Zooming in: Remixing a Train Station for Ticket to Ride Europe

Black is my final version, red is from the actual game

(Sorry for the break. We got a house and a puppy. Less writing, more...stuff to do.)

Today, I'm zooming in on a remix I did for a friend. We were listening to irish folk music at a newly-local bar, and one of my friends asks: do you do replacement game pieces? Yes. Yes, I do.

Their copy of Ticket to Ride Europe apparently didn't arrive with black train stations. We went on Thingiverse, found a station - thought, sure...it's already done! Getting home that night, I realized that it was only partially done and unprintable — but someone else had remixed it into a solid piece.

Left is straight import, right is cleaned up

The initial print was fine. It had the general shape and was roughly the same size. In a dark play area, maybe someone wouldn't notice all of the differences. My friend probably would have been happy with it, but if *I* played with them, it would bug me that I didn't improve the piece before gifting them. You can find the final STL on Thingiverse, here.

The final project

I did a lot of touching up. The arch for the train tunnel is now rounded, instead of chunked 5 times. The tall doors/windows on the first floor have a break in them, like the original. Shingles! Oh man. The actual stations have smaller shingles and more of them, but I felt it was risking the details not showing up enough. The overall piece is only 3 cm tall, printed with a .1mm layer height. (That's 300 layers, maybe I could have fit in more detail.) I added the side vertical ridges above the arch, and the time is now the same on both sides. The triangle windows...dormers(?) on the roof needed to be fixed as well.

This was hours of work, using the digital calipers and figuring out how the model was actually designed. Minor trivial adjustments — it's hard for me to let an imperfection stay.

Timesaver Tip 1: Cut it in half, use the mirror modifier

I was adjusting the first floor, the second floor, the pre-shingled roofing...why do it more than once? I should have been able to mirror x-axis and y-axis, which would have been a much better example.

Timesaver Tip 2: Break it up into consumable parts

One of the nice parts about Blender, is keeping the objects separate until the end is easy. The shingles were probably the most fun part of the whole remix - carving them out of the roof would have been annoying though.

The three shingle arrays on the roof

There are three parts to the shingles - the main roof, the top of the clock tower, and the slightly curved shingles at the base of the main roof.  I did the initial main roof tile as a flattened cube, rotated it to match the roof, and then multiple arrays of the cube. As I only needed the tiles that would stay on the roof portion, I grabbed them downward into what they would be covering. Using the boolean-intersect with the main station...it now matched the size of the roof, and raised them slightly back above the main station to be visible. The clock tower shingles were much the same. (Also in keeping with the first timesaver tip - MIRROR.)

The slightly curved tiles, were a single array. The base tile, in  edge mode, I selected the two side edges, control-e for the edge menu, then Subdivide - 3 times. I grabbed the three new edges to make a slight curve...then did the array, followed by the same boolean-intersect trick to get the right amount of tiling.

I didn't bother altering the bottom or sides of the curved tiles - those are hidden inside the roof. I didn't make any special exceptions for the 4 dormers, within the tiling, as the shingles went right up to the dormers.

Overall, I didn't learn a lot of new skills in the project — it is what it is. Looking back, I was too finicky about small details. I could have mirrored x and y, saving 30 minutes here and there. Maybe I could have done the shingles smaller, and still had detailed shingles for the final print.