Has scenery improved that much since I’ve been gone the last 5 years? I feel like I have to wrap my head around a whole new level of competence.
No, it is not only you - I share this feeling!
To me, it looks, as if scenery has gained a lot more focus on layouts in recent years.
It’s not just you. I moved in 2003 and didn’t get my current layout started until 2009. I never dropped out of the hobby in the interim, but I noted the advances in scenery materials and techniques. I’m now using things like Supertrees and static grass that I wouldn’t have considered before.
well, I suppose I could admit that when I did work on my first layout I enjoyed doing the scenery. I just need to do a bit more refining and it should be good, hopefully as good as some of the work featured in the magazine and here in WPF.
Static grass comes to mind immediately. You can get an applicator for $40 now, too, instead of a couple of hundred when they first came out.
Give some credit to photography, too. Cameras have come a long way in the last 5 years. A good camera makes pretty much any scene look better. When you can work with ambient light rather than a flash, you’re going to get more realistic pictures.
And, forums like this one are part of it. As the “virtual community” of model railroaders grows, we are gaining a valuable resource for inquiry and instruction. I know it’s pushed me to do better, and not be satisfied with just “good enough.”
Agree, better cameras have a lot to do with it
I disagree. Cameras have nothing to do with it.
I can look at my layout and view sections that were just “upgraded” a few years back and realize that the bar has been raised. Do I HAVE to redo my scenic elements? No, but I’m now aware of better ways to do things- better materials, better techniques, and better skills.
Things I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying years ago are now within my capabilities. I do think that the camera comments are certainly valid as well. Additionally, all the video available ( right here on MR, as well as things like You Tube) have made a lot of the “secrets” available to a much larger group of modelers.
Some scenes on my layouts were capable of standing largly on their own, depending on the angle, buty 90% of my images involved some form of staging, including importing foliage or bush clumps temporarily, even placing hand towels that had been sprayed with adhesive and sprinkled with ground foam nearby to hide fascia or tracks on my folded loop design that would appear in the image otherwise. I moved utiltity poles, too. I only have two hand-made points stands, so those had to be carefully positioned when taking yard photos.
One thing I never thought to do was to drape that hand towel over the trestle that appeared in so many photos of mine because I had little choice.
I agree, though, Chip, a lot of the currently finest images on the www have static grass, more clumps placed by hand, the more expensive commericial front-row deciduous trees, and the puff-ball trees have begun to give way to a more concerted effort at making hillsides appear more natural.
Crandell
Your point is not clear. Your cowboy picture is not one I would have referred to as a “better scenery photo”. Sorry to be blunt.
Better cameras make possible better photos. If the modeling is good, that comes across better in posts. Simple fact.
Just you Chip my friend,just you… [(-D]
All ribbing aside,with today’s scenery material its easier to do professional quality scenery.Even the RTP(ready to plant) trees are superior to the RTP trees of just a few years ago…
We have a wealth of “how to” tutorials at our finger tips thanks to you tube and other on line resources…
Thanks to Google and Bing maps we can even check the landscape we need to model, the track location and the type of industries in that area.
I was staging a joke not photographing a diorama. Still, you have to admit a lot of illusion was created with the camera (and I took that photo 7 years ago.)
Sorry. The garish green and rough edge of the foam hill/tunnel is instantly noticeable.
Just to demonstrate how easy it is to come up with a nice looking bit of scenery, using “modern” materials:
The beginning
A day later, after a battle with Styrofoam, kitchen towels and paint:
The finished scene
Yeah, I should have cropped that out when I made up the footer. My bad.
I don’t think that better cameras have much to do with it at all. If anything, they show more of the stuff which would be better-off not seen. [:-^]
I do think that those taking the photos are doing a much better job of composing their photos, though. Some of the tools available to manipulate photos can improve marginal shots or enhance good ones, too, but most of those are either beyond my budget or beyond my level of comprehension. [:o)]
There is a selection of increasingly better materials available for scenery work, too, and the on-line sharing of photos and techniques helps, I think, to inspire all of us to better work.
Wayne
I think a lot of the trend has to do with observation and taking of photos of what you want to model. There seems to be a real push to look at a scene and think, “How can I model that?”
A camera in the right hands from the 70’s can do what a modern camera dose. There are computer programs that make manipulating pics, much easier to the 100th degree. Scenery work could be done well many years ago but very few were doing that level of work and it was very much harder. Things that used to be cut by hand, leaves and such, used to take weeks to do and now can be had at the puch of a button by lazer. Rapid prototyping is changing the model world also, know some people into that. The bar is raising, check out Chuck Doan’s work!!!
With better scenery there a lot more folks critical of images of MR stuff not related to the actual model railroad itself, but, instead are critical with everything, but the train. I realize that 1950’s plasticville buildings in glistening, shiny polystyrene and the ground cover being the roll out mat of green common back then can ruin the look of a high scale $500.00 mallet. Hopefully, however, most of us are not but so nit-picky about every inch of our surrounding layout and attempt to make our layouts to a standard that we are happy with.
Scenery moves on to try and keep pace with model detail for the purist with the money to keep model and background at cutting-edge levels. Maybe this expense and time needed to achieve a perceived high level of critical scenery detail explains why now that I am back after 15 years that I see so many layouts, effectively finished, track wise with vast areas of no scenery whatsoever. I suspect a lot of folks just want to run their trains and once the track is down and trains on the table and running they are loath to leap into a lot of expensive and tedious scenery work.
Being in HOn3, the very gauge seems to demand hyper fine senery and scratch built structures such that you can’t tell a good image from reality. This is why my layout will be largely naked of scenery and each section will advance slowly as a series of, effective, dioramas assembled around common track on homosote.
Richard
Modelers may be emphasizing qulity scenery more since they have the ability to show their efforts to the world these days, via digital equipment.
And the camera notices imperfect workmanship more than does the eye in real life, making the modeler double their effort in making high quality scenery. JMO.