Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Model Railroad: Starting the Building Mock-ups

Well, my son's football season is over, so I've got some time to start working on the railroad again. I decided the next step was to start building up some more elaborate mockup buildings to get a better sense of the dimensions, style, overall look, etc. To make the mockups, I started browsing around my faviorite (FREE) texture website, [url]http://www.cgtextures.com/[/url] and downloaded a bunch of images of rollup doors, concrete, plaster walls, etc. I also did some sightseeing in Miami via Google Street View and grabbed a few screen shots of signs, container stacks, etc. I took some measurements of the building footprints and started putting it all together in Microsoft Visio with the drawing scale set to 1ft = 87ft. A little cropping and resizing, and it comes together pretty easily. Printed the results out on a color printer on plain old cheap paper, used spray adhesive to stick it to 3/16" foam board, cut out all the pieces with a razor blade, and assembled everything using Elmers white glue. They're certainly not permanent structures by any stretch, but I think they look pretty darn good for the little bit of work it took.