Three-D Modelling for Railways

I created this in response to a challenge, rather than any actual need for one. The basic construction is pretty simple. The base is a flat cube with beveled corners. Everything else is cylinders. For the corners, the cylinders are extended and re-sized to give the right shape. To give it a slightly deflated look, I used a lattice modifier. Available for free on Cults3d .

Blender 5 came out about a week ago, and the noticeable difference for what I do is with the Array modifier. I think it is a big improvement, but there is still an "Array (Legacy)" option if you want to stick with the old (and when opening files made in earlier versions, they will still use the legacy version). The new version has more options, and options that were previously available, but hard to find or do have become much more accessible. For example, you can rotate and scale now. And to support this, the UI has handles on your object. So in this simple example, the basic cube is on the left, and the two generated by the modifier are centre and right. The first copy, in the centre, has handles you can use to move, rotate and scale that instance, and that gets applied to the modifier. The old version has a tickbox so you could turn off relative offset and turn on absolute offset. They have realised no one does both in the same modifier, so now we have radio buttons for th...

At first glance, this is a trivial subject, but in fact there are a lot of options that are not a first apparent. Some more useful than others. We will start with the basics. In Edit mode, click on a vertex to select it. Click elsewhere and it will be deselected. [Shift]-Click on another vertex, and any selected vertex will remain selected, and the new one as well. Note: Most of this applies to edges and faces too. Some of it applies to Object mode too. I do not find there are the same issues in Object mode, as I might only have a couple of dozen objects, while one object might have hundreds of vertices. Toolbar Top left of the toolbar is the select tool. If you click and hold on it, you will see there are four option. Tweak: With Tweak you select each vertex as normal, but can then move it. It is only slightly different to the move tool, and frankly probably only useful for doing minor adjustments to organic models. I have never used it. Select Box: This is the one I use most by a l...

Blender's Array modifier lets you repeat an object any number of times. I only recently discovered this can be in a circle - previously I have done that with Geometry Nodes, which is far more complicated. NOTE: Blender 5 has an alternative methods. See here . In A Line The Array modifier's most obvious use is to repeat an object in a row. You want a row of identical houses? Create one (as a single object!), and add an Array modifier. Want a brick wall? Create two (one staggered above the other), and add two Array modifiers, one in the X direction and one in the Z. You can do this as a "Relative Offset" or a "Constant Offset". With relative offset, the distance between each one is determined by the item size in that direction multiplied by the value. With constant offset the item size does not matter - except that the size transform is applied after the modifier, so it can feel like it does. If you need a specific spacing, constant offset can be better; just ...

This model is available on  Cults3d In some countries, the wind is so reliable you can build your windmill facing one direction. I believe the windmills on Mykonos are a famous example, facing north to catch the Meltemi. In the UK, millers were not so luck, and windmills had to be built to turn to face the wind, whichever way it was blowing. One way to do that was a "post mill", in which the whole (or most of) the) body was turned. Because the grinding wheels were turned too, the mechanism to transmit power from the sails to the grinding wheels was kept simple. A later development was the tower windmill, in which only the very top rotated. The required a way to transmit the power from the moving section to the stationary section. However, it did allow the mill to be built of stone or brick, so it could be significantly higher, and so catch more of the wind. The windmill at Little Marton is a tower windmill, built in 1838, and it is thought there were originally four in the ar...

Preston Corporation Tramways opened the first electrified lines in 1904, and in the same year opened a new depot on Deepdale Road, not far from the football ground. The tram system closed in 1935, but the depot is still standing, now used for buses. As you can see from the photo, the back of it is quite a different design. I believe this was the original structure built in 1904, with the stone frontage built ten years later. A photo here looks like the depot before the addition. I have just modelled the frontage. It is a complex model because there is a lot to it, though there was no specific feature that was that difficult. I left the turrets to last, expecting them to be tricky, but it went smoothly. The bricks were done by using a "curve" modifier on a Bezier curve, and sometimes they can be a real pain to do, but this just worked, with just tweaking the size of the wall. Turned out pretty well!