Shildon Tunnel BA side

This weekend I managed to find a few hours to put together the tunnel entrance at Shildon (BA side)
In 1839 work was started on the Shildon tunnel and was opened on 10 April 1842

An interesting fact:

Wikepedia, says that the world's oldest railway tunnels lying beneath streets are the Cobble Hill Tunnel and Murray Hill Tunnel in New York City.
They were originally cuts dug in 1844 and 1836 respectively, but weren't roofed over to become tunnels until the 1850s.
Shildon is clearly older then either, and as neither still has trains running through it, Shildon should claim its place as the world's oldest railway tunnel under a settlement.

1024/512 size texture that is not final, but at least it is squared up and ready for the graffitti to be removed.




A view to show the polygons.



I tried to avoid the visual butterfly effect by off setting the split on both sides, the eyes are drawn to the impressive entrance.



regards

Derek

BA progress

For a week now I have been without the internet so not been able to update the blog.

Over the weekend I spent some time on the main Station at Bishop Auckland.

The station is the whole reason for creating the route, however I have held off making it due to lack of information.

However thanks to a UKTS forum member who sent me a link to some wonderful flickr images by pinzac55 some progress has been made;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28403871@N05/3332800687/

I took this image and distorted it as best I could to make it look like it was being viewed straight on so it could be used it as a template.

Once this was done I created a brick texture from one of my photos of the old hippodrome in Bishop Auckland.

The building is less than 100 metres distance from the station and is constructed from the same type of brick. I know it is not important where the brick texture comes from but I thought it would be a nice touch to use a Bishop image. (Nice to see research trip come in handy too)

I then added some corner stones from another photo and placed with a slight drop shadow.

The orginal photo is great for reference but it could never be used as a texture even if I had the rights to use it, I therefore had to recreate the orginal details in a higher resolution.

The Brick surround I created by making a long strip brick texture and applying that to a box in 3DS max (with lots of segments) and then adding a bend modifier.

The texture is currently looking a little flat regarding lighting, however it will evolve once I start on the rest of the station and only truly come to life once I bake shadows.

I sunk in the doors and middle windows into the geometry to see how the texture would look on the model.

There is still a long way to go however I hope to show the completed model in a couple of weeks.

Derek

Who's house?

OK this has taken me a little over 4 hours to make but the texture will be used for a number of houses at Wearhead.

I often create the texture before I make the model, this is the case here.

As you can see only the top left part of the texture has been worked on, the rest is all wonky.

I'll work my way around the texture as I create more houses. Each part of the texture will get corrected/cloned/mirrored etc.

I am using 256 pixels as the height of my buildings, any less would not hold up to close viewing. Even close up this house looks crisp enough for what I need. Station buildings will be at least double the rez.

I made the front and side wall in the texture, the rest of the windows I cut into the model, I sacrifice the variety on the house to get more variety in the whole scene. The top model has 200 polys (400 triangles)

The plan is to have all the houses in this small village all using 1x1024/1024 sized texture, this will hopefully keep any loading glitches down to a minimum.

derek