Hi,
I found an article while surfing the net by John Nehrich (sp?) who has a
technique in which he uses a digital camera to get a picture of a brick wall,
adjusts it in Photoshop, and then prints it out onto decal paper. He then uses
liberal amounts of Solvaset and presses the decals onto a plastic surface
embossed with bricks. The results are pretty impressive and I thought I'd give
it a try. Here's the link if you're interested.
formatting link
Has anybody tried applying the brick decal paper onto smooth styrene sheets
instead of an embossed brick surface? If the results look just as good, maybe
I can save a few bucks. Or perhaps I can use smooth styrene on background
buildings and the plastic brick for closer structures. Anyway, any helpful
hints from your personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kenny
Save your money altogether. I tried it and was extremely disappointed.
I have an Alps printer, so I was able to print not only the colors but the
whites, too. I took a great shot of a brick wall with a fading, painted
sign on it. I used that.
I printed out a decal and put it on a Walthers plastic brick sheet. I
must've used half a bottle of Micro-Sol to get the decal to settle into the
mortar lines. The result was: if you stood back 6-inches from the wall,
you couldn't tell the decal was on an embossed surface -- it looked like a
flat printout on paper. Big disappointment.
So I tried it on the coarsest bricks I could find: Holgate & Reynolds (which
is unavailable any more). It looked only slightly better. At 6-inches, you
could see the embossing of the brick giving some texture to the brick decal.
It looked kind of neat, but it didn't blow me away, as I had expected. One
foot away and you were hard-pressed to see the embossing. Any farther than
that, and it appeared to be a flat printout on paper.
I guess I don't know what I expected, but it just didn't have the realistic
texture I thought it would. Now I'll admit -- I'm extremely picky about
details. But it seems to me you could get the exact same effect by just
printing out a picture of a brick wall and pasting it on some cardboard.
Your mileage may vary.
-Gerry Leone
Hi,
That's too bad - I was really fired up after reading that article.
One final question - did you experiment with using photos of the bricks taken
under different lighting conditions? I'm wondering if the presence/absence of
shadows in the original photo influences the final appearance when applied to
embossed brick.
Great website, by the way.
Thanks,
Kenny
Gerry, I'm not sure if I understand exactly what it is you were disappointed
with about your wall. Was it mainly not being able to see any texture? Or was
it the overall effect?
I'm just asking because you said that you started with a great looking photo.
What didn't you like about it once it was applied?
If it was the lack of actual texture, doesn't the suggested texture in the
photo help to compensate for it?
I thought the structures in the article John Nehrich wrote looked fantastic,
but since I've never tried it, I've always wondered how well it would look in
person. That's why I'm curious as to what you didn't like.
Jim
Me, too, as was a friend of mine. Couldn't wait to try it.
I actually only tried it with that one photo.
Here's the bottom line the way I see it: the 'thinned paper" signs (a
la George Sellios) work so well on a brick wall because the signs
themselves are flat (solid chunks of color) and reasonably un-busy.
The flatness of the blocks of color allows the texture of the bricks
to be seen via highlights of your room lights.
On the other hand, with a photo of a highly textured, highly colored
surface -- like bricks -- all the subtle texture of the plastic scale
bricks gets completely lost.
Believe me, I *wanted* this to work and expected it to be the coolest
effect I'd ever seen. That's why the fall was so far when it just
didn't work.
Hey, thanks very much!
-Gerry Leone
Exactly -- lack of real, discernable texture.
And, Jim, you answered the question without realizing it: the
suggested texture in the photo does help to compensate for any lack of
"real" texture of the plastic bricks.
But you're seeing a photo of texture, versus real texture. It would
be like pasting a photo of a stucco wall to a model -- you're seeing a
picture of lumps, but not real lumps.
That's the problem -- as I see it -- with the brick wall technique:
if you eliminate the plastic brick substrate you don't alter the
effect one iota. Hence, you may as well just print a photo of a brick
wall on some flat paper and paste it on a piece of styrene or
Strathmore. You're never seeing the real texture of the bricks.
Believe me, I'm not dis-ing John Nehrich, who is twice the modeler
I'll ever hope to be. But perhaps the article made me believe that
the result would be a textured, painted scale brick wall, and the
actual result was a scale brick wall, with a picture of bricks on it.
Maybe it falls short because when you're seeing a photo of texture it
doesn't "shift" when you move your vantage point. I dunno.
Again, these are just my opinions.
-Gerry Leone
On 15 Apr 2004 12:21:50 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net (Gerry)
purred:
The thing is bricks and stone walls texture vanishes when
scaled down to Ho or N scale. O is about as small as you can get and
still find a measurable texture. most "brick" material used for models
is hilariously outsized, especially the mortar lines.
I used to use textured surfaces built found, the smaller the
scale got the more obvious the model became. By the time I had shrunk
things to HO size there was no way the surface textures used in most
models were even vaguely realistic.
And that is the secret to realism in smaller scales. Texture
scales and, once that scale becomes close to zero, only a good photo
can replicate it. I use well lighted photos of texture, scanned at
high level and then composited to fit the surface and it looks
absolutely perfect.
Now the trick part is the lighting. You have to shoot the
surface at the same angle the viewer will se it at and you have to
perfectly match the lighting conditions the model will be seen under.
If the sun is at a specific angle and intensity, you need to match
that in your picture. If the model will be seen at an angle it needs
to be photographed from that angle and matched to the foreshortening
and fade that will be apparent to the eye of the viewer. It is a bit
of a pain but the calculations are pretty easy once you get used to
them. A good camera is nice but I have seen some spectacular work done
with a pinhole lens and a conventional 35mm camera. for those with
really good math and optics backgrounds you can even make the shots
with an all cardboard camera (yes, they do exist and, in the hands of
a skilled photographer, can produce work easily the equal of a good
35mm camera)
Actually you are seeing the texture of the real bricks, just
not the out of scale texture of the model bricks
Exactly and that is why you need to control the viewer's
"aperture" vis a vis such models. That is easy to do in my case but
for most model railroads, can be tricky. It is much like using mirrors
on a layout, they, too require the viewer see them from a very
controlled angle and no other.
cat
I used a similar technique to print the sign on this building:
formatting link
used a white painted brick texture and adjusted the brightness,
contrast, hue, saturation, etc. to get black (dark grey),white and
orange painted brick textures and used those textures to draw the sign.
The printed texture is not noticeable enough to really be worthwhile.
I hd better luck with the cedar shake pattern on the middle house here:
formatting link
colors were washed out on the decal but several washes of reddish
grey fixed it.
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