Flying Scotsman Model

I had decided that after many Max tutorials that it was time to throw myself into modelling a complex object from the ground up. I decided on The Pacific Class locomotive The Flying Scotsman which is world famous and currently resides at The National Railway Museum in York. At this time I believe it’s been refurbished and should be out on the tracks again soon.

At time of writing the locomotive is in it’s black livery but I wanted to do the apple green version that everyone knows. I did find it difficult sourcing good quality images on which to base my design and I used a combination of a Hornby model and photographs from the web. There seems to be two version, one with smoke defenders and one without, I decided on the without one. I thought at the beginning that the main challenge would be the linkage for the wheels but discovered that there is so much detail you don’t notice at first. For example the springs for the suspension and the inside of the cab (which I decided not to model) at this time. As an inexperienced modeler the main body was quite difficult as it’s not a straight tube it actually changes shape and thickness.

The cab also was quite difficult as I used Booleans to remove the window shape but this produced very messy polygons when I used NURBs for smoothing. After many hours of modeling I started on texturing, which again I’m very new to and decided to use Mental Ray as the renderer which comes with 3DS Max. I never was very happy with the coloring or the lighting and will be revisiting that when I work on my next locomotive which is to be The Mallard. As this was going to be imported into Vue I concentrated on getting the colors and textures to look good in that program, I added the LNER as well as the loco numbering and name. I also experimented with adding the clay render to a stock station that came with a 3DArtist magazine.

I’m currently working on some Matte painting and Vue projects (I like to jump around in my workflow) but will be coming back to The Scotsman as I would like to really expand on my modeling skills and merging these pieces with Vue for its outstanding landscape abilities. I have included wireframe images and clay renders.

I revisited the Scotsman with a new scene here.