How I recreated an entire Steam Locomotive in 3D

Jake here creator of animography graphs starting with the steam locomotive here and everything starts with research which in this case means that I furiously Google things for weeks at a time until I find what I'm looking for so that's anything and everything old posts deep in the bowels of a forum somewhere I'm there I start to find stuff like if I go into the drawings folder here you can see I found these exterior blueprints amazing apparently the drawings for Big Boy the two places I thought that I might be able to purchase them uh this place says they're updating them from a DVD so if you have one of those on your PC then you're set but they've been sold out forever I think and then if you go to this website it also has drawings but you'd have to buy them individually part by part and have the paper shipped to you I believe so that was all a nogo um I did see some Forum posts where somebody was posting resources from these actual Big Boy drawings and I was salivating I desperately wanted it but I just don't want to wait for a month for someone to get back to me in a forum somewhere so if I don't see it and if I can't purchase it then it's probably not going to happen so I take the drawings that I can find and bring them into blender and set them up for example here's the side view the side elevation and there's crosssections at different points going back another thing that was a huge help for this project I found that the rail industry back in the day was publishing Illustrated journals of all the new models and the parts for them and whatnot so the locomotive cyclopedia I believe this one is from 1939 and as I scroll down here you can see that they have every train model oh thank you Adobe yes I know and and of course I'm just used to you know using the old two fingers on the page down and the down arrow to just rapid fire these bad boys check this out oh yeah now you're at anagraph speed anyway till I find what I want but these finding these was a massive find some other things that I found that were just huge victories cuz these projects are not a guarantee like I have to I have to find this stuff and figure out how it works period the buck stops here so it gets intense so I found this book on on specifically the big boy which was awesome um because I knew I wasn't going to be able to get the blueprints for this thing or wait to have them mailed to me on a DVD um that's why I add the disclaimer in every project that it's period correct because I'm probably going to be substituting parts from the locomotive encyclopedia or from other trains into here because that's all I can get which I think is fine because I'm trying to teach about trains of the era and I don't always want it to be just a specific model every time so I think it's great Oh So Glorious there's the photo of the articulation oh man some people had doubts about how far that thing leans over but there's your proof I start to assemble my research doc here and this is just Snippets and Forum posts and links I haven't written the the narrated script yet I start modeling I guess at this point I can reveal a filthy secret in the underbelly of the animography and that is that I purchase the exterior of these models for almost every project but that does not mean that there's not a ton of work to do not just on the inside but also on the outside so first of all my value proposition as animography exterior makes sense however let's have a look at this model and I'll show you what we're dealing with this is almost always what they look like when I buy them so here's the purchased model of the big boy you can see it is pretty fantastic but as I tab into edit mode in my software if you look at the state of these meshes I can't use this stuff for modeling and blender and I'll show you why so I rebuild everything from these models usually let me show you my boiler exterior that I built okay so here's my model let's click on roughly the same area and as I tab into edit mode oh yeah now we're talking look at that it's beautiful clean simple this will render a lot faster it's more efficient for blender to even display in the viewport the next month of my life is going to be better because this model is extremely simple and efficient so say for example I need to add a pipe to the side of this I can grab that make it a circle make sure the edge is beveled flatten that out boom look at that a cute little pipe out the side if I wanted to add a little little something right here cuz usually I guess they'd probably have something right there like a little sleeve you know it's no problem right you got your little sleeve on there lovely so so I'm do that so if I wanted to do the same thing in this model over here look at this first of all I can't make any Cuts like in my model I can make a cut right there and with a cut then I can start editing you know bringing things out start making shapes making moves but uh this thing I can't even cut it I mean you can there's a way to do it but I'm not going to show you because it's still horrible this mesh is basically unusable for me and if you look at the how many points are in here how many vertices the count is really high if we fly into this model you'll see inside the cab and whatnot there's nothing in here and often times there's not even materials here's the inside of the boiler on that purchase model nothing I think I've made my point I do purchase the exterior because the placement and sizing of these objects just having that is a massive amount of work that I don't have to do takes out a lot of guess work about how