Westward Ho

"It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were at sea - there is no other adequate expression - on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own head seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land."

Robert Louis Stephenson, Across the Plains

Had I intended to just render an illustration of Stevenson's book, the locomotive would beyond doubt need to have been a specimen of the famous 4-4-0 "American" design known from western movies; and the plains obviously less barren. However, the link to Stevenson's travel memoirs as quoted above is only due to pure chance, not design, and the motif of this shot actually stands on its own; being set somewhere in the realm of dreams, it has been calling not for accurate depiction of any particular time or place, but for archetypes. In case of the plains, this means arid steppe; in case of the locomotive, it means impressive power.

The locomotive is modeled from scratch after blueprints for the 2-10-2 USRA "Heavy Santa Fe" class of steam locomotives, which entered service on US railroads at the end of WWI. (I'll spare you the rest of all the trivia I learned during my researches.)

The motivation to go for this particular locomotive class was actually quite compelling; of all the locomotives for which I could find free blueprints on the internet, it stood out in three distinct areas at once: The blueprints were by far among the most detailed; it would make for a sufficiently impressive engine (articulated locomotives like "Mallet" types might have been a bit over the top, and I couldn't find any blueprints anyway); and last not least it was part of a whole family of locomotive classes, each coming with blueprints, so that I would have a comparatively easy time in case I should change my mind regarding the desired dimensions. (As a matter of fact, I first went for the 2-8-2 "Heavy Mikado" member of that family, but decided to "supersize" it soon after I had modeled the first parts. The decision already paid off there.) The latter feature also meant that ambiguities of the blueprints could often be solved by studying the drawings for the other family members.

(Unfortunately, the choice also had its drawbacks, which I did not realize until a good deal into the modeling. Besides the blueprints, photographs were a major source of information on how the individual parts would look in 3D; however, the two USRA "Santa Fe" variants were equipped with a particularly uncommon valve gear, with closeup photographs of these being virtually nowhere to be found on the internet; likewise, the trailer was of an unusual type as well. For a few parts I therefore ultimately had to resort to some solid guessing. Not that it would be relevant for this shot, but still it did bother me.)

The "captain" is a DAZ 3D figure posed with Poser 7 and exported with PoseRay. The motif originally called for him to hold a sextant, but I found that it would probably be difficult to recognize from this perspective, so I went for a spyglass instead.

I also had planned for the scene to be set in daylight, and had envisioned a realistic, semi-dirty look for the engine; but while toying around with the sun position I happened to come across this twilight sky, and just couldn't get my eyes off it. And even though I'm missing an opportunity to present all the detail work that went into the engine and to show off texturing skill, I just can't help it: I just had to go for this sky, and the way it reflects in a freshly-painted boiler fairing.

The sky was created using scattering media (credits go to Bruno Cabasson for his excellent tutorial on povray.binaries.tutorials); the ground is actually not an infinite plane, but a sphere of fitting size (fun fact: the rails are circular, going all the 40,000 km round the globe); moon and star are simple spheres. Unfortunately, the scale required for the whole sky smash turned out to break details on the locomotive, so I had to render the sky separately. As I needed a high-resolution image for the moon and star, but rendering a full 360 degrees panorama at this resolution would have been prohibitively slow due to the media, I resorted to rendering a low-resolution 360 degrees panorama and a high-resolution 22.5 x 22.5 closeup, which I then merge-rendered into a single sky image. It is the only light source in the main scene.

Sky rendering took 36 minutes on an Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz 6 GB for the moon & star closeup, and 3 hours 9 minutes on an AMD Phenom X4 9650 2.3GHz 6 GB for the panorama and merging. The main render took no more than 7 minutes on the Intel Core i7 machine despite double resolution and high anti-aliasing.

IC and Photoshop were used for image format conversions and to add signature.