Modeling Trains - learning Sketchup
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Very nice--cool and fun picturs. Yes I find your renders are dark and I wish to see the details better.
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OK, setting asside my penchant for dramatic (moody) lighting, here's another view of my scene from another direction with the sun set to a bit closer to noon.
My renderings are typically at 3849x2400 resolution (twice my screen) so they have been reduced a bit to get them through the site's 1000 pixel limit. Below are two images cropped to aprox. 1000x1000 which may give you a bit better idea of the detail I see on my screen.
I rather enjoy the little bit of the scene I see reflected in the caboose's marker lights.
Once again, thanks for looking.
Jim
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My current rail road themed project is Kelso Depo.
Kelso Depo was built by the Union Pacific in 1924 and pretty much sits in the middle of the Mojave desert, over 20 miles from the nearest highway and 35 miles from the closest town. The building still exists and is now operated by the National Park Service.
The model is now about 75% complete and is geo-located.
More to come soon. Jim
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do you design for any railroad simulator ,too?
for trainz i have a sketchup plugin.
im sad about, that sketchup cant export animations (not movies) i mean real animations.
here a simple export from Lightup4sketchup to trainz.
lights and shadows will bake in the texture.
for this i dont need 3dmax.
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Hello,
Interesting images... looks like light and shadows are well handled.
But, no, so far, my models are static renders only.
The models are a bit large and for me fairly complicated mechanically, I'd love to see them move but I'm not sure how to describe the motions.
Also I've had a bit of a challenge getting 3dMax to render any animations - I think it doesn't like my computer. I can do large static renders but as soon as I attempt even a simple an animation, it crashes.
Jim
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than look at Eneroth Railroad System (ERS). ok the locos in this plugin is lowpoly..this is needed. otherwise your framerate will drop.
you could try highpoly..however the movement of your cars annd locos could be very slow.
when you design own tracks, ERS can help you to setup your cars and locos on this track.
your renderings look like LumenRT or Lumion
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=57831
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and here all videos via google
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I think for the moment, it's time to suspend SU modeling and begin assembling parts in 3DMax.
Here's where things stand this evening.
The station has a partial interior; floors, partitions and doors so I hope to be able to apply some useful interior lighting.
Cheers, Jim
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This is great. They certainly built a good size depot for the middle of nowhere. Is is possible to go in or look inside the building today?
Railroads really put a lot into building up the fantasy of the west, along with many depots that were fine buildings in their own right.
Great job on the tile roof. Did you have any plugins or methods that helped in that, or just brute force?
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Hello,
The depo still exists pretty much dead in the middle of no where. The rail road abandoned use of it in 1985 and subequently sold it to the National Park Service in 1992.
It is now fully, and very nicely, restored inside and out and serves as the visitor center at the Mojave National Preserve which is a 2,500 square mile preserve. A park larger than either the state of Deleware or Rhode Island. If you look at Google images of Kelso Depo, you can see how well done it is.
And yes, the tile work was strictly brute force. I wasn't sure I could pull it off but it wasn't too difficult and seems to have worked pretty well.
Jim
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jim if you want, you can share your work in the 3dWarehouse.
Pullman Buildings look very nice ,too
i have seen in this week a movie about the time around the May/10/1869
The Golden Spike ceremony held at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell.
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The building looks great!
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Hello folks,
Here are a couple renderings including my Kelso Depo model.
The backround mountains are images I made on site two weeks ago, the trees are free models from Xfrog.
The third image is an enlarged detail showing roof tiles, awnings and double hung windows, gutter and downspout detail and decorative bandsawn rafter tails.
I hope you enjoy, thanks for looking.
Jim
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Hello all,
My latest project is nearing completion... this time the small but fairly fussy B&O depot at Point of Rocks, Maryland.
It was modeled from the photos and drawings found in the Historic American Engineering Record Survey housed on-line at the Library of Congress. I have also consulted other on-line images of the building which still is in use.
Jim
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Sweet. Yes fussy. Extra decoration or contrivances seem to be features of depots--almost like follies. As if the small building needs extra help to express how fine the destination is. We had many small historical depots in our area that are gone now. Swept away with the public transport. Now a new train is going in and a new depot near our house with it's own idiosyncrasies.
Very cool model. Would like to see rendering and close-ups. Thanks for sharing!
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Oh I missed your depot renderings of the UP desert depot. Very well done!. Good colors on the tile and all. I like the desert mountains in the background. I had expected the trains to be along a platform at the back.
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Hello pbacot,
Thanks for the comments.
Kelso is a bit of an odd depot, not really serving traditional depo functions. For example it has minimal ticketing and baggage support and no waiting room or platform. I gather that in the days before air conditioning waiting in the shade under the arcade was the best option.
The depo served two customers: there was a dinner operated 24-7 for passengers on trains without dinning cars and recreational facilities and housing for the railway workers who ran the water / refuel stop and the helper engines that pushed trains over the hill to Los Vegas.
I've started on the material tweaking and environment for renderings of the Point of Rocks depot, but it will be a while before I have much to post.
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Another fine model.
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It's been a while since I posted anything, partly from my need to earn a living, partly because I needed to work out the shingles on the station and partly due to inertia.
In any case, I've finally completed a few renderings of the Point of Rocks, Baltimore and Ohio train station in Maryland. The model is geo-located on terrain extracted from Google.
An overall view... working out the curving track was one of the challenges.
A bit of a detail. The paving, brickwork and stone bands are textures, the slate shingles have been modeled, painfully, one at a time with the coursing and patterns as close to the photos of the actual station as possible.
...and of course we need one of my extra dark images, imagining what it would look like arriving late at night.
I hope you enjoy.
Jim
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The night shot is perfect.
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Good evening,
Just finished another project, a model of a 70 ton 2 bay covered hopper.
The model is based on a fairly schematic engineering drawing and a collection of photographs of the actual cars. This type of car carried various granulated or powdered industrial materials.
This model of car was used by a number of railroads in the 1950s with minor variations. I picked the Norfolk Western version because I liked the inverted V cut in the side between the hoppers and like the pale gray color they used.
Here’s a three view composite from 3DMax. As you can see little additional color / texture work was needed moving it into Max, mostly adding more realistic metal surfaces.
I really like hoppers because I can expose a fair amount of detail in the open ends. In this view in addition to a lot of piping, you can see the reserve air tank and below that the brake valve mechanism.
On the other side of the car, you can see brake cylinder and the levers used to actuate the brakes.
Here’s the 70 ton hopper coupled into my switch train.
And finally, the switch train crossing the Gloucester River draw bridge on a sunny summer afternoon.
As usual, I had a lot of fun building this little car.
Jim
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