R Reynolds

Working out the details on the facade of the bar. Since Hopper decided to "punt" when it came to the wall to the right of the entrance, I decided to add the antithesis of fine art...commercial art. An unambiguous, detailed example of craftsmanship...a beer ad. It makes sense to me, since if there had been an ad painted on that wall I suspect it would have been the last thing Hopper would include.

I can see why...that's pretty impressive. But it depends on having enough photographs of the real world texture to cover over 30 ft. of a facade that never existed. I prefer a combination of procedurals and decals. I made a first stab with some Darktrees.

From my standpoint "loose" is a nice way to say imprecise (see top section of attached image). At any rate I've decided to make the lower (green/yellow) facades covered in heavily aged painted stucco...somewhere between the two lower examples. I only have a vague idea of how I'm going to build such a texture.

Construction on the first floor continues and after spending a few hours moving the walls and windows of the dry goods store around to try to match the shadows, I've decided to treat the picture more as inspiration than rotoscope. There's just too many missing details and discrepancies (like two large sheets of window glass forming a 90 deg. corner with no visible framing at the joint). I also had to erect a dark backdrop (whose edge is visible in the left most window) behind the camera so there is almost nothing being reflected by the windows to obscure the details.

First floor "roof" and decorative columns complete. I agree Mark. He's taken some liberties likely due to his light source not being fixed in space. (Why didn't he just paint faster? ) Notice the location of where my sign's shadow ends on the wall and compare it to the same location in the painting. There is a darkened line that almost matches but it appears he then extended the shadow beyond that point. And since I'm nitpicking, look at the fire hydrant's shadow which tends to point toward the second (!?) curb and yet the barber pole's shadow is essentially parallel to the building. I'll treat the signs are like every other detail that isn't in the painting; make stuff up. I'll probably try to match the words as best as I can but since I don't have to defend my choices to any expert from the "Art" world, I have lot's of freedom. And I'm very suspicious that almost every window sign is three lines long; first line is short word/long word; second line is short word centered; third line is long word/short word. Sure, that's believable. I like the sound of "LARGENTO'S BARBER EMPORIUM".

The short, flip answer is ... like anything else, spline by spline; build a box with holes in it, then you fill those holes with windows and doors, see attached semi-wire frame. However I assume you're referring to the texturing details. The bricks are a material using the indispensable plug-in BitMapPlus, see attached colour render. I have a basic material that sets down 8" bricks and the location of their mortar joints controls the position of all corners, doors and windows. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well I was able to match Hopper's composition with my brick work. The window sills and headers simply stick through the brick patches but their edges are also aligned with the brick joints. The detailing on the front surfaces of the corbels (those arched supports that seem to hold up the overhang along the roof line) are normal decals generated from models built for that purpose. There is little in the original painting to support those exact details but the Street View images from Largento showed that they can get very ornate. So I felt it was justifiable. The rest is just build/copy/paste modeling.

The modeling for the upper floor is complete. It was tougher than expected to deduce the third dimension of things based on their shadows so I ended up just making educated guesses. (My thanks to Mark Largent for his link to a building in New York on Google Street View. That was really helpful.) And there's no way I can reconcile the angle of the sign extending from the left of window #3 and the length of its shadow. Hopper more or less got the perspective of every component correct except for that sign. But hey, I'm no artist. I'm sure he had a good reason at the time.

The single frame render chugs along through passes 1 to 4 and then somewhere in pass 5 (percent complete has been at 100% for some time) the progress icon stops walking and the screen goes translucent white. A message appears saying "program has stopped responding". I had no other programs running at the time.

Win7-64bit, 16Gb; when the render stopped, the Memory meter read just below 4Gb. I submitted the consolidated/embedded project to A:M Reports at the beginning of the month. Hopefully Steffen will solve it.

Stian asked, The closest I have to "everything" in one shot is the attached image. When I dropped my locomotive and tender onto the track, 17e crashed near the end of the render. Resource Monitor says that project consumes about 160 Mb.

Same model in both left and right images but better (IMO) textures, lighting and setting; ten years between renders. I'd be willing to bet there's nothing in the 2013 versions that couldn't have been done in 2003, it just took that long to motivate myself to sweat those details.

Every time I've added another object to my city street back lot, I've been doing successful test renders. Adding the 21st object, my locomotive & tender, caused the choking. In a different chor the loco renders successfully, so I assume it`s this particular combination. During the failed render, with only A:M running, the RAM usage never went beyond 3.5Gb on a machine with 16 so I don`t think I ran out. That would likely be the sky backdrop (144 Mb) but that`s object number one in all my other chors that render happily. The good news is I still have FTP access so I can recreate the directory structure and upload all the components folder by folder without trying to upload one huge zip file.

