It's no secret I'm very fond of the CGI era of Thomas and Friends. It was something that I grew up with the most. Now it sounds like a nod statement, seeing as I was born just after Magic Road was released. I mainly say growing up with it because it was the main show that aired while I was starting to become more creative with my hobbies. I had the oldest seasons on DVD and VHS, but when I got to the age where I was writing short stories for fun or playing with train simulator, seeing CGI Thomas plastered everywhere was my main inspiration. Jumping back to 2012, I started playing around with Google Sketchup with no experience whatsoever, as you might guess it didn't go very well. Around 2017, I finally took the leap and downloaded blender to try and make 3D faces for my models. Only watching one tutorial, I started developing my skills and modelling career. With many of us modelers, my first attempt at a model was Thomas. With more and more seasons coming out, more and more modelling resources becoming available, the first version soon became severely outdated, and with each and stunt on the new Thomas, I found myself missing out on more and more details to the point where I've made 7 versions of Thomas. Today, I want to take you on a journey through my trials and tribulations, and my last 5 years of my life have gone. This is mainland models. In the fresh new year of 2017, where the latest movie was Journey Beyond Sodor, and series 20 was halfway through its air time, I recently bought a new PC for Christmas, and I wanted to put it to good use. At the time of building it, there were no official or clear orthographic views of Thomas available, so I had to use the turntable shop from the great race previews. While it had the overall shape of Thomas, you can see there are many inaccuracies. We also have two big rods, two small, co-load is too big, it's very under detailed, and the funnel and dome aren't flush with the boiler. And the face too, it looks like Thomas, but it still isn't Thomas, if you get what I mean. This version made it into trains in two ways. One had no extra features, it had no face or eye scripting, and it used the old CGI Thomas Berge from Scarlo with a great, but I had the fundamentals down with the smoke attachments, couplings, whistles and all that. The second export came months later, with the first fully working version which was seen in my old Who's That Engine video. This version had animated bogies, a selection of faces, and used the old eye-library scripting. By the end of that year, I had already made plans to remodel Thomas all over again. This time, we were lucky enough to have full authors of Thomas from an odd paper cutout from a Japanese magazine. The main issue was, it wasn't very high quality. I was able to get the basic shapes of all the parts featured, but it wasn't good enough to get the finer details, and a little old me thought it was a bright idea to rebuild the face using the same authors too, so the face looked even worse than before. Same as the previous version, this had all the same features, though this time it included inside motion, thanks to the amazing user light and coal. This model was featured in my first movie, The Adventure Continues. Pretty much a year after the first version was built, I still wasn't happy with the quality of the previous versions. Though this one was built after the Adventure Continues had finished filming, nothing crazy special went into this one. Though this time, I used the authors from the behind the scenes picture of Thomas from the Great Race. I tried adding the coal hatch door thing seen in Genemy on Sodor, but it didn't really work out as planned. The overall look just seemed really chunky to me, and I wasn't fond of it after a short while. Now this is where things get interesting. I was lucky enough to meet Missalaneous Miss Chi 48 through a group chat I was in with various other users. We were both making CGI content at the time, and I saw he was vastly superior what I was trying to achieve. I went in for help, asking how he got his looking so accurate. He was most gracious enough to donate me a set of Thomas faces to use, as well as providing reference material. I tried adding more details to it, such as pressure gauges, the Paul Hobbs free blender asset pack for most of the cab parts, but they didn't really fit the style of the Thomas. This one now uses parts provided by Neb on Twitter. So one of the upsides of this version was I'd made the funnel and don't flush with the boiler, so it was a lot smoother than previous versions, which just clipped into the boiler. For this I used the Thomas AR authors provided by the now shut down Sodor Workshop's Discord. This version was probably the pinnacle of all previous Thomas's I'd built, and laid out the groundwork for all future versions. This one had a lot more updates, including rebuilt inside motion, more cab details with re-added pressure gauges that I had admitted from the past two versions, and new faces built by myself. This was the first time I used substance painted a texture of the models, so they had more weathering and grime applied to them, instead of being straight clean from the blender-baking process. I recently discovered that in a behind the scenes shot of the Great Race, the Sun Reflection textures that they had in their eyes weren't actually rendered by the animation software's lighting, but more or less a physical texture, all my models from this point on used these. To shake things up a bit, as well as the utilised trains 2019's features, I built Thomas once more this time using the Thomas Rail authors. My downfall was these were purposely low poly, and lacked detail. But based on their other work, I assumed it was the most accurate version available. I used this version for another year or two, and featured in most of my videos up until now. Now I had no clue that these flew under the radar, or how no one had seen them before, but the user, the unlucky tug, posted these high quality, official, orthographic views of Thomas. These were the cleanest, clearest quality I'd ever seen, to the point where I found new details that I'd never seen before. Like this bit right here, I had no clue they weren't attached, shows how much the model is based on the brass models. But this has to be my most detailed, up-to-date model of Thomas yet. So many new parts and details were added that I'd never did before. The piston block now had these nipple guides, I don't know what you actually call them. Frames were textured accurately to have rust, and not a dark brown as I assumed before. I re-added the pressure gauges, rebuilt the cobbunker as well as the door, as seen in Journey Beyond Sodor, new wheels and side rods, a detailed brake pipe, and new face textures that now have a similar shine to what they had in the show. If it wasn't for these 7 Thomas, I probably wouldn't be as skilled as people make out I am today. My journey shows that from trial and error, having a little faith in yourself, and a good community of friends to guide you, shows you can achieve anything. You can never be satisfied with your work, and I say just go for it, make what you're passionate about, if you want to be the guy that built the 158th Thomas in the fandom then do it, because it's something you can sit back and say, I made that.