Train Head - Full Tutorial

The front section of a locomotive, modelled, unwrapped and textured across seventeen hours in 3ds Max, Rizom UV and Substance Painter. It is a large-object tutorial, and large objects fail in one particular way: the modelling goes fine and the texture comes back soft, because the surface area outran the texture budget. Most of what is taught here is how to stop that happening.

What the three parts cover

• ✓Three video archives, Part 01 through Part 03
• ✓10 hours of modelling in 3ds Max
• ✓2 hours of unwrapping in Rizom UV
• ✓4 hours of texturing in Substance Painter
• ✓UDIM and overlap layout worked through on a real subject
• ✓MP4 video, with no narration

Modelling here is box modelling done properly. A proxy mesh is built first, and everything after it is edit poly work aimed at the overall form — the tutorial is explicit that shape and silhouette come before detail, and it spends ten hours proving the point on a subject that has a great deal of both.

The unwrapping chapter is short and is the part worth watching twice. Rizom UV lays the model out across UDIM tiles, with overlapping shells wherever the geometry repeats, and that is what buys back the resolution a single tile would have thrown away. Substance Painter then opens the project with the UV tiles option enabled and manages materials across the whole set, so painting happens on every tile at once instead of tile by tile.

There is no rendering chapter. This one stops at a finished texture set, which is the honest place to stop for an asset headed into an engine. The level is intermediate and the recording assumes working knowledge of the three applications used. Neither the model nor the project files are part of the download, and the videos carry no voice-over and no subtitles.