10
    Hi,

    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! :p
    When I started the project for my folio, I never imagined that this loco will become so amazing. The thing I'm the most proud is the cooperation. Together, we achieved more than what we can create separately. It's very pleasant! 

    See the first driving tutorial here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysd5i1uXXBU
Sign In or Register to comment.