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A week ago, a friend and I attended BlendIberia here in Madrid. There was a 2 day crash course in blender. Both wanted to learn Blender, yet 2.4 looks put as back each time. So we got in the course. The first day was an introduction to blender and basic modeling. Pablo, our instructor, chose an steam train as base for the trainning. It was great fun, and blender was just plain great. So this week I've tryed to learn more things and get used to blender. In my spared time I've grown on the few poly's we got to do at the course (there were so many things to see that there was no time to model, hehehe), I've use a similar picture for reference. It a double first, my first blender model and my first vehicle, also I'm using it to practice smoke and fog in Octane. I'm thinking on using it for the contest adding more stuff and using instances... we'll see. Meanwhile I hope you like it.
On the technical side, 2.5M poly rendered in PT with an HDRI as light source for 15 to 30 minutes, color corrected, no retouching.

with a bit of motion blur it's perfect, the back smoke is amazing
ciao beppe

yeap, it needs some motion blur, hopefully with 2.6 and instances something might be done. Meanwhile we got smoke to play with

I really like the ilumination, i have a question about the grass i always like to work with displace map but now octane doesnt have that option how did you make the grass without to get too much polygon count? I try with hair and fur convert it into geometry but it seems to have problems working with to much count hairs.

I usually do billboards so polycount is low, in this case I wanted to learn how to do instances in blender so I used particles and instance a 60x60cm patch which was actually a particle instance by itself of 4 different blades. So polycount in this one is high, but I want to test the incoming instancesand I'm also learning how to do what I usually do but in Blender (in which with my limited abilities by now I'm faster at most things than with Max with many more years of usage behind, so go figure ;P)
For a tutorial for doing grass either with billboards or grass blades (low/high polycount) I've always loved this one (it's for max and vray, but you can use it with any soft) http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/0 ... al-part-1/ and part 2 http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/0 ... al-part-2/

Nicely done, especially the steam. The last one is the best, imo

Welcome to the club!

How did you do the smoke? I didn't think that you could export smoke from Blender.

I don't know if it was intentional but the train has a toy train look to it. Really cool.

@matej, thanks, I've totally fell for blender, in this model I was able to use only blender and octane, the textures for the materials mix I painted it directly inside blender, such ease I'm not used to (usually that would have involved max+sculptris+photoshop), the particles for instancing stuff is great too, all the bolts are particles instanced on a dummy surface above the train base mesh... so many little things.
@ steveps3, the smoke is modeled, I did a simple cube, added subdivide and I sculpted the smoke to my liking, it's not particles, but I wasn't planning on animating the scene, althou that's the next thing I'm planning on learning. If you like the material, I'll post the parameters later on. And the toy look wasn't what I was after, it's a side effect, althou I can't put my finger on why, but I agree that I like it that way ;P

Niceeeee!!!
I love the smoke! You are mastering it! ain't smoke funny to play with?
Congrats!!!

thanks ttaberna, smoke is great fun to play with, I expect that we'll be using it a lot from now on as a constant companion, even as a subtle way to set depth it adds a lot to a scene.