things should look and feel from the start after a few weeks two to three weeks maybe a month of modeling I have this ABS absolute monstrosity that you see before you if we go into wireframe mode you can see it's it's beefy should I try going into edit mode Let's see what happens that's every vertex point in my whole project it looks like it's 300,000 vertices I don't know somebody in the game industry can tell me if that's a lot I don't remember but I do try to keep my models really simple because we'll get to that in the rendering section but I think keeping things efficient is just good for my for my sanity for Speed and Performance and whatnot so I almost always start to build my materials with the model whereas in the 3D software you just see like a gray basic object obviously these things need to look like metal or aluminum or paint that is the materials and textures let's look inside one of these here's black paint and you can see as we look down the side of that it's got like some cool streaky stuff going on and I think the boiler has some texture on it too that gray metal but I don't usually focus on that kind of stuff to the degree that you would if you were doing cinematic style renders or or realism because for educational modeling where you're going for extreme accuracy like I do this there's there's no need for it and there's no time for it honestly but sometimes I do a few things here and there just to make the art look beautiful we switch over to the switch over to the shading window with that selected this is a material called metal black or black painted metal that roughness that you see there comes from its own little texture so here's that particular texture material that I've wrapped around the 3D mesh and then I just use a couple other these little things are called nodes and it's basically processing this texture as it goes through these nodes so you know I'm toning it down so it's not so pronounced and then I pipe it into the roughness Factor on my material my main material node and let me show you how this works this is really cool I think other softwares do sort of node setups like this I know blender isn't the only one but I disconnected everything from this material and you can see that you know if I was to color this red it still looks metallic so I can turn down the metallic right here let's zoom in a little bit I can also turn up the roughness so that it looks kind of you know like rubbery or plasticky um and then there you can add like fake bumpiness and all sorts of things you can do a clear coat which I didn't get into on this one but if I go back I took that this texture here and plugged it into the roughness and for example if I was to mess with this uh little adjustment Point here oh that like that o I like that looks like it's leaking or something that's amazing yeah blender doesn't know when things are transparent it's the materials that handle transparency so this basic shape that I've built it just exists um and I also found a Reddit post where somebody was asking how I do it the responses are it's a pretty good method what they recommended but this isn't how I do it and what they're recommending here wouldn't work for the kind of specificity I need so the way that I actually Do It um blender natively has these folders you can use to organize things and I had to learn how to python code to pull this off so I tell blender to take the folder that this object is in and run the object level Alpha based on the folder that it's in so this Alpha here has a driver on it and if you look at the driver it's linking it up to a property that I set this panel here here on the side of the screen is not native to blender this is in the animation window and I coded it so that all those folders that you see where my objects are in it places a slider in the animation window that's linked to every object in that folder so if it was the exterior and I slide this down you can see the entire exterior starts to fade so this is all something that I built another thing that this does because my projects tend to be intense H with thousands of objects if I slide exterior down to zero you can see blender thinks it's transparent in the materials right blender will render this as a transparent object but the object still exists see if I go into just the object mode and I'm not viewing materials the object still exists so I can say visibility sync in my anagraph tools and it will turn off that folder what that also means is that I keep a clean clean viewport for what I'm working on but I've also coated it so that those objects don't load at render time you know if we're looking at just the wheels it's only loading those objects for rendering if other things are transparent they simply don't load I almost never simulate stuff so when I need liquids gases anything like that anything that fills a volume I never use simulation for that because the second that you click on that simulation panel in blender you're going to blow three weeks for sure so let me pull up the Firebox in the big boy and show you how I did it Okay so we've got our Firebox here it looks awesome here's what it looks like by the way just as objects and blender doesn't look like much a little strange think I was messing around in here yeah the fire material is placed on these plane objects and I've repeated them and mirrored them so I'll turn those things off in blender and what you have is this collection of mesh objects and they correspond to what what would be the path of flame inside of the Firebox I've pulled up the reference image so you can see so there's my model and it's going over