Years ago I had FTP access to the Hash server. I'll have to e-mail Jason. No, I only want to render this one frame as a test and I can't get it done.

I'm trying to submit a bug report to Hash Reports but the max. attached file limit is 26,214k. I'm making v17e choke during a single frame render with a combination of models, materials and decals that generates a zip file just under 115,000k. I can't reduce the data set because then A:M doesn't hang. Any alternatives for uploading this much data?

As shown in the first image, I'm installing electric trolley wire down my city street set. The solid copper wire is strung from steel clamps that are supported by multi-strand steel cable. I played with the concept of modeling the cable strand by strand but that turned into a lot of patches for low visibility set dressing. Instead I built some angled half cylinders to generate bump images using a black to white gradient material. So the cables shown in the second image (a view from above) are simple tubes that were straightened in an action and then cylindrically decaled. They turned out much more convincing than I expected. They probably wouldn't hold up if you were tracking an ant walking along the cable, but at this distance, I'm satisfied.

Presenting a completed model against a generic grey background just doesn't cut it. Finally having a sufficiently detailed city street really helps IMHO.

Thank you. I'm sure my opinion is coloured by how I use copy/paste but I found ZoomFit to be a consistent annoyance. Can someone explain to me how one would use cut/paste to make this feature useful?

Far be it from me to recommend anything from Autodesk but this is really quite impressive; send Autodesk a series of quasi-random photos surrounding an object and they ship back a polygon model of that object, for free. This explains it well. Normally we`d be shut out but the V17 retopolgy tool makes it potentially useful to an A:M user.

Actually it's 50's Canadian National Railway thing. The best examples I had are shown in the attached collage. I sampled mostly from the number plate at lower right and used those samples to generate the upper left logo that is used as my standard paint chip. It's the same colours I used on my locomotive. Good idea, Nancy, thanks.

Material test submitted for opinions. Almost all of the materials shown use the same combination of combiners and plug-ins with just varying parameters. My goal was to build and learn only one material "formula" that was sufficiently flexible that I could build everything from new hotness to old and busted and all the shades in between (sorta' dirty, kinda' rusty). Naturally the risk I run is that they all look the same but most real surfaces age in similar ways so IMHO it's justifiable. And the "back story" on the paint job: they were originally going to paint the lifting mechanism, framework and bumpers with the same green paint but someone suggested that if you're going to drive on city streets with all that hardware hanging out, it might be safer to make it red to attract attention. Since it was a last minute decision they used some red paint they had lying around that has not weathered well outside.

I fully realize that when it comes to hardware design I'm whimsically challenged, however you could at least turn the wheels into pulleys to make some concessions to the laws of physics.

I've always been intrigued by the utility vehicles to which the railroad companies attach retractable flanged wheels to allow them to ride the rails. So when I saw the image shown in the upper left of an actual VW bus version, I knew I had to modify my own microbus model. And inspired by the image of a prototype pickup bus shown in the upper right, I decided to go off the deep end and design a stake truck version. Before I started texturing the finished model I decided it was best to add bones, constraints and finish the movement of the wheels. Considering the time I spent tweaking it, especially the hydraulic hoses, the action is remarkably boring. I suppose in some ways it's the equivalent of a convincing walk cycle for a realistic character; if you do it right, a casual observer accepts it as believable with no concept of the effort to get to look that way. VW_wheels_up_test_a000.mov

For an extra $300, FormLabs claims you can get finer detail and better resolution, albeit with a smaller volume. Let the battle of cheap 3D printing begin.

Thanks for everyone's help and I doubt it's worth pursuing further but this has just moved from frustrating to totally weird. I clicked my bookmark to the A:M forum, clicked on this topic and then clicked on Rodney's link and I got the correct page. Hooray! Then I clicked on Robert's link and also got the right page; UNLIKE EVERY OTHER TIME PREVIOUS! The only parameter that was different was that I wasn't logged in to the forum. So I logged in and clicked Rodney's link and got the error page. I clicked Robert's link and got the error page. I logged out and both link's worked perfectly. I went to Robert's web page and used that link; worked like a charm. I went to the forum, logged in, went back to Robert's page; no joy. I suspect that somehow this may be connected to something that happened when I upgraded my PC and moved to Win7/64. On the old hardware with WinXP whenever I'd visit the forum with Firefox I was always logged in. Now I'm never logged in even if I ask the forum to "remember" me. I really don't know, it's just one more goofy internet thing. Thanks for everyone's help to get me the info.

Now we've moved from funny to frustrating; if I select your link I still get the attached forum error.