Luggage Rack

 

For the brass luggage racks that sit above the windows in the restaurant cars, I went about doing a few designs to make them a bit more decorative than my reference pics. I took my refined designs into max, with the intention to bake them onto planes and use alphas, as there would have been too much geometry to make them look good.

I also created some simple geometry, kind of a ribbon of planes, that would give the piece a bit of width, but as shown in the image below, the results turned out jagged with gaps and harsh lighting in certain places. It also bumped up the tri count a fair bit so i rebaked with just the original flat plane.

I was happy with the image above, although it did look very thin, it still looked clean. Then I thought of other ways of giving it a bit more depth, so I layered the alpha planes ever so slightly next to each other, which gave this convincing illusion of depth. The normal information on the extremeties of the alpha is just enough to catch the light and create this appearance.

Then I took it into nDo2 and created a few ornate patterns, and then gave it some ambient occlusion. To tweak it further I used blending options to add more shadows within the patterny bit, to give it a kind of tarnsihed effect. Then I baked a twisted cylinder for the pole, and created a simple weave pattern in photoshop for the mesh bit. 

 These two images show it in Max and UDK, with a 512x512 texture sheet, shrunk from the 2048 I created it at. Ideally it will be at 256 eventually. It actually looks pretty good at 256, except for the wirey mesh bit, which got completely destroyed, but to fix that i could multi sub obj that bit and apply a small res but high quality tileable weave pattern. I will see how it looks when i have the main interior finished though. The specs aren't final either, I may want to shine them up a bit. The asset drops in at 100 tris bang on. Tres bien

Sleeping Arrangements

I was in bed all last weekend so thought it was a good idea to have a fiddle with the cloth modifier as I wasn't familiar with it, and have quite a few assets requiring fabric. The pillow for the bed was the first thing i attempted using tutorials, and eventurally got a few nice results. I didn't feel I had complete control over the final results however, so I took it into ZBrush for my first go at that aswell, and was pleased with the overall outcome.

 

 The matress took a little while longer to get right, as I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get a kind of shrink wrap effect to make it look tucked in at the bottom, but sussed it eventually

 The blanket/quilt at the moment is temporary, as I plan to apply a patterned texture to it before dropping it onto the bed. Then i can do a render to texture diffuse aswell as the normals, so the patterns follow the same waves as the normal bumps. This technique i hope will work well with drawn curtains in the restaurant car.

Sleepers and coridoors

Only have a high poly version of my bed at the moment so will have to make do with no sleeping arrangements in UDK, and just the sofas. Modular pieces are fitting nicely as planned. My next big step is to continue getting all of the wooden panels that make up the shell of the train unwrapped, lightmapped and their high-polys/normals done. Many of the low polys are simple planes with not many tris, but there's a lot of them to get through

Dining Car progress

Some progress shots of the restaurant car coming together

Max

So based on my working measurements in UDK, i started making modular panels for specific parts of the carriages. Each piece obviously given a unique name, and for the time being, a colour to distinguish them from other similar pieces. I then went about rebuilding the carriages somewhat, to see how the pieces worked together, what pieces I would need to alter slightly, and what pieces I could get away with using elsewhere in the carriage.

Whilst doing this, i began compiling a list of all of the unique pieces. It shows their mesh naming, their dimensions, and a description of what they might feature, their importance and any other notes

building blocks

 So I completed the basic shell of both the sleeper carriage and the dining car, with the vestibules inbetween. From here I had good dimensions to work with for most of my modular pieces and wall panels. I knew the dimensions to start creating the pieces in Max on the same grid setup.

Dimensions

 Many of the dimensions I knew of the carriages were in imperial units, so it was more than straightforward to use the generic UDK units. I knew space was going to be tight however, so I went and started building the basics of my shell with 1ft x 1ft tiles with collision, to see if the character could actually navigate around the carriages. The checkerbox appearance of the tiles next to eachother also made it easier to count how many feet long a certain area was, and i could easily halve a tile to make 6 inches, or 3 inches etc.

UDK Units  =  Imperial

16   =  1ft

8  =  6"

4  =  3"

2  =  1.5"

1  =  0.75"

The first big problem i encountered were the width of the doors. Based on blueprints and from reference, the doors are about 2 feet wide. As soon as I tested this in UDK, I realised that the character would not fit though the doors, and only three feet wide was sufficient birth, with about 2 inches leeway (enough to fit in the width of an open door). The first thing i didn't like about making the doors a foot wider was the visual appearance. The cabin doors in reality do look tall and narrow, which i think is part of their elegance and charm, but if they won't work in game then i have to make them wider. Unfortunately this meant having to make each cabin a foot longer, as the 3 feet required for the bed and the 2 feet required for the wash cabinet couldn't be touched. It does at least give the player/camera a bit more room to look around with.

 Obviously, with the discovery of gaps having to be 3ft wide, other areas were also going to need to be ammended. For example, part of the wall that was the same length as a door when it is open, had to be made a foot longer. The gaps between diagonal pieces had to be adjusted, and even places where locked/static doors were placed had to be made wider just to flow with the overall scale of pieces. Working in UDK first this way was such a big help, much better than working in max first, exporting assets, finding out they're wrong, going back and forth..

Plans

To start things off, I began with a few basic sketches, scanned them in and then started working in photoshop because the result looked a whole lot cleaner. The 'shell' of each carriage will be similar, although often using different modular pieces depending on which carriage or which part of the carriage.

 

 Every carriage will start and end the same, with an identicle vestibule linking the two, featuring the doors that would be used to step out onto the platform(although not accessible). These areas will be joined by an enclosed walkway.

The restaurant cars will feature tables for two and tables for four, and the carriage will be split down the middle by a divide. The modular pieces and furnishings for the diner will be versatile, so it should be easy to make variations of the car, like maybe having private dining compartments.

 My first design for the sleeper car just featured rooms that were mirrored, but i found it a bit dull in comparison to the other designs I'd looked at, plus they didn't match some of my favourite reference images.

I figured that with this more interesting design, rooms could be more varying, and the result wouldn't be too hard to achieve, which I had initially thought. As long as I planned my modular pieces better, most of the assets and wall panels could be flipped and rotated to still achieve a nice result.

For the coridoor carriage, with public seating compartments, the planning was pretty much a copy of original blueprints but fit within the original dimensions of my carriage. I've been in three minds whether to continue with this carriage(as they don't really exist on these trains), or wether to do a parlour car/piano lounge. I think both would take about the same amount of time to complete, but I'm also unsure whether or not to scrap this extra carriage completely considering I still want to do my scrolling exterior scene

CHANEL N°5

I found the making of the latest Chanel advert to be really inspirational. It's really helped not only with planning the layouts, but also given me a good idea with some of the visuals I may be able to achieve when completed