Railworks America

It may not look like much, but the siding sign at Therm is the result of a weekend of almost non-stop Blender work. It's been quite the learning experience. The modeling was straight forward thanks to a number of the tutorials listed here and found through Google. What took the longest though was the unwrapping, texturing, and exporting. There's so much more to learn in Blender, but everything starts with a first step. BTW, the siding sign is based off of a Southern Pacific plan I found out on the web. And the route? Let's just say it's a work in progress.

Congrats. Every journey starts with a single step. You are way ahead of most of us.

I like your post.


And yes, there is nothing like the feeling of starting the game and actually seeing your creation.

"You've taken your first steps into a larger world."

Unwrapping is a major PIA. It takes a month to create a locomotive, six more months to unwrap and paint it. I think there are utilities available to help this along, but i've never had the time to mess with them.

Thank you for the encouragement. It was a learning experience, especially watching how different tutorials approached modeling, unwrapping and texturing. There was that one building tutorial in this forum where the person textured the model with individual textures, then UV baked (I think that's the right term) to create a single UV mapped finished texture, which then became the basis for a normal map and specular light texture. I was trying to follow the key clicks and mouse movements, but the artist was way too fast. So, I'll keep experimenting and learning.

Excellent, I was quite excited when I made my first objects for the sim. Then someone showed me how to make them with more depth, not sure I got the whole jest of it all, but it worked and that was he second step. With regards for learning through videos, there is always the stop and rewind buttons so don't be afraid of them. Its a great way to learn as if you missed something just stop and rewind. I did that with many of the 3Ds Max video as those guys move quickly. Nice work here. Keep at it, it only gets better.....

Bravo! Really nice

I see that Blender is freeware. Your post is encouraging to me because it suggests that one can create scenery objects like that, and get them working in TS with just a freeware package? Is that right?

A few years ago I briefly looked into trying to learn modeling, but it seemed like there was always one or more steps that would require me to buy expensive software, which is not likely to happen.

gwgardner wrote:I see that Blender is freeware. Your post is encouraging to me because it suggests that one can create scenery objects like that, and get them working in TS with just a freeware package? Is that right?

A few years ago I briefly looked into trying to learn modeling, but it seemed like there was always one or more steps that would require me to buy expensive software, which is not likely to happen.

Blender is freeware an can be found here: http://www.blender.org
Try to find these files: Objekte_erstellen_Teil_1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (German) but very clear how to handel it.

I use Blender for many years an made a lot of objects for Railworks. see my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Railworks.Objectenbouwer

Good Luck with your yob.

cnwfan wrote:It may not look like much, but the siding sign at Therm is the result of a weekend of almost non-stop Blender work. It's been quite the learning experience. The modeling was straight forward thanks to a number of the tutorials listed here and found through Google. What took the longest though was the unwrapping, texturing, and exporting. There's so much more to learn in Blender, but everything starts with a first step. BTW, the siding sign is based off of a Southern Pacific plan I found out on the web. And the route? Let's just say it's a work in progress.

20170219153738_1.jpg

I will be looking forward to seeing what you bring to the sim next, it's definitely a big step when you do finally figure out how to get your first object into the sim.

John, you should start looking into Blender too.
Maybe try a few tutorials to get the feeling.
Once you go Blender you won't want to go back to 3DC.

The next scenery object is in the works, but it's still has a long ways to go before a preview. Its something I had started in 3DC, but decided to redo it in Blender. I probably could have picked something easier as the second model, but I need the object for my route.

As for anyone on the fence with using Blender for modeling, I would encourage you to give it a try. The biggest hurdle will be learning the user interface and the different shortcuts to do the various modeling tasks, but the modeling concepts are the same. And there are so many Blender tutorials (HTML pages and videos) out on the web covering everything from beginning modeling to advanced topics, you'll find something. I started with tutorials on building architectural models, as the shapes are mostly cube based and easier to create / modify using the basic commands. And if you have a question regarding using Blender, or how to do model something in Blender, a quick Goggle search will usually return a long list of items to sift through. Blender seems to have a large user base, so more than likely the question you have has already been answered on some Blender forum.