Atomic Systems

out of curiosity, what techniques are peeps out there using to bend handrails around the front of smoke boxes over the door?

I tried a few ways for my last loco, all were fiddly.
(ended up bending the ends of a chopped up torus)

anyone have a simple method ?

Yep, handrails are a fiddle. so far (in TSM) I generate a single length of tube with multiple sections. I then manipulate each section to turn around the boiler and over the top of the Smokebox and then down the other side of the boiler. Some of the sections points needing to be rotated on one or more of the axis so that the handrail does not appear 'pinched' at particular changes of direction.

If anybody has a simpler method then I am all for it!

Hi Paul,

Have you tried the Extrude Tool in 3D Canvas, I have managed to make some nice curves with it, usually I just use long cubes for the side hand rails (with the back face removed), they look OK at a distance. Then extrude a curved section for the front handrail. (still uses a lot of faces/points though).

It's a doddle in TurboCAD.
You draw your circular (or rather hexagonal) cross-section and draw a polyline for the extrusion profile (the shape of the handrail). You then extrude the cross-section along the polyline.

hmm - I guess there's no easy way in 3DC, sounds like a job for another plugin

A small addendum to this topic ....

Using 3DC, I found an interesting way of making a (square section low poly) handrail last night.

Littleton 4 has a rather odd shaped saddle tank with a handrail running up the side and over the top.

I selected all of the side and top faces of the tank and used copy/paste to create another object.

I then shrank the new object in the Z (lengthways) direction to 0.03.
I selected all the faces and extruded by 0.03 with a bevel of 0.0

This gave a square rail, (with the underside face missing) that exactly followed the tank side shape - by scaling up all dimensions by about 5%, and pressing the "smooth" button, it perfectly matched the tank on the model.

I found this simpler than most I've tried so far.

I tend to just build with square section and then apply a crease in 3DC.

If its just a single rail I also sometimes rotate it to be a 'diamond' section.

At most distances you can't tell the difference between a square and a cylinder when the section is that small.

For small rails and grab handles I use a flat with transparency.

Cheers

Richard Scott

I also use square rails, but smoothed. A little bit of graduated texture helps to complete the illusion of roundness. I have never bent rails, for the most part no one notices/minds and I feel that in general, it is a big waste of polys.

So we're pretty much agreed that smoothed square is best for handrails - low poly and looks the part

The worst (for efficiency) I've seen was a model that used a 16 sided cylinder for handrails (I can't remember which it was, but I suspect it was one of the yankee coaches)

One trick I've used is to make any rails visible in the head-out view with more sections. American diesels use a job lot per loco! I lost 80 polys from one model.

On the other side it doesn't matter so much - 4 or 5 sides smoothed looks fine. BTW I've found that 3 sides won't smooth very convincingly.

regards
Richard Osborne

how about doing half the hand rail in TSM then copy paste flip etc. not so much work
john engoine mad

jow104 wrote:how about doing half the hand rail in TSM then copy paste flip etc. not so much work
john engoine mad

... that just increases the number of polys needed to nearly double ...

Makes more sense to spend the time to make one good one and copy and paste that everywhere else needed ...

Regarding 3D Canvas' ability to stretch the handrail - isn't that what the extrude tool is for? I've not ever used it but it seems to be for that purpose!

Jon

Jon - back from another long holiday ?

the extrude tool tends to generate huge numbers of polys - there was a similar thread on the amabilis forums called "Making Piping"

I had a bit of success with the bend operation on cylinders recently, but it's not easy to get an accurate shape (OK for sanding pipes)

I really should do that plugin, one model I want to do has them all over the place and they're all curved.

Could say that - it's been ages since I looked at the forums! Somehow I lost the desire to model... But anyway I'm back on track now (no pun intended, but it sounds good!) - have finally got around to ordering some 4mm scale drawings of Bulleid SR EMUs - 4-EPB included of course so I will soon be releasing stuff.

Oh, and there's also that BETA A4 I need to make a full release and a tutorial on how I made it to do so I'm sure I'll be busy in the ensuing months!

Jon