INTRODUCTION
My name is Steve Hawirko, a Vancouver, BC local. I’ve been doing 3D work for ages, starting with modding race sims and making historic race cars, monster trucks, etc. Deciding this was the best career for me, I went to Think Tank Training Centre in North Vancouver. After jumping around from project to project, I’ve now settled as part of the car QA team on Forza.
In addition to making pretend cars for a living, I enjoy fabricating and building real cars as well in my free time. I’ve built gassers, a concourse winning Jag, and I’m currently restoring both my 1935 DeSoto Airflow and 1966 Dodge Polara 880 wagon, the latter needing almost every structural element fabbed from scratch. So when it comes to mechanical accuracy in 3D, I’m second to none because I’m sick in the head and do it for real, for fun.
INSPIRATION
The final render is a product of my adoration for early 20th-century industrial illustrations. These include the concept drawings of industrial designers like Otto Kohler, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, Harley Earl, Virgil Exner, and the anonymous artist armies in the styling divisions of car companies and other design firms. Or the commercial illustrators like Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, and the innumerable other members of their peculiar trade, whose extraordinary paintings lined every billboard and magazine ad from the earliest days of print to their waning days in the 1960s.
The fruits of their trades, once regarded as mundane annoyances to glance past, now stand as a remarkable body of work. Both from a technical standpoint and as a cultural idea, they set out to represent. Towering Beaux-Arts skyscrapers defying the world with their presence; the smoke and fire of a voracious steel mill, its soot-stained sinews stretching off into the horizon; sleek, futuramic new motorcars, cast in chrome and cutting a defiant path through the reticent air; or thundering locomotives, a 2,000-ton luxurious line of streamlined steel charging at 100 mph to a new dawn in the west. All in service of your slightest convenience. Talk to your dealer today!
I love their composition, their color, and their dreamlike portrayal of the life and times they represented. Being a locomotive enthusiast, I was specifically attempting to replicate the spirit of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s annual calendar paintings—fantastic watercolor paintings depicting The Pennsylvania Railroad and America at the height of their glory.
The Duluth & Missabe was inextricably tied to the steel industry, being built and owned by U.S. Steel specifically to feed the grand steel mills supplied by the Great Lakes. So, the above image was a particular reference. The fire and fury of America’s furnaces, at the wrathful command of Uncle Sam, rolling up his sleeves and looking east to forcibly bring the west to it, borne on the back of the railway’s sinews of steel. The Duluth diesels were a little late to the party, but their road and their forebears were doubtlessly instrumental in that effort.
Thus, I wanted the towering composition of an imposing industry: a single dominant tone, using warm pastel colors. A single strong plane stretching off to the horizon, aligned with the central ridged form of a road switcher. Progress on the rails and smoky pillars of productivity in the sky. But as this was the '60s, the golden twilight of Americana, I wanted the hazy afterglow of a fading summer dawn—some of the chimneys laying dormant, the buildings boarded, the flag limp, and the negative space on the left filled with a 1965 Buick Riviera, a wonderful car, but one of the first early onset symptoms of the coming Malaise Era. The cracks were beginning to show.
PROCESS
Firstly, the locomotive itself. The model is of an EMD SD18, as uniquely delivered to the Duluth & Missabe Railway in 1960. I was commissioned to make it for an upcoming rail sim, which was a wise pick. The DM&IR is a popular railroad with a unique look, relatively short trackage with only one biome, and a rich history. It primarily hauls one thing: a mile-long line of identical iron ore hoppers to feed the voracious appetite of America’s steel mills, meaning a minimum of rolling stock to produce.
Additionally, despite the fact that the Duluth's SD18s were quite unique as far as diesels go, being an EMD/General Motors product, the majority of what I made for it can be quickly kitbashed into a variety of other EMD products. Anything built between 1945 and 1974 will share something with it, meaning future assets for the sim could be assembled quite quickly. Great choice.
References
Next was gathering references. Reference material on the as-delivered originals is available but not overwhelming, as they were heavily modified in the '80s and '90s. Though the hood and high nose were unique to the Duluth examples, most everything else was shared with other EMD products. The trucks were shared with every SD unit built until the '70s, the cab with SD9s and GP9s, the coupler a standard Type E, and the draft gear universal. Knowing what else these parts were used on greatly helped in gathering references. Knowing your subject beforehand is probably the best thing you can do if you’re to do it right.
But far more valuable than photos are technical drawings. Lenses distort, pixels lie, lighting alters, and drawings belie. Dimensioned drawings are the one absolute truth. So I went diving through historical societies looking for archived technical drawings. From the N&W Historical Society, I found fully dimensioned drawings for the truck/bolster castings and journal boxes, and roughly dimensioned elevation drawings for an SD9, which was broadly the same outside of the unique hood. I used PRR drawings for the wheel profiles and Type E coupler. I otherwise made do with references to specific dimensions in operating manuals and advertising brochures from EMD. Finally, for specific parts, I reached out to railroading friends with access to the parts firsthand and got them to take orthogonal photos and jot down basic dimensions. The gladhand connectors on the air hoses on the front were made accurately this way, for example.
But where neither technical drawings nor photo references exist, you have to get crafty. Draft gear is a sprung buffer that cushions the loads between the coupler and frame, and despite being a nearly universal part, I found very little reference for the EMD gear. However, after going through several equipment suppliers, I found a brochure for EMD-style draft gear with orthogonal and isometric CAD views of the parts, from which I also inferred the coupler pocket in the frame. Aces! …or at least queen high.
The headlights, the bell, the Nathan horn, and the radiator fans—critical references and dimensions for these components were found on equipment supplier and auction sites, hidden in plain sight.
