Hey everyone!
My name is Csaba Szilágyi and I am the sole 3D artist behind Transport Miniverse.
I am from the video game industry, with nearly 2 decades of experience. I used to work at CD PROJEKT RED, modeling weapons and vehicles for the Cyberpunk 2077, and now creating awesome models at Reikon Games.
If you are interested, you can see some of my works here:
https://www.artstation.com/csabaszilagyi
But why am I here?
That’s not that long a story, grab a chair and a drink and sit down. Hm? Are you already sitting? Right. Well, anyway.
As you can guess my passion for video games played a significant role in my childhood. By learning the basics at home, my curiosity and hard work with a pinch of dumb luck helped me to land my first job while I was still in university, learning something completely different. Very soon I realized this is more for me than a hobby and now I get paid for this? Hell yeah! I left the university which felt like it led nowhere anyway and became a full time junior 3D artist.
Fast forward to recently. My passion to create games is still boiling. With long years of hard work and some incredible luck I landed a dream job, working on the Cyberpunk 2077.
But going home after work, I still had creative energy to burn. With my brother and our friend we started to make small mobile games in our free time. One of them was even featured in the Apple store! Unfortunately it was not a huge success.
We never finished developing our last game.
Pity, as this was based on my cherished idea with mini trains.
You see, I am a huge train fan. My grandma lived very close to the train tracks. I still clearly remember how I ran there after dinner to watch these huge iron beasts pulling 10,20,30,40… 50!!! cars behind them. Loved standing there in the huge metal noise and counted them.
Over the years the train topic came back to me in some form.
For example, once I started working on this huge double track steam locomotive, but never really finished, something always came up and had to leave the project.
In the meantime I discovered 3D printing. Oh man! How cool is it that you can hold your virtually created model in your hands?! Somehow I never acknowledged that 3D printing was an option, even though I knew about it and now suddenly I am in the middle of it, when (n+1)th generation 3D printers make very decent models.
I converted and 3D printed one of my old models, an assault mech and asked a friend to 3D print it out for me. It was really exciting to hold the parts for the first time in my hand and discover all the details of what I made.
Then our daughter was born. What an incredible moment!
But also… saying goodbye to sleep. 😀
We took shifts with my wife, and since I am basically an owl I took the nights and fed our baby every couple of hours and watch her, because as new parents we were freaking out if everything is ok 😀
During the quiet hours I wanted to kill some time, not fall asleep and somehow the idea came to my mind to check one of those mini train in-game models and recreate it in Fusion 360 in high resolution, ready to 3D print.
Had another idea: what if it would be small enough to sit on the monitor and I could make a whole train with cars? How about it would have a tray, so I could change the configuration as I like? Now they are collectibles!
Let’s make a base plate for them. Hmm, now if I make them like this, they could be figures on any board game too, like Monopoly.
Wait a minute. The size that I picked is perfect to use as chess figures, they fit on the standard chess board! Let’s make chess pedestals!
Now I made so many, an own board game could be designed around them! Already wrote down a few ideas.
…And so on, ideas after ideas.
Something just clicked.
Now time is flying and working on them is fun and just feels right. I found my “thing”!
A great way to let out steam (pun intended) after a long day of working on highly detailed AAA game models at work. (Well, of course after my family goes to sleep. 🙂 )
Of course at this size I had to sacrifice things to keep them somewhat unified in this 1 by 1 baseplate ratio size. The most obvious thing you can notice is that the wheels are not exactly the same as the originals. I simply did not have enough space to put enough wheels under a 6-axle modern locomotive for example, let alone the steam locomotives. Or if I do, they would be incredibly tiny compared to the rest of the train.
But being my own art director I quickly made the decision that catching the character of each locomotive is the priority, and to make them recognizable while each of them would fit on the base plate.
At this time I published them as STL Miniversum until I came up with a better name.
And now back to my desk. I have a bunch of test prints to paint!
