For a long time I’ve wanted to recreate something I see throughout my day when I go to and from work. After seeing the work of Clinton Crumpler and his Train car project I became inspired to work on my own local train transit. My main goals were to recreate the look and feel of the train from the image and to better practice my light which I felt wasn’t one of my strongest areas.

Blockout

First I needed to block out the general size and dimensions of the train, from there I had to block out using primitive shape static meshes. Doing this helped with creating size templates from when I went to refine and fully flesh out assets, such as my seats, which were the primary assets in a train car. They were originally placed with the right spacing and the right dimensions, then once my new seat was created, I could then select my blocked out mesh and batch replace my new seats to save time. Once the seats were placed in the scene I could start working around, refining the lighting, smaller asset placement and finally the modular pieces for the train itself.

Scaling

First I made a template Maya scene using the Imperial scale, then I imported in the default UE4 Mannequin as a human reference scaled to 6 feet which is my height for when I do relative dimensions. Next, I went on the train and began measuring things, such as the width of the individual seats, seat frame width, and the doorway dimensions, etc. Then using profile photos front the side and my dimensions of the door sizes, I could accurately make a block size of the train car. My major problem was creating modular pieces to build the train out. In the end, I tested to make sure I could snap the pieces together in Maya before I import them into Unreal for the final assembly, which was made easier using the same method from before of batch replacing the objects.

Materials