3D Modelling

Okay, so this thread looks like it will be my personal dumping grounds. I recently downloaded a beta version of Blender which features an amazingly fast rendering system called Eevee. What would have taken me a couple of hours to render with Cycles (2560x1440, 720 frames @ 48fps) took about 4 minutes with Eevee. Colour me impressed!


There are also some other cool features for rendering in general such as bloom which you could use to make that typical soap opera style lighting etc.

This is going to be the RHDR's No. 3 Northern Chief as on a recent trip to the UK, where I was fortunate to meet up with two of my friends, we visited the KESR together and the day after with only one friend we went to the RHDR and Northern Chief took us along the line for the whole day, even after getting off and on again several times. Eventually I will 3D print it in OO scale (so it will be closer to an N gauge loco than anything else probably)


I tried my hand at some photogrammetry programs hoping it would ease the process of making car models a little bit. It doesn't seem to like the input images I feed it, but considering this was reconstructed using only 4 pictures it is pretty good. Not good enough to try and fix/clean for a proper render quality model though.


Here's a goofy idea I had back when I was still at school which I always wanted to render but with minimal effort (understandably, it's not exactly something I want to pour hours of time into at this stage). The model came from a mobile game called CSR Classics.

The original idea was to make a boat with the upper half representing a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona which as you got further down the body would roll under and form a more conventional hull shape than the floorpan of a car. My mind being a superb wordsmith sealed the deal by naming it the Dodge Daytuna. Hardly clever, but it was still something I wanted to visualise. I intentionally used the wrong car for this render, a 1970 Plymouth Superbird, because I like the nose cone more and the Road Runner it was based on could be ordered as a convertible - for safety, as I wouldn't want anybody to be trapped by a low roofline/windows in the event of a roll over. It could be worth looking into further just for something different.


Test rendering in the beta Blender using what I have so far of my XA Falcon Ute project.


After a sleepless night I decided to start another new project. For this, I needed some good quality track. Using a GCR bullhead rail engineering drawing, looking at images of UK track and viewing some reclaimed UK sleepers for measurements yielded this quite convincing (IMO) model.


And of course I had to complicate things for myself. This is going to be a 1:1 scale 3D model of Broadbottom Station and the associated sidings, with a total length of 0.65km being modelled. I was extremely fortunate to find a high quality scan of a signalling track diagram, split in two parts and stretching in total roughly 3.2km. Using images of the real station in the 50s/60s I can approximate things missing from the drawing such as a 5th track which has either a goods or loco shed over it. My plan for the finished map is to use for more convincing renders than just plain backgrounds/transparency as with all of my previous renders.


And yes, that really is the same track model being repeated hundreds of times as well as the rails which I separated from the main model.


Please let me know what you think.