Diesel Fuel Tank

Description:

NOTE: The blend file only contains the fuel tank, the concrete supports, and the ladder.

The bottom image with the grass and the brick wall is only to suggest a scene that you might make for yourself. Including the full scene would have doubled the size of the zip file. However, I have included the seamless image of bricks and the normal and bump maps for them as well in case you want to create your own brick wall. I threw in the seamless image of the ground texture as well for you to use.

This diesel tank project was only to experiment creating my own hand painted textures, bump maps, and signs.

I have never hand painted an entire texture on a UV map before and I am not even close to being even a poor artist, so I thought I'd give it a try on a simple model. For a first effort, I thought it turned out reasonably well.

Except for the three signs, all the textures on the tank are hand painted.

In addition, I used three images: a mossy rock image to create the moss on the concrete supports, a seamless concrete image for the supports, and a rust texture as a bump map to add small deformities in the tank.

I learned several important lessons on uv mapping and creating textures. It took me a while to figure out how to get the stain down the side of the tank from old diesel spills that occurred when the tank was being refilled. I could have painted on the texture, but I wanted the subtleties of the rust, the Danger sign, and the flammable sign to show through. So I created a semi-transparent oil spill and sandwiched the signs between it and the tank texture, allowing the diesel stains to flow over the signs and allowing the underlying rust textures to show through as well.

Thanks to Andrew Price for the technique of adding dirt to the bottom edges of the concrete supports and the tank (which is subtle).

I finally discovered how to get my signs and lettering to show up in the right spot without being duplicated on the opposite side of the model. It's simple once you know. If I had known how to do it when I did the V-1 buzz bomb model a couple of weeks ago, I would have included all of the standard stencils the Germans used at the time.

I know all of this is simple-stupid for experienced modelers, but it's been difficult for me to discover what I don't know.

The ladder is there in case you want to climb on top of the tank and have a look around. However, there is only a small patch of ground and a piece of a brick wall to see and neither of those are real.

As always, all images are copyright free. The model is CC0 and no need to credit me.