Lym's TARDIS (and Met Box) Renders

[lym]

Perfect!

[lym]

Redone my Mark 4 from scratch. Hopefully should be much more accurate this time around, based on pictures from Crich and the fleeting glimpse of V23.



Here's a comparison between this box and Crich:

[lym]

Actually, I feel like that last image didn't really do the model justice; having flat lighting doesn't really show off the texturing very well, and the camera's focal length was really far back. So have another!

[hb88banzai]

Very, very nice, lymerence!

Thanks to Mark and Matt's trip to Crich a few years back, and their generous sharing, I have quite a few very high res photos of Crich, both before and after its dark repaint. Mark's given permission to use and post these as needed/desired, though they are too big to post without modification. Should you wish any in order to do proper comparisons for checking and refinement, let me know and I'll see what I can do about getting the originals to you.

If you PM Matt Sanders, he should be able to give you a few of the many measurements he made as well.

[lym]

Redone the Mark 1 from scratch, hopefully should be as accurate as possible!



With the signage added about a year after activation (no of course I didn't forget the signage  )

[Cardinal Hordriss]

Brilliant render and I'm sorry if this screws up the drift compensators but what were they thinking with that thing on the roof?

This thread has been really informative for me, being only 29 (for another month anyway) and living north of Watford Gap Services I had no idea there was such a variety of metboxes. I always assumed they were all of a standard model and had no idea how ugly some of them were from a purely aesthetic point of view. That's not a comment on your excellent renders by the way but the original boxes they are based on...

...but going back to that thing on the roof where I'd expect the lamp to be; what is it? It reminds me of the Jaggaroth spaceship.

[hb88banzai]

Brilliant render and I'm sorry if this screws up the drift compensators but what were they thinking with that thing on the roof?

(snip)  ...and had no idea how ugly some of them were from a purely aesthetic point of view. That's not a comment on your excellent renders by the way but the original boxes they are based on...

...but going back to that thing on the roof where I'd expect the lamp to be; what is it? It reminds me of the Jaggaroth spaceship.

Well, to each their own - I personally think they are all kind of cool, but I'm old. Still think the Mark 1's (sans Jaggaroth Spaceship, of course) to be the most TARDIS-like of all the Met Boxes. They were even mostly made of wood!

Regardless, that is the original 1929-1930 style red beacon lamp (apparently designed by Trench himself, BTW, per memos), but the Chief Engineer of the Met didn't like them very much either. He even did a bit of sabotage to my mind, by not getting them professionally tinted like Trench had specified, but rather hand painting them on the inside himself. That had to reduce their visibility and effectiveness, which was one of the prime criticisms leveled against them (both by him and others).

They appear to have been retained for the later all-concrete Boxes right on through all of the initial Metbox installations in V Division (though in modified form for better visibility - getting rid of that band at the equator with a different mounting system), as well as being used on the first Y Division Boxes and the Prototypes, before being replaced by the standard Fresnel Beacon we are all familiar with c1932 or so. The later Fresnel Beacons, though originally still red by way of an internal tinted dome or cylinder, had a much better ability to pierce the fog and haze, as the lighthouse-like technology had been in use on ships for a very long time at that point (as well as on some Police Boxes and Posts in the US, BTW). They didn't change the beacon colour to white until the late 1930s, mostly to avoid conflicting with the rising number of automatic traffic signal lights.

There is some conflicting information on the 'Jaggaroth Spaceship'/Reactor Beacons, however, so it's hard to tell if they were constantly on once triggered, or if they flashed off and on like the later beacons, or if they originally perhaps even had an internally revolving beacon of some sort. While the Met's own Press release stated "... and a red signal lamp on the top. The 'flashing' of the signal lamp, which has a fog-penetrating beam, ...", some later news articles seemed to say they were constant once activated, and so perhaps 'flashing' wasn't to be taken literally, but just that it was turned on. Regardless, because of the way the signalling system worked at that point, they had to be manually reset at the Box once triggered by the Station - a major pain.

Note that a hand written notation on a proof copy of that 1929 Met Press Release underlined the phrase "fog-penetrating beam," and wrote in parentheses to the side "all being well!!" - a perhaps sarcastic comment regarding their relative effectiveness and/or reliability (or rather, lack thereof).

Redone the Mark 1 from scratch, hopefully should be as accurate as possible!



With the signage added about a year after activation (no of course I didn't forget the signage   )

Great improvements lymerence! In this latest build you've pretty much addressed all the issues I had noticed and was going to comment on. Well done - and again, great eyes.

Well... there is one thing --

You rightly (for some Mark 1's, at least) have the rail below the phone door thinner than the rails above and below it, but you also have a thinner rail at the same level on the door next to it (and if I'm seeing it correctly, on the other walls as well). On that subset of Mark 1 Boxes that were constructed this way, the thinner rail was only applied below the phone door - the Main Door's rail at the same level was the same as the standard thickness/height rails (as well as all the panel separation rails on the other walls), not the thinner below-phone-door thickness/height.

Many, if not most, Mark 1's actually had the rail below the phone door the standard height though. On those, no filler strip was necessary, but on those with the thinner rail as here, a filler strip was used, attached to the bottom of the phone door (which appears to have otherwise been a standard size used on both).

