Another Connie (coz we need an uglier one)

[Gumboots]

Yup, the original is not gruesome enough. RT3 needs a Connie that will make people run for the hills. I have just the thing.

Tis a Pennsy H3 from circa 1890, not modelled to brass obsessive standards but defo up to or past general PopTop standards. Still needs some reskinning but is basically all there. It looks like this compared to the Mogul...

and like this compared to the real thing...

What I'm thinking is that, due to its undoubtedly obscene levels of just plain ugly, this beastie will be ideal for scaring children and making maiden aunts have conniptions. Which is a good enough reason to have it.

However, it will also fill a gap between Ye Olde Connie the First and the H10 Mikado. Said gap will need filling with my revamped cargo scale idea, because that has a freight weight bump in 1890.

I also need a locomotive that will allow me to test the new "Gruesome" pax appeal rating, and this one definitely fits the bill. Tis muchly gruesome.

However, even with the default weights, eras and ratings it would still be useful, because the old Connie is a bit past its use-by date when the 1900 freight change comes in and drops asteroids on your choofers. A later and stronger Connie would be just the ticket. This one actually looks the part, rather than just being a "throw some lipstick on the old pig" deal. That sort of thing is fine if all you have is lipstick and a pig, but we have more options these days.

[Gumboots]

Woohoo! I found an even uglier Connie! Behold the KkStB 170. This beast makes the H3 look positively stylish.



As we say in this part of the world, that thing is as ugly as a sack full of arseholes.

However, it was actually a good locomotive and had some technically interesting aspects. Introduced in 1897, and built in large numbers, it was the main freight hauler for the Austria-Hungary area up until the end of WW1. It was the first locomotive to use a new system of controlling side play in the driving wheels, that gave greatly reduced wear on the wheels and the track around tight bends. The funny large pipe between the steam domes was intended as a steam reservoir so that it could provide extra steam on downhill runs, thus leaving some boiler pressure for when you got to the next hill.

They were built as saturated, but converted to superheated in the mid-1920's. This gave them a 40% increase in grunt and another lease of life, and they were in use until the 1950's in Germany. Czechoslavkia further updated them by fitting Giesel ejectors after WW2, and the last withdrawals were in 1978. So that's an 80 year service life for the class, which is pretty good going.

So this beast would make a great addition to the Euro freight slug roster. It'd be ideal for the Orient Express scenarios.

[Just Crazy Jim]

It is a bit ugly, but I think I could grow to love it. Just paint it green and call it "The Incredible Hulk".

[Hawk]

Or leave it black and call it 'The Incredible Bulk'.

[Gumboots]

They were like Ford Model T's. Any colour you like, as long as it's black.

I'd be inclined to call it The Incredible Bog Ugly. Might as well be accurate. The funny thing about them is they were originally designed for hauling premium express trains. Seriously. They were meant for the really heavy grades where standard express locos would require an extra helper. The thinking was that it made more sense to just use a different loco for those sections (which Austria had a lot of). So this gruesome beast had very little top speed, and very little appealing about it in general, but would get the job done.

As it turns out they were quickly relegated to freight work anyway, because with increasing express train weights around the turn of the century things quickly reached the point where the Class 170 would require a helper too, so they came up with more impressive beasties for hauling pax services over them thar mountains. The more impressive beasties in question being the KkStB Class 280, which was basically a 2-10-0 version of the 2-6-4's they ran on flat country.



And if you're wondering why they ran 2-6-4's on flat country, Austria had really crappy coal so a giant firebox was the most important thing for speed. Ergo the 4 wheel rear truck. The 2 wheel front truck seemed to be fine. They generally didn't run over 70 mph anyway.

[RulerofRails]

Gotta say, all that space under the boiler looks odd. Looks like a conversion/adaption rather than an original design to me. I can't read German, but thanks to a little Google Translate seems there were only 8 produced?

[Gumboots]

I haven't checked closely yet, but given that it was introduced in the same year as the Class 210 2-6-4, it would be logical that they would share some components and dimensions. You wouldn't redesign every component from scratch if it wasn't necessary.

So the Class 210 ran on 2140 mm drivers (7' 1/2" for you lot) which meant the boiler had to be at a suitable height. My guess (not having direct access to the designer's thoughts) is that this boiler height was regarded as being perfectly fine, so no reason not to use it.

The 2-10-0 still required a massive firebox to get best performance from the cruddy local coal, but had to fit that on top of the rear drivers. It couldn't drop the firebox over a lower rear truck. So I think the boiler height was the logical conclusion of wanting to retain firebox size, while having to reduce driver diameter for performance up heavy grades.

The main reason only 8 were built is that, in Austria, this was the crossover era from saturated to superheated. The 280 was saturated, but once a bit more experience of superheaters was available they converted two of them to superheated. These went much better (about 1/4 more oomph) so the next couple of dozen were built as superheated. These were called the 380 class. Basically exactly the same choofer, but with a superheater added inside the smokebox. You can't tell them apart just by looking at them.

[Gumboots]

Aha! I just had a look at the drawings for the 280. The reason for the boiler height (or at least, a significant factor) is the inner cylinders.

They were a four cylinder compound, with two high pressure cylinders under the smokebox. These had to be inclined, same as the outer low pressure cylinders, to get the inner connecting rods clear of the first couple of axles (all cylinders drove the third axle). So that then means you can't lower the boiler.

[Gumboots]

Well this sorta just happened.

It surely is a strange looking beast.

[RulerofRails]

Did it grow on you while you were working on it? Perhaps it's the large chimney and domes so much higher than the top of the cab that give it that sense of incongruity. Because of the angle in the photo they are exaggerated a little, with the proper dimensions in your model looks have improved for my eyes.

