The backscene for Penzance is now done. The basic hills were generated by an AI tool called Canvas, the overall town is a combination of snapshots from several drone videos, small scenes with roads are from a combination of Google Earth, Paint and a little program of my own that places rows of houses with scaling and perspective. All of that was followed with a lot of editing in Paint and GIMP to tidy everything up.
Work on the Penzance backscene has now begun. My techniques are becoming more sophisticated with each of the layouts, starting with Peco and Townscene products on the early N gauge examples, then a commercial photo backscene for Sarum Bridge, then heavily edited photos from the web, Google Earth and 3rd party drone videos for the previous linear motor layouts. Penzance is particularly challenging due to the urban setting and time period.
The basic terrain image is generated by an AI tool called NVidia Canvas, which makes it easy to paint hills and other natural features and generate photographic-quality output. It is an incomplete Beta test product, so cannot do human features such as roads and buildings, is limited in the output image size (4096 pixels, about 2 feet at 150 DPI), and can take a lot of coaxing to get a satisfactory result. However, with a bit of effort, it can achieve results that would otherwise be beyond my skills. I intend to cut and paste buildings from other images to populate the scene, draw or paste on roads, and 3D print some low relief smaller scale buildings for a forced perspective effect. We will have to see how it turns out, and I may yet end up scrapping it and trying something else. All the buildings for Penzance are now finished, except for some final cleanup and detailing which will be done at a later stage. As usual, the closeup pictures in this scale are cruel.
Now that Malmsbury is done, it is time to pick up from where I left off on Penzance. So, time for a bit of thinking and taking stock...
Penzance is continuing to progress in fits and starts. The paper roads, footpaths, platforms and tracks are now done. Suitable artwork printed onto self-adhesive label paper is used to make the linear motor track look like something other than a circuit board, and also provides a protective layer for the trains to run (slide) on. The other man-made surfaces have been done the same way for visual consistency.
Scatter (grass, ballast and sand) will be done later. The next step will be finishing the buildings. The layout has finally reached the pieces-coming-together stage, with the plastering, puttying and preliminary painting now done. Next come the platforms and paving.
All the buildings, railway and non-, have now been built. The platforms, and the foundations for the ground, roads and dummy tracks are taking shape. It is finally starting to look like a full model.
All of the non-railway buildings along Chyandour Cliff behind Penzance station have now been 3D printed. That works out to about 625m of street frontage, with every building present and to the correct scale. There are some distortions, with the road and retaining wall curving differently to fit the available track pieces, but close enough.
The first two blocks of buildings along the street behind the station are taking shape. These are the raw prints, with cleanup, painting and detailing still to be done. Oh, for a simple row of terrace houses!
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AuthorMartin Kaselis |
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