Note that the reduction in height of the shorter/thinner rail was only taken off of the top edge, making only the phone door opening a bit taller, not any of the inset panels, which should all be the same size.

OK, I see one other thing - your cylinder lock looks to be a bit too far to the left. Pics show the right edge should be about in line with the left edge of the cuts for the inset panels, or even just a touch to the right of that. In other words about even with the join line for the rail, or perhaps the 'rose' of the lock a bit over the line.

Actually, I feel like that last image didn't really do the model justice; having flat lighting doesn't really show off the texturing very well, and the camera's focal length was really far back. So have another!

Also very, very nice! Great improvements.

A couple of minor points, though --

The smaller pillar tops - while most (but not all) earlier Met Boxes had proportionately smaller corner mouldings on these stepped-in Pillar Tops than on the main length of the Pillars - as you have here, on your Barnet Box, etc - the Mark 4's were different. Not only were the tops shorter, as you have here, but their corner mouldings were the same size and profile as those on the main part of the Pillars. No decrease in size in any examples I've seen, and certainly not on Crich itself.

Finally, the bottom centre window pane of each window on Mark 4's was clear (at least as built), with those above and to the sides being the standard 'Pebbled' pattern glass.

[lym]

Thank you! Yeah, I'm much more happy with this one now. The rail sizes and cylinder are easy fixes fortunately, so it shouldn't take too long. As for the Mark 4, the centre panes actually are regular clear glass - the quick render just sometimes leaves some spotty artefacting in glass which gives it the effect of being pebbled.

And Cardinal Hordriss - sometimes just dedication can help you find a wealth of information. I'm actually only 18 but I already am really interested in the history of police boxes.

[lym]

Redone my Mark 2, which is a WIP at the moment. I'm not so sure on this one, I feel the details are more accurate than my previous attempt but the overall shape is less accurate - the roof stacks look a little too low and the inset panels too shallow. The previous attempt had a much chunkier look (which I think is quite typical of Mark 2s) that this one lacks. Not hard to fix, of course, but that'll have to wait for tomorrow.

[attachid]mk2v2.png[/attach]

[lym]

Fixed all that was bugging me...

[lym]

I've been a little out of it these past few days (hence the lack of updates), mostly I've been doing research on the police box section of the forum and taking notes to improve the renders.

That said, I thought I'd do something a little fun - a 3D mockup of Trench's original design outline for the Mark 3, traced exactly from the plans.

[Scarfwearer]

These are really rather lovely!

[hb88banzai]

Yes, very nice indeed!

That's something I was going to suggest doing, but note that the Trench plans specify top signs that are below the sign box surface like Mark 3's, not attached to the front like Mark 1's and Mark 2's before early 1935 (one of the reasons they can be ascribed to that interim period). Of course, the elevations do look more like the earlier Marks' sign mounting method than they do for the new sign lintels shown in the separate cross-section detail that specifies how the new signs were to be mounted, which is one of many reasons that I hypothesised the plans were traced from an earlier set before being modified to reflect the changes for the new version.

Note also that the Phone Door wording on the glass appears to be a much later addition, drawn in a rough freehand. My suspicion is that it was done when the plans were dragged out again to get bids for the inner Divisions (which all had the TARDIS like signage) and to test out what Phone Door signs might look like (showing a first stab at the new wording).

Of course you say "traced exactly from the plans", but then one would have to ask which view? There were some pretty sloppy drafting tolerances between views on those plans (and even in the same views). It's so bad at times that some of the details that have dimension call-outs don't even match the measurements specified in those call-outs if you check them against the "Scale of Feet" drawing given along the bottom left of the sheet. This is why they've been described as rough working drawings.

One example: I'm pretty sure that most instances on the plans show Top Sign Boxes that are noticeably more proud of the Pillars than you have here, though I have no doubt there is at least one view (or part of view) where they are relatively shallow like yours.

This has always been one of the challenges in using those plans, and why I've said before that it leaves them so open to interpretation that many of the differences in Met Boxes over time (both between Marks and within a given Mark) can to a certain degree be traced back to one view or another in the Trench plans.

I'm going to have to take my set of these plans down to some place that has a large scale sheet scanner to try to get a good high res greyscale of them in one go (8-bit greyscale giving more nuance and detail than 2-bit B&W can). We could then use those to try to refine a set of plans in CAD to essentially recreate them for an "as designed" set of drawings with a more comprehensive set of dimension call-outs. Then we won't be in the position of having to rely on the relative accuracy of any given view on the originals (or rather the copy of a copy of a copy (etc) that our current example is).

Considering the size limitations on this forum, however, posting those scans and resulting plans could prove a bit of a challenge.

[Scarfwearer]

Considering the size limitations on this forum, however, posting those scans and resulting plans could prove a bit of a challenge.

There are ways. If you have trouble, I can help.

[lym]

Well, Tony was absolutely right about the difficulty of matching photos to the models. There's just so many variables that need to be right (perspective, focal length, box angle, etc.) that it's almost impossible to get right. Case in point:



Both these photos are of the exact same box (V47), and they both use the exact same model. You can see just how wildly different a slight perspective mismatch can make. I eventually gave up trying to match it to the second one since it definitely wasn't gonna work any time soon.