noiseboy72

For the test print, I put in some Bachmann metal wheels from an old bogie bolster. Probably not quite right, but they certainly added a little weight. There should be room to get some more just under the buffer beams at each end, and still be invisible, and perhaps even a little along the sole bars, tucked in between the sides of the hopper.

Glad these arrived in one piece. Hopefully the bowing is not too severe, it did not look too bad on the test print, perhaps 0.5mm over the length of the hopper?

As per @RedgateModels suggestion, I can happily do some 3D printing demos, along with displaying some of my garden railway models. Stock ranges from a Rocket loco with coach and wagon stock through Ffestiniog coaches to trams, including Wisbech and Upwell and LCC. All 3D printed or laser cut.

I have been incredibly impressed with your design skills, they are much in excess of my own. What you achieve with MS builder is just amazing. Your APT bogies and pans are a work of art, and would be hard to create in Solidworks, let along MS Builder. It's a genuine pleasure to print parts for you :)

Thanks Ian. Yes, I use a variety of resins. This is an ABS like resin and I find it remains stable after printing. I've just made some signals for my garden railway, so time will tell how long it lasts. Hopefully it won't crumble. I use a modified Mars Pro, which uses high intensity light and a better screen to give very short exposure times, this seems to help with keeping things more flexible after printing. Post cure is limited to a few minutes, nothing more.

We sold our 2 GMRC layouts a couple of years ago. Our Mars layout from the heat is still pretty much in one piece, with all the main items still in place, but it's been modified as a roundy roundy, to make it easier to operate. The Bond layout has been stripped back to bare boards, which was unsurprising, given the less than stellar track plan we were given to work with! It was great fun making GMRC and we'd happily all do it again. The production team knew very little about model railways, but then again, they probably knew very little about Thai airports - which had been their previous production! They are there to make general entertainment, not 100% authentic records of what went on during filming. Had they set out just to capture 3 team building some model railways against the clock, there would have been lots of shots of people drinking tea while waiting for things to dry, shots of people chatting to other teams about the best way to do things, people lending tools and materials, and generally just building train sets at an much increased pace to normal. They need to make entertainment and tell a story from a particular viewpoint, and that's what they do. If that involves enhancing the few disagreements and problems the teams encounter, so be it. I think the Hornby show is similar. They will show a very small part of the design process, scenes of things not going quite right, followed by the grand ending of the finished product going on show. They compress it down to seemingly a few moments, but we all know it's a 12-18 month project end to end, with the designers probably working on a large number of other projects - at different stages of completion at the same time.

A quick photo update following painting..

This was my attempt from your picture... Main problem looks to be hands and feet. I've added her a peg leg, which should be OK up to 7mm, but I might need to graft on some hands from another model.

One of 12 I've printed out today for butcher's scales apparently...

I found a nice gentleman in his top hat and he worked out quite well through the 2D - 3D app. I did have to tidy up his hat, but that was about it. It's actually a fancy dress costume, but it still works very well. Pictured here printed to 7mm, along with a rather lovely sarcophagus that's in the grounds of Kingston Lacy house in Dorset. I did a quick lap around it and captured about 40 photos, before uploading them to Kiriengine and creating a really nice little model. The American student - Annie has now been painted, so I've added her to the shot as well. 3D viewing links here: https://www.kiriengine.app/share/ShareModel?code=AM34IJ&serialize=fddf1f2720bb41ed8a2fb32afa1f645d https://www.kiriengine.app/share/ShareModel?code=AM34IJ&serialize=764c08e4f4904889803e0f8794363e62 I updated my old original Mars printer with a new mono LCD and Mars 2 firmware. It's more than halved the print times and uses the more efficient .ctb files, so the processing and Z lift control is much improved. Less than 2 hours to print out both models - something that would have taken 5 with the old screen and firmware.

I did some comparisons between photogrammetry and this single photo technique. I am sure you can predict the results... This is a young American called Annie. I scanned her the other day using around 40 photos: This is the 3D model of her generated with the 2D reconstruction compared to the photogrammetry model. At first look, the 2D conversion has done a fair job, and has brought out the facial features better than the photogrammetry, but the pose, hair and body shape are all incorrect. The detail in the jumper is knitted in, so should not really be brought out in relief. Still not a bad attempt though. This is the 32mm character I've made for her from the scan.

Thanks for the reply. I did precisely that, and got it to work well enough to download the .Obj files, even if the pointless video animation didn't work. Not sure my Python skills are up to putting this together as an on-machine version, but let me know how you get on!

I would be interested to know the detailed steps that you went through to install this, as I am struggling to say the least. I get errors around finding and installing the correct dependencies. I would like to use this to salvage some photogrammetry projects where the end result is less than optimal due to lots of plain colours preventing accurate image matching, or just poor photography in the first place! Any assistance gratefully received and I will happily share the resulting files with the wider community.

We had to prepare plans for both semi-finals as well as the final itself. Our unbuilt semi-final layout would have been on the theme of Myths and Legends and our plan was to create a derelict theme park set around the theme. We would have had the park's own railway running with western style stock around some run down fun fair rides, an edible gingerbread house, an animated jack and the beanstalk and a loading challenge featuring us loading a standard gauge wagon onto a narrow gauge truck and transporting it on a stretch of 009 track. Our final layout idea was to do magic tricks with the trains! This would have included a magical train that changed from a steam engine to a diesel in a very short tunnel, Find the Lady with 3 identical short trains disappearing into tunnels and reappearing at random points in the layout and a card trick with the reveal being transported from the other end of the 3 layouts. We very much enjoyed our time on the show and would go back in a heartbeat. We've also had fun exhibiting our layouts - we're at Mansfield model railway exhibition this coming weekend and were at Newark last weekend and had lots of interest from children and adults alike. We're open to further exhibition invitations for our heat layout, but intend to retire our semi-final layout as it's not really up to the rigours of exhibiting and has limited operational interest.

Just an update on this, as I had an email from the production company last week. There's currently no firm plans for a 3rd series of GMRC, but discussions are ongoing. Fingers crossed...