PS.
This is probably a silly question, but is there any way to create a skin (H.3. or any loco for that matter) from photos?

[Gumboots]

Funnily enough it has grown on me. It's certainly not pretty, but for some weird reason I find it amusing. And of course it really would be a useful Euro/World addition to the freight roster of the period. It's also small enough for double-heading, which could be fun. Although that might cause excessive load on the graphics card, with the extra detail compared to default PopTop models. Singles will be fine, but doubles en masse could be a bit much.

Here's a shot from much the same angle as the picture of the real thing (back in post #2).

---

Regarding skinning from photos: it's not a silly question. It's possible, but there are limitations of course. Photoshop will correct for lens distortion and perspective, up to a point. It works best when you have something like a good square-on shot of a box car. That means minimal distortion so is the easiest to work with. I used this for doing those modern autoracks.

Once you start getting into cylindrical components and other odd bits from weird angles, it gets a lot trickier. Past a certain point you might as well just make it from scratch.

[Gumboots]

I've just been working on the Pennsy H3 model to move that along, and I found out something odd about it. The firebox is huge, and goes almost to the rear of the cab. There's a step about a foot wide behind the backhead, and about 2 feet of space each side of the firebox, but the fireman would have had to stand on the front platform of the tender most of the time. Which was about two feet lower than the floor of the cab, so the firebox door would have been at a pretty convenient shovelling height. Makes sense I suppose, but not something I've seen before.

And obviously this means the driver would have had to stand to one side of the firebox to get a clear view ahead, which must have been mighty toasty in summer.

[Gumboots]

This is coming along well. I finished the UV's for the tender and temporarily skinned it, using bits of the old Mogul/Connie skin just to check it was all hanging together well. Reskinning it with better graphics won't be hard. Tenders are pretty basic.

Also made a start on the locomotive UV's. They are going smoothly so far, so I fired up Photoshop to make some test pieces of the custom skin. This resulted in me coming up with some good tricks I hadn't tried before. The apparent 3D shaping of the front of the smokebox was just done with a bevel and emboss layer style set to "Emboss". Dunno why, but I just tried it and it worked, so now I know how they did those.

The rivets around the sides of the boiler and smokebox were done using a 4px basic round brush set to 250% spacing, making each strip about a 10 second job. The ones curving in a circular path on the front of the smokebox were done by using the shape tool to do a circle, change to path, then stroke the path (one click) using the same brush as before. I hadn't tried this before (had only read about it) and it's super quick and easy. Perfect circles of rivets with no drama and at all.

The firebox hasn't had any grunge applied yet so doesn't quite match the boiler. That, and a range of other details, will be sorted soon. The whole lot is being done on a single 1024x1024, so there will be the possibility of double-heading the beast at some point if anyone thinks it's worth doing.

[Gumboots]

More progress. Loco custom skinning now is getting close to completion. Even revamped the mesh a bit more, to cut polys slightly and make it easier to skin.

Speaking of cutting polys, I'm doing the wheel meshes on this as triangles rather than the usual squares. The downside is they take up a bit more space of the skin, which I can spare, but the upside is they only have half the number of tris. These add up when you have a lot of wheels with multiple layers per wheels, so halving them makes sense. The only thing that was bugging me about using single triangles was getting the sizing of them right, because you can't just set the edges to match the diameter of the wheel like you can with squares.

Then I realised something. To enclose any wheel skin within an equilateral triangle, all you need to do is use Blender's circle tool, with 3 vertices in the "circle", and the radius set to exactly twice the radius of your wheel. Because of trigonometry (sin30 = 0.5 and all that) this works perfectly. There's no need for tricky calculations. If you want to skin a 63" wheel at the standard scale of 1 Blender unit = 10", just put the cursor at the centre of the wheel and make a 3 vertex circle with a 6.3 unit radius, then rotate 90 degrees around the Y axis. Voila, instant mesh sorted.

Edit: Just updated the screenshot with a better idea: more of a slate grey rather than a green. Looks a bit slicker, IMHO.

[Hawk]

Lookin' good Gumboots.

[Gumboots]

Yeah it's coming along nicely. I've decided it only has to be as much of a hassle as I decide to make it, which means I might even (miraculously) finish the @&!%#@ thing sometime soon. I'm gonna get onto coding up some hex files so we can have some fun with this beast. If I see a beta running live on my box, that'll give me a good guide to any final tweaks it may need.

[Gumboots]

Ok, just in case anyone was wondering if Gumboots had totally lost the plot again I'm off the express cars and back onto the H3. I should be able to get the skinning pretty much finalised over the weekend. Once skinning is done it's just hex files, so will aim to have a finished unit later next week. *th_up*!

[Gumboots]

Ok, here's the latest. All the bits and pieces are on it now. UV's have been almost completely repacked to fit it all in (which always happens a couple of times). The grunge overlays are turned off while I was sorting everything else out, but all bits are now skinned to at least a basic level. Some are finished, but most need a bit more detailing thrown at them. For instance, I'll be making new drivewheels instead of using the cruddy old ones off the PopTop Connie. Those are just there to check everything fits like it should. And obviously it needs cab front windows and various brackets, etc, added to the skin, but it's all on target and progressing well.

[Gumboots]

Got a bit more done. I'm really pleased with how the bell hanger turned out. The layer styles might still get some adjustment, but the overall shape is good and clean.

I did it at a larger scale than most of the skin, to get a cleaner outline. It's also split vertically at the centreline, and each side is angled back slightly. This helps avoid the "made of paper" look when side on. The visible thickness never quite vanishes, which I find helps the looks a bit for no real difference to amount of work involved. It does add 2 tris to the total count, but that's not an issue.

[Hawk]

That bell looks cool. I like that.