the brick Arch here right if I unhide that here is what the 3D objects for the fire look like just in blender right now to make fire as you can see if we look at the rendered view it looks awesome right if I scroll through a few animation frames oh man that's sick if we go into the shading window here so it's a Musgrave texture which which is just a mathematically calculated type of noise or whatever that's in blender and I didn't even do anything fancy with this as I animate this again you can see that that texture is just programmed to move along this shape in 3D we have what's called UV unwrapping and what that's means is that you unwrap like a like a present or a box you unwrap the shape that you have so that you can apply a flat image texture to it so in the UV editing window you can see that as I go around this curve here for example if I select those points in the UV unwrapping it's flat so that is how I'm telling blender where I want that texture to go and that's why it looks like it's traveling along the curve cuz I just flatten the points when I unwrap them and there's some special techniques for doing that back in the material I have a mask here that is telling blender because I have two textures I've got the small Flames that I wanted and the big flames and this mask is telling blender where to put those things and then I just use a little node here to mix those two together based on this mask that I painted so I can control I have extreme control over where those two little texture Parts go and what they do so if you look at the the output if I saw the output of just this node you can see that we have the small Flames here and the big Flames down there and as I animated you can see them moving yeah this is a color gradient or color ramp they're called in blender and that says map the left side to dark and the right side to light values I think is how it is yeah so if I solo just this you can see the Flames are starting to come together right I use the same output from this node to drive the transparency so this is saying black will be see-through white will be visible so I look at the output of the entire network of nodes here and there's your fire right there all those things combined make this fire and then in blender because I have one sing I built one single instance of that I use an array so the blender just copies that over like four or five times itself and then I mirror it on both sides and I used a lattice which is just a way of deforming it so that it could so I could shrink it in what this does though is mean that I'm never I'm never editing it's not destructive is what they call that so I can edit just one instance like the smallest instance I've got and it will change all the other instances here so it's really powerful it means that I can edit things really quickly and change how they look without having to get down into each little flame object so taken all together that is what the Flames look like and I I was really pleased when I saw this because it's fake but I don't know I think it looks awesome like I really pulled it off in such a simple in in an elegant way like I didn't I didn't know how it was going to look I I get excited when it's time to build materials because because they're so cool and it's so much fun but this one turned out red so you can see that also in here okay so my smoke object this is cool too so the smoke is just that just this object and if you look at it it's a really simple 3D object that's the smoke object right there all I did was again wrap a texture around it the outside of it it's not full of smoke it just looks that way it's just around the outside like a like gift wrapping and the shading the Shader will have the same kind of tricks that I'm doing in there where I'm saying I want dark smoke here right above the fire where the ashes are and I want it to get lighter as it goes out there's going to be a mask for that ooh this one has something cool in it so this particular texture yeah let me let me make this more pronounced there's a way in blender that you can make a texture move through another texture so look at this watch this see that so I toned it way down from my material because I don't want it to look quite like that but okay let's undo that but you can see it has this thing where it looks like it kind of morphs as it moves like if I just click on that texture alone it's not very convincing right it just looks like it's moving as one unit but if I click on the output of those two moving through each other now you're talking that looks cool yeah so that's the smoke and then I have a mask here to tell it where I want the different colors and the different smoke densities to go and it does that for me and then I pipe that again into the transparency and into the coloration so there's your smoke yeah oh the coals are awesome too check this out so on the coals I actually use I did use particles like real particles is like blender can scatter things on another object so I did that but if I hide that particle system this material is really cool so let me zoom in there watch this this is so red look at this that looks sick doesn't it looks like lava or magma I wanted to give the impression that the fire was just really hot because it is so this is another case where you can move a texture through another texture so here's one verono which is again just a mathematical term for a way of calculating like a a pattern and this thing's just moving to the left or whatever and then I have another voro down here and what happens is that first texture moves through the coordinates of the second one is actually