Finally, it was time to start. The commissioner told me it was intended for Unreal’s Nanite specs and, given that it’s the hero asset of hero assets, to go all out. So, I chose a mid-poly workflow using the bevel modifier and bent normals for ease of creation, turnaround time, modularity in the future, and flexible polycount. The final polycount was about 1.5 million and can easily be reduced for porting to a less forgiving engine.
Modeling
As for modeling the thing, the hardest part is always where to start. I work backwards. Most people begin with a chunky blockout, but I know that if I make parts correctly, they’ll fit together. So, I started by creating all the repeated parts—bin stuff I’d be using on every other part of the unit. The latches for the hood doors and side skirts were first. They appeared on almost every part of the body, so I made them correctly once, fully mapped and ready to pull off the shelf. Next came the side skirts, then the horns, handrail mounts, grab irons, ladders, and so on. Only then did I do an accurate blockout using the elevation drawings of an SD9 for key dimensions. I then hammered out all the handrails and put them in place.
Then I made the trucks. I had almost all the dimensions to replicate them perfectly, so I did. I have a strange workflow, best described as “Destructive CAD.” I build and fabricate cars from scratch, have worked in a foundry as a pattern maker, and have dabbled in machining. So, I think like an engineer and work like one too. To this end, Blender is irreplaceable. The 3D Cursor, in particular, is an indispensable tool for replicating the technical drawing workflow. It allows for the accurate placement of guide radii, measurement points, chamfers, and cuts as precise as the vertex float value will allow. (Were it so easy in steel!) Blender also uniquely allows me to create faceless, orphaned verts and edges, which to most people would be an annoying bug, but I find extraordinarily valuable for creating measurement guides, reference points, and so on, using them as quasi-jigs. Combined with the 3D Cursor, I can create perfectly accurate shapes with ease.
A good practice is also to map parts as you go along, especially anything you reuse—parts or individual shapes alike. I tend to build up an inventory of parts for any project, keeping a menagerie of fasteners at the root to copy into assemblies easily.
After that, it was just a lot of doing the work. As the locomotive frame is essentially radially symmetrical, I used an instanced group instead of a mirror until the geometry was final. When it came time to map it, I gave the trucks their own material/sheet, as they could be placed under any future SD model I’ll make. Likewise, from the walkway down, it’s the same as an SD9, so that too got its own sheet, with the hood and cab getting the third and final sheet. Should I ever do the later rebuilt low-nose version, the SDM, only the hood textures need to change; the rest are shared. I also created dynamic grime overlays to be blended over the base textures in-game to distinguish and break up units. In a rail sim with many variants lashed together, sharing the massive textures is no small thing.
Rigging
I also created a complete rig so the spring rigging and brakes would function in-game. The brake animation is a simple flex/shape key in-game, derived from the fully functional rig in Blender. I built a simple train rig using a contraption based on moving a mesh representing the important IK/wheelbase points down a Bezier curve and copying the location onto the armature. As far as I know, there’s no way to move a chain of bones down a spline as you would a mesh with a curve modifier, which would work a lot better. Good enough, at least.
Rendering
Finally, after the asset was shipped off to the commissioner, I wanted to do some renders for my own amusement. The hero render started as a simple studio shot on an existing environment I had lying around—little more than basic tracks with nice ambient lighting. But I made the mistake of posting it on the Polycount Discord server, and they egged me on to keep building it up. Everyone in that server is extremely helpful and talented, and a few of those fine people even did excellent paintovers to help nail down the color and composition. It simply would not be what it is without them. I just did the work; they did all the hard parts. Mostly.
A key part of the composition was using 2-point perspective via a tilt-shift lens for that strong single plane and the tall, square, proud, and undistorted nose front and center. I didn’t even know Blender could do that beforehand, but that powerful little setting was hiding in the camera settings tab all this time. Without it, I would not have achieved that industrial illustration forced perspective look. A button worth knowing!
Aside from the SD18 itself, everything else in the scene is stuff I already had lying around. The background buildings are Kitbash, and the P85 coaches, searchlight signals, power poles, and so on were made previously. The smoke and mist are a quick and dirty Embergen export, a very handy tool for volumes.
Lighting
The scene is mostly lit by the HDRI, with a strong sun backing it up to provide more diffuse and clearer shadows. I also added some minor fill lights on the nose of the locomotive to prevent the image from being completely dominated by the sun on the right and to maintain contrast between the background and the train on the left. I had most of the lights cranked up way higher than natural, aiming to emulate the pre-dawn long exposure time without encountering the rendering problems of a truly low-light scene.
All this was also filtering through a large volume scatter, which is a good practice in general to break up the overly clean CG lighting look. It also helped to convey industrial haze and the late summer dawn. All very simple stuff, just carefully employed.
Compositing
And finally, it came to compositing. I had to render the scene in three plates: the main plate, the smoke in the background, and the mist in the foreground. It took some fiddling to blend all the plates nicely, but it ended up working. The lighting was already strong, so it only took some minor color tweaking to achieve the result I wanted. I prefer the muted, low-contrast look in general, as it helps convey the dusty, hazy, industrial summer draught feeling I was aiming for. Adding some minor post passes like overbright glow, and it was done.
What started as a basic turntable render got wildly out of hand, but the end result was worth it. So it goes!
RENDER: DM&IR EMD SD18 Locomotive
Clay renders:
Thank you for reading! Feel free to check out and connect with me on my social media.
About the Artist
Steve Hawirko is a 3D artist from Vancouver, BC, who specialises in vehicles and hard surface assets. He is currently employed with the car QA team for Forza Motorsport.
1 Comment
The absolute goat