Railworks America

Something I've wanted to do for a long time is get into Blender properly and use it to make more than just decals, and I've finally made good on that. First proper outing for TS is, as the thread name implies, a set of generic stations that are typical of the architecture used generally by Midwestern railroads. First up is a design roughly based on a modified Type A passenger station built by the Milwaukee Road; this has been done mostly to the spec that the Harlowton, MT, station was modified to circa 1944, minus the steep roof section above the waiting room. This design was about three times as long as a standard Type A station, and at around 188' in total length it's a decent station for larger communities.


Little light on details at the moment, which I hope to fix soon. Lots of doors and windows to add, so stay tuned for that. If you've got any ideas for other somewhat generic stations you might like to see, give me a shout and I'll see what I can do. Plan right now is to do maybe 3-4 stations and put them in one pack, maybe with a few color variations. At some point I'd like to make this a little less generic, but the attached route is nothing short of a herculean undertaking for just one person. We'll see; perhaps one day if I can collect enough reference to do it justice it'll happen. For now, though, this is staying as a proto-freelanced design.

Looks good. Maybe some of us have station plans from railroad magazines we can share.

Harry

Decided to do a version with the steep roof after all. Also figured out how to make the renders slightly better; I think the black background makes it easier to pick out the station personally.

YAY!! Looks great. I had often thought of doing this myself...not sure why this never came to pass, but what you are doing is a needed asset package. Thanks.

Bits and pieces at a time, as they say. Today's project was working with curves to get a good looking result for this, and managed to get a not half bad result with Bezier curves, which are a favorite of mine in 2D work.

Shadows are a little grainy, but upping the number of cycles that the render uses massively increases the render time, and the other option, just doing viewport screenshots, makes the model a little less impressive without all the fancy environment stuff.

Tonight's project: going through and doing all the windows and doors. The window arrangement isn't final, as there's a door in the place of one of them, but I didn't feel like playing around with the Array modifier before doing the renders. Think tomorrow I'll try UVing and maybe textures, although I'm not 100% on that last part.

Just a quick test export to see if everything works in-game. Had to flip some of the normals but other than that it works fine, so I can go on and finish the last few bits and pieces.