what's going on so you can see what that looks like as I zoom in oh it's awesome this trick here is basically how I fake everything this particular trick so if I up the intensity you can see it looks kind of funky I pull it back down to just very subtle levels and then I have another color ramp to tell where to map these colors and then in the end it gets output like this yeah and then I add that little particle thing to it to add some stones on there some coals and there's your whole Firebox so every other texture that I make is animated in a similar way when I'm combining materials together like that the node setup can get really intense so this is the steam then the bubbles you can see all the little nodes related to Bubbles and here is the water so yeah so I've got if I solo just the water let's see what that looks like yeah so that's the water here are I'm guessing the bubbles would have a mask applied to them there's the bubbles you can see if I animate that just little circles going up the screen there and then the smoke yeah so that's our smoke and then I just use masking to split them all and tell blender where I want it to go that one was tricky because it has to line up with a this flat object because again I'm not in 3D you don't fill a volume with something and if you try to that's really processor intensive so I fake everything this is just the water level is just another flat object that's why when in the video when I fly through there you can see that it's like it looks kind of funny but I I didn't care here yeah once I've got the whole thing built I start the rigging right now nothing in here is moving so let me pull up the wheels and the valve gear to demonstrate my point here okay so here we are in the animation window and whereas these little categories here correspond to the transparency for every group of objects if I scroll up here this panel here that I also custom coed is my rigging panel as I move up the drive gear revolutions you can see that the whole thing animates oh yeah that's so cool check that out ridiculous even though it's just me working on these projects I have built them such that if I were to hand this off to an animator they would be able to understand the file and animate it like a like a little video game almost so the drive gear revolutions if I were to animate this value it makes the wheels and the valve gear and everything animate so it's easy to use let me feature just one side of this so it's a little less confusing I had to copy this four times because these have to spin at a 90 degree offset that's what the the that Heist the expert reviewer for Big Boy told me so you can see the do yeah if you look up there these things spinning at a 90° offset so cool but I also made a slider here to feature just one side so that will scale out those objects so that we can see just a single valve gear these things actually have to work the size of these levers let pull that down and we'll get into yeah if the levers aren't the right size this little piston at the end of this gear won't move the right distance and as you can see that thing has to move has to line up with the valve opening as it comes by when I moved that reverser lever when I first made my rig the piston valve went way back here and what that means is is some part way down in here is it that is it this is it that I have no idea I don't build these for a living and this thing is insane it's very complex so what usually happens is I have to start shifting Parts until it works I'm literally eyeballing some of these things I guess that could be a shameful secret too but I don't see any other way of doing it in blender when you're building a rig they have what's called Bones it hearkens back to the old clamation days where they would have metal wires inside of the clay so they could position the guy and then take a shot and then position the guy and then take a shot so these bones if I isolate just that you can see when I move the drive gear revolutions up those bones also move and so what you do all these little 3D objects that I built the ones that are supposed to move you link those up to these bones and that's how you get your rig when I fire this thing up and nothing is in the right place I literally have to get in here and just start moving around like the knuckle on this little thing that spins I forget the name of it in this moment until the valve gear does what it should over here this particular rig was the most difficult in this project I probably spent more than one day just tweaking the size of all these little components to get this so that when I move the reverser lever that shift is accurate oh I must have moved that yeah as you can see how sensitive these things are I think I moved that yeah okay got it back so when I move this reverse lever so that that shift was accurate and the timing so this thing is an actual working demo of how the train really works to a degree so let me show you a couple other rigs from this project that I think are especially cool there's this one for the articulation where the chassis moves and the steam pipes have to shift with it if I roll the articulation value up you can see those steam pipes shift it's so cool see that oh wow I hope that wasn't visible in the project I got an error there oops that is not supposed to do that I think it's because I copied this project file so that I could make this demo for you I think I must have messed something up but anyway for the most part it works and you can see if I feature just the just the bones that I made for that this is the whole chassis and the pipes up there the bones