Paper Structures

Has anyone had experience building foamcore buildings? I have seen on a website (maybe

a step by step tutorial on using foamcore for really amazing buildings. It certainly peeked my interest but I have yet to try it. As for the web site, I thought it was featured within the site but I am not sure. The site is certainly with looking at .

Drew

Using the off-white paper was a good idea - it cut the bright highlights just enough!

OK, you may know this already, but for others who want to try this, here's how you can deal with these problems:

1) When you copy the roof, do a horizontal "flip" or "mirror" on the copy so that the weathering doesn't repeat directly under itself... or... 2) First make a rectangle the size you _need_ the roof to be... then "stretch" the roof to fit the rectangle. This will essentially restore the proper dimensions - more important with a shingled roof than a tin roof like this one.

You can also combine techniques and build up sections out of smaller pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle.

You don't need full-featured photo software to do this - even low-end stuff like that which comes free with scanners will handle this kind of simple manipulation. You might also be able to do some minor color correction to make walls match better - usually just a matter of playing with contrast and brightness a bit. As with anything, don't work on your original files, work on copies! And always save in uncompressed formats like TIFF... GIF and JPEG (especially!) files degrade in quality as they're manipulated and saved over and over.

Now, to up the ante a bit... copy and paste detail items like door and window frames, those horizontal door tracks, and the horizontal boards at the end and the rack on the ground below to a smaller seperate image (so you don't have to print the whole thing over again... then cut them out _very_ carefully with a SHARP Xacto blade or similar, touch up the edges with a colored pencil in an appropriate color, and glue them directly to the flat side of the building. Now you've got a more 3D appearance. Some items you can stack 2 or 3 deep for higher relief.

And a lot more rewarding than building a paper kit... ;)

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Bob, That barn looks fantastic. Very creative! Lynn

Bob, That barn looks fantastic. It would still look great as a further delapitated barn should humidity someday sag the roof a bit .

Have you tried any other structures?

Great job!

That's really slick. How many people are fooled by it?

Not yet, but I am keeping the idea in mind for the future.

Bob Boudreau

It's been sitting alone by itself so far, as I don't have any room on my present modules. I made it as a modeling exercise only, and have only shown it to friends by itself.

Bob Boudreau

No I didn't, as this was a first time experiment to see if my idea would work. In this instance I think stretching the roof image may have looked "stretched". Imagine that!

Bob Boudreau

Art, I ordered all the roofing and brick siding material from Paper Creek. I tried the corrugated roofing on a coal shed I had been procrastinating on and was very happy with the results. I does need to be touched for one to be convinced it is paper. The sheets need to be cut and the edges touched up with a grey or black to hide the white where the cutting has been done. Overlapping the roofing strips does create a real world layered surface unlike a photograph. I next tried the tarpaper roofing on an FSM Swakhammers Welding structure I was finishing up. It looked good but did not have the same 'flavor' as the rest of the structure as built per instructions. I had to drybrush the surface with a concrete color to make it convincing. After all the work I was very pleased but would have done just as well using faster conventional methods. I have not tried the brick siding yet but when I do it will not be on a foreground model. Two thumps up for the corrugated roofing. The rest, good but not a bell ringer in my opinion. I would really like to see them do some random stone wall sheets though. Doug

Man, that photo sure gives the impression of a 3-D surface. Did you actually use stripwood around the windows or would that draw attention to the otherwise flat surface?

Impressive.

Jay CNS&M North Shore Line - "First and fastest"

Nope, I just shot the images with my digital camera and printed them on paper. The only stripwood is hidden on the inside as corner reinforcement. I think I was lucky when I took the shots, as it was a nice sunny day which produced great shadows that seem to give the 2-D images their depth.

I would have liked to use all four sides of the barn on the model, but they were in the shade and weren't as accessible. I did try to use the images I took, but they were too uninteresting that I did not use them. For the back side I couldn't back up enough to take it all in, and I rebuilt the missing top part with my graphics program.

As someone else suggested in this thread, it might be an idea to exchange such images so others can give it a try. I don't mind sending my JPG images, or I could place them on web pages. The peaked front file is 512K, the side is 374K, and the roof is 180K. I have DSL Internet connection, so sending such files isn't a problem with me.

Drop me a line if you are interested.

Cheers,

Bob boudreau Canada

Here I am again. I uploaded the three images from my model barn into a web photo album, all full sized. You can see, view and copy them if you wish in your own time. Here:

Please let me know if it seems to work OK.

Cheers,

Bob Boudreau Canada

Paper buildings can be as detailed as any wood or plastic and have the advantage of often being prototypical thickness. There are numerous paper model directories and lists, snipped-for-privacy@smartgroups.com comes to mind as well as Peter Visser's "Iceberg" directory. check paper out and you will be pleasantly surprised. there are structures from all eras and countries and a huge number of the best are absolutely free.

cat