@august said:

When I was a teen I used to follow Model Railroading and was fascinated by articles that were tutorials on building models like this in brass and motorizing them. This work appears to involve many of the same skills and passions, without requiring a lathe or drillpress. I linger with pleasure over the photos. There is beauty here in your remembrance of some beautiful machines.

Thank you. The truth is I look over lots of paper model builds (mostly because the people building these models painstakingly document their work, making building individual pieces in 3D much easier, along with some factory blueprints). They're also very fun to build. I have many more renders here if you like- http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81%26amp;t=54436 (one of the images has a faulty valve gear, I know). They're all Eastern European locomotives

@leonmetalowiec said:

LZ ,are you Poles?

No, I'm not Polish. I live Hungary, but apparently I have some polish lineage or something.

btw, the Px48 in the render is a well known polish locomotive. http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Px48

Hey thanks! I also stumbled on another much older model (from last year I think). I considered uploading it on the warehouse at the time but it's much too large (about 40mb). Mostly because I didn't model very efficiently and I didn't care to reduce complex geometry or delete unseen faces. Anyway, here are a couple of renders.

Very cool. It's got a swiss cheese look to it, which might have been the point.

You too Ken! I don't comment much but I always look up on your awesome work!

Looks good but isn't the garage door much too close to the edge of the wall?

Nice. Seeing the first one, you might try to go for a haunted house interior sort of thing. Lots of dark blues, greens, spider webs and stuff like that. They always look good.

@unknownuser said:

:fro:
Why not an entiere clay render of the Locomotive?

No reason. I just wanted to do close-ups. And they were faster on my slow laptop.

Basically, a steam locomotive model that I've built. I didn't use plugins.

And a host of screenshots of the original skp file.

Thanks everyone. Since Dave originally said he did not see anything wrong with the sample model then I assumed that my Sketchup 7 is also if not entirely to blame, so I removed the skp file. I eventually isolated the places that were generating problems and remade most of the model from scratch.

Ok. It's a mess only when I use it (sketchup 7). The number one issue i'm having are duplicate faces. I push a face until it hits the opposite surface, but instead of disappearing and leaving an empty sliced area, it leaves two faces for whatever reason. Like in these screenshots. The second images are what the they look like after I pushed a face in the opposite direction.

Also, i get this on some faces but not all. Keep in mind that the face is flat. Doesn't triangulate completely, only shows those lines when i resize some objects. Never seen it before.

And I get many 'an error occurred. Would you like to fix it?' warnings. I tried removing parts of my model and rebuilding them but these core issues persist. I don't use plugins.

Long list of bugs that appeared after I exploded two groups and made them into one shape. Faces get extruded at an angle, even though all lines are straight. Faces sometimes can't get selected (instead, backfaces are selected). Hidden lines pop up and triangulate faces for no reason; and a bunch of other random stuff that are hard to put into words.

Newb question. Picture that I have a model divided into groups.

Is it preferred to have those grouped pieces 'closed' or should the faces that intersect with the rest of the model be left open?

To illustrate this, In Img 1 you have a face noted with 'A', which is the face from the box connecting to the cylinder. In Img 2 I deleted that face and don't have the face overlapping issue, but the white cube is now an 'open' model.

What approach is preferred in 3D modeling? Especially since I export a lot to other programs for rendering purposes. thank you

@gubermensch said:

Very impressive. How dare you call yourself a beginner!

thanks I've gotten better at modelling over time but I'm still a rookie at texturing/animating. which is why all of these models are clay rendered.

Thanks everyone. The second one was my most detailed model and needed the most amount of work, especially with all the cabin controls

Very nice! Love it. Did you do the texture work in sketchup or in another program?

A few steam locomotives and other rail-related stuff that I've created this year. Most of this stuff is very old. First half of the 20th century old (the vehicles, not the models). So far I have built many, but here are some of the better ones.

link for model on the 3D Warehouse if anyone wants it:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=45f9f9a2991b3c0b76d9bf960443503e&prevstart=0

That's about it. thanks for watching. All of them were built in Sketchup.

The first render is drop dead gorgeous. The second one is great also, but the first one stands out for being unusual. How did you do it?

Unfortunately I can't do that with my free version. I simply import my .skp into 3ds max, as it supports that format. But I'll try updating sketchup to v2013.

Anyway, thanks for the help. If anyone can please let me know how they convert their .skp models into usable .3ds I'd be very grateful. That's my primary issue. I mostly need this for blender but also to know that my many .skp models are usable outside sketchup.

Hey. Confused rookie here. I'm good with sketchup and I'm just learning 3ds max and blender.

I'm trying to export some native .skp models as 3ds/dae/obj. So far I've simply imported my .skp models with 3ds max, after which I export as 3ds. However, this method screws up the geometry somehow (although not according to max, which seems to display/render everything just fine).

Simple, illustrated example of my issue:

1. Built a sketchup thingy - http://s12.postimg.org/l1tgvzokd/io2.jpg
2. Imported/rendered it in max 2013 just fine - http://s15.postimg.org/ij5iubi6z/io1.jpg
3. Exported as 3ds (or dae or obj) formats
4. Imported into blender or any other free viewer. - http://s23.postimg.org/k2bj0kcxn/io3.jpg

What am I doing wrong?
Is there any good way of exporting native skp. files as usable 3ds models?