for those and when I articulate it they they swing about like a yeah like a cartoe in a trailer so that's a pretty cool rig here I've got the rig for the suspension and if I move the suspension slider you can see it does that little thing where it tilts up and down just showing how the suspension is linked together so that's a pretty cool little rig it actually works and I got that feature of single side thing going again so yeah those are my Rigs and I also in this panel will rig up things like if I need the fire to to flow through a pipe or air to turn on or off I rig all those things up over here with those little sliders and connect them up again so that it's like a little like a little Sim game or something so if someone were to come in and use this they could easily understand how to work the file that I've created so with all that done with all the the modeling the materials and the rigging now it's time for animation so just to keep the viewport fast I'm not going to show the entire train right here but we're looking from the Viewpoint of the camera and you can see as I push play the camera starts to fly around where you can see it sort of starting to fly around the object there that's my that's the representation of the camera in the 3D World if we go into the camera you can see it's yeah it's checking out the train so I have to animate all that stuff also at the time of Animation I write my narrative script and that's you know the actual words I'm going to say to describe this thing that I just built I take that script and divide it up into sections so that I know where I'm at I take those files when I record them and from my audio software also split them up into named audio files so these labeled sections .1.2 correspond to the script and I'll have that up to the side while I'm animating and I've coded tools so that I can move these around with their little markers and whatnot but I have this open in the animation window so as I'm flying around the camera I can see where I'm at in the script and where the ins and out points are and special Transitions and all this stuff so yeah and then I start animating the camera moves and I use the rigging window over here to animate things in and out turn off the transparencies make things move as I can hear what I'm saying down here in blender let me see if this works can't hear anything I must have muted that let's see there we goti for the sake of teaching yeah big boy came to be in late 1941 at the latter end once I have all the camera moves and everything animated just how I want it then I start rendering each video frame has to be rendered individually these are all the frames for that entire locomotive project if I go to the bottom here you can see it's 65,535 megabytes a piece this folder is 854 gigs of space so when I tell my software to render out all these frames if I Ru this frame by frame right frame frame frame frame frame each one of those is a separate image so if I click into this and just go image by image those are your frames now because of all those like the way I clean up the models and build them really light and efficient and the way that I make it so objects don't load if they're transparent you can see at the beginning of the project where it's the whole train I'm getting what four or five frames six frames in a minute when I get into let's see if I can find something that's like yeah so here's something like in the the middle of the project you can see that here I'm getting oh wow look at that yeah 28 frames per minute so in a matter of about a week I can render those 65,000 frames once this is rendered then I'll take all these frames and pull them into Adobe software for making videos but one last thing that I have to do okay so I've brought up the labels here you can see if I look in the camera they're they're like attached to the camera as I move it around I have the materials on the labels are what fade them in and out but the pointing lines from these labels actually go to where they point on the train um yeah that's wild there's your labels and the camera as it moves around if I select it you'll see the lines all stay attached to it um I had I coded a system where it was taking the 3D objects and what they point to like the markers for that into After Effects which is Adobe software but it was just far too intense so I brought the labels back into blender so that's every label that shows up on screen I have to position that and tell blender when I want that to turn on and off so that's the last thing I do and then I render out those label frames and I impose those over the over the rendered frames and then I assemble the video with my voice and everything and Export so that's how I make anagraph and I'm going to keep making these videos and I hope get better at it because I'm really proud of what I do and I have wanted to show everyone all the cool things I build because in a project there's just every day it feels like or at least every week There's Something New some crazy thing that I have to build to make these work some Triumph that happens where I'll get it a material working like the fire that looks beautiful and and I love it or the um or a rig like that uh valve gear rig where you saw the bones it's so complex uh where I'll get something like that working and I'll figure out how it works and it's just extremely satisfying so I would love to show that to you and in true tradition I'm not going to sign off it's just going to end

Channel: Animagraffs

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Id: T7Hb8kRUHEI

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024