Between the Ties

[fleetwood]

... or sleepers as sometimes referred to. The recent train subjects made me think of a photo of an old rag I made a while back when hiking along some nearby rail tracks, so decided to try to use it as a reference. Here's the result and the reference photo. I always am fascinated by the strange and often robustly engineered mechanical artifacts that seem be found as litter along the tracks so I included one buried rusty fantasy object made in XenoDream.

plants -xfrog, Klass
crushed can model from Sample-and-Hold

[bobbystahr]

Nicely done, I had difficulty discerning which was TG and which was a photo...They're sleepers in Britain and ties in N America...

[Dune]

That is nice to see and a good ref. Close render. Procedural dirt or rags would be perfect.

[Hannes]

Wow, that loos already amazing. The only thing that I'd change is the cracks in the stones. Like that they look a bit like compressed clay or something like that.
The crushed can looks fantastic here!! Gotta check their website!

[Hannes]

Downloading the crushed can at the moment. 115MB!!!!!! Holy cow!! 

[inkydigit]

Love this render... great detailing, and I have that an too, never got round to doing a close up, as it so deserves... needs to be centred at its origin/pivot to be handier to use.

[archonforest]

WOW! Great render! Like the details and stuff. Well done.

[fleetwood]

Thanks all 
Ties are simply Terragen cubes with displacement coming from old wood images and orange rag is a flattened Terragen sphere with several displacements including one coming from a cloth image.
Ballast stones and base sands are all fake stones (14 separate sizes) with procedural texturing only. Experimenting with a new crack modification scheme which makes some cracks fade, actually the reference doesn't show many cracks in the ballast stones nor much actual fine dirt.
Some of the stones may look squashed just because they are those random "cow splat" shapes that like to crop up in fake stones from time to time, reseed might lose them I guess, but I left them. There are funny "rocks" in real ballast around here, metal slag sometimes and pieces of fused glass like material or melted limestone from some industrial processes, industrial bi-products or waste seemingly.   

[luvsmuzik]

That certainly looks like the railbeds I have seen. Good job!
Brother was a brakeman and conductor, father a yardmaster.

[ADE]

crushed can 115 mb?? :O......I have an empty  can of beer here and sure can crush it for less
nice render btw