Module 1 - Blender

Here is my super cool barrel made (followed from this tutorial):

I'm not super happy with it, i think the colours are a bit dark, and the iron rings should stick out more, but it still looks okay! Anyway I was just excited to move on to the next part.

Following the barrel, I decided to try and recreate the West Coast Wilderness Railway Locomotive. This railway runs from Queenstown to Strahan on the West coast of Tasmania and is a relatively famous tourist attraction. Also the locomotive is gorgeous!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Wilderness_Railway)

(https://www.traveller.com.au/west-coast-wilderness-railway-tasmania-not-your-ave...)

And here is my attempt:

I couldn't quite match the details on the train but I did my best! 

I learnt a lot about Blenders tools during the process and feel a lot more comfortable with some of Blenders fundamental shape building tools such as bevel, extrude, inset, and cutting. Unfortunately I did not have time to texture the train, maybe next time.   My favorite parts are the bezier curve pipes and the little lamp at the front of the train, I love how they turned out.  

The hardest part of the process was figuring out all the intricacies and details, and then using Blenders tools to do what I wanted to do. How do I create this shape how I envision it? How do I create a lip on this cylinder? Curved cylinders??  For example, the main chimney was the first thing I created, and my attempt was rather messy:

But by the time I'd gotten around to creating the stoppers at the front of the train, I'd figured out a rather simple technique using normals extrusion and a bevel on the edge of the lip of the cylinder. Experimenting with the tools and figuring out solutions was definitely the best experience I could get to get a grasp on Blender's fundamentals.

Overall I think it turned out really good! There are a lot of things I would do differently if I were to do this over, using some of the things I learnt during the process (Also texture it!). But I am happy with the result.

Thanks for reading :)