railroad box car

[R Reynolds]

standard 40 ft. length (circa 1950's) with steel sheathing

 

box car pic

[robcat2075]

Impressive detail!

 

How's the gravel under the railroad ties made?

 

When did they get rid of the thing the hobos rode on? And what was it really for?

[Guest mrsl13]

looks great...not just the boxcar but the rails to the sky..is that a pic of all a 3d scene?

 

Mike

[Rodney]

Hey Rodger,

Looks great as usual!

Sure would like to see them moving especially via Artic Pigs.

 

You've been doing trains for a long time.

Do you have a virtual railroad set by now?

 

...like the ones that people have in their basements?

[R Reynolds]

Thanks for the compliments, guys.

 

Rodney asked:

Sure would like to see them moving especially via Artic Pigs.

I'm worried A:P would choke on a 4Mb model. But I may give it a try when its compatible with v10.5.

 

You've been doing trains for a long time.

Since A:M v1.

 

Do you have a virtual railroad set by now?

Not yet. But it's like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.

 

...like the ones that people have in their basements?

Mine was in the backyard so I could use natural light for my 16mm movies.

 

mrsl13 asked:

...is that a pic of all a 3d scene?

Everything except for the sky which is just a picture decaled to a hemi-sphere.

 

robcat asked:

When did they get rid of the thing the hobos rode on? And what was it really for?

Around the turn of the last century they were trying to improve the maximum load that wooden freight cars could carry by adding a truss array of reinforcing iron bars below their floors to strengthen them. As all steel car construction became standard these cars were phased out but some were still in use in the 1930's.

 

How's the gravel under the railroad ties made?

This image rock displ is an overhead view of rock_displ.mdl. It's a 9000+ patch model of only the top halves of individual rocks over a 9 x 9 ft. area They all started off as a 4,6 or 8 patch "primitive" which I cut and pasted at random and then tweaked them to fit as tightly as possible (it took a few weeks, on and off).

 

I randomly placed each rock in the vertical direction at one of five heights. Next step was to apply a noisy gradient map so the grey values generally went from 0 to 255 with some random variation to try to simulate smaller detail.

 

I applied this as a displacement map to a flat mesh of 2916 patches representing a a 109 x 109 in. area. I applied a procedural map to the mesh to vary colour on a micro scale. I also applied 33% of the same image as a colour map to get some overall colour variation on a macro scale.

 

In the chor. I tiled copies of this model on 9 ft. centres so one overlaps its neighbours by an inch. It's not obvious in the image but the rocks along each side of the perimeter are only half visible and identical copies so they are perfectly tileable.

[Zaryin]

The detail in your textures is impressive. It looks great.