Making Terrain?

[Fat Al]

Is there a place where I can look up how to make scenery? It's very strange, but I've been looking all over the web, but the details are somewhat scant. It seems like everyone's who posting on forums and blogs are experts, and hardly any info on the absolute basics.

 

I mean, stuff like how to make terrain, lakes, roads, etc...

 

Sorry for the noobishness...

[disturbman]

Don't be sorry. I think very few of us are real expert, we all learn and are learning the hard way. Blogs, forums, magazines and books (or books pdf) are usually really usefull. As a matter of fact, except Jeff (cteno4), we all are amateurs. Some of us are a bit more advanced than the others but not so many.

 

So if you want some preliminary views you can:

- follow Scott, Qwerty and Bernard's attemps.

- Take a look at Amazon (or anyother online shopping center) to buy some Kalmbach/Model Railroader basic books. They also have a website were you can buy e-books covering basic railroad modeling stuff. http://www.trains.com/mrr/

- Look at some blogs or websites: http://www.sp-coastline.com/ or http://www.kinet-tv.ne.jp/~psy_sai/ or http://quinntopia.blogspot.com/

- Forums: Trainboard forum has a lot of discussion about projects and layouts. Some are plain useless but others are absolutely great to read.

 

Anyway, if you want to learn you will have to read a lot of things and try them out on your own projects. There is many different ways of doing and achieving scenery and it's only by trying that you will find ways that you like. And, don't let other peoples achievment put you off, if they can do it you can too.

[Fat Al]

Thanks for that! It seems like some of the guys have rather interesting projects going on...

[CaptOblivious]

Or find a website on making wargames terrain. I don't know what the current crop of websites looks like, so I can't help you with specific URLs, but popular wargames to include in searches include "Warhammer" and "War Machine". It's through wargaming that I learned how to make terrain.

[Bernard]

Fat Al - Welcome to the forum. Making scenery is really open to the model maker, there are so many different ways to do things and with different materials. It really comes down to what techniques and materials you are most comfortable using. Here is my suggestion to you, when you are at the point of designing your layout, start thinking about what structures, terrain, etc, you want in that layout. As you go along start asking questions, for example, "How do members make mountains or hills?" or "How do you make Roads?" Take it at one step at a time, otherwise you might get overwhelmed if you take on too much. You will also get a variety of answers because there is no set way to modeling. Also if you see a modeler has done something that you really like, in their thread post the question there too so you can use it as a reference later down the road.

One last thing, have fun building your layout!

[qwertyaardvark]

I personally had no idea of how to build scenery when i started, and I just picked the Woodland Scenics method of scenery building, since a kit they had *everything* to build a complete layout (minus rail and buildings) all in one package. I personally would recommend buying WS "Scenic Ridge" if they are available in Hong Kong (which is probably a stretch). I am personally using this layout almost entirely for the lessons learned or to be learned: making mountains w/ tunnels in them, laying rail, laying ballast, wiring, adding vegetation, laying roads/foundations/sidewalks, making trees, placing trees, assembling building kits, painting buildings, and more. If you want to read through the manual of this kit, here it is. Definitely will help in understanding one way of how to do it.

 

Different materials are used for different styles of terrain you are trying to model. I'd say one of the popular materials for shaping a mountain/hill/cliff is mostly likely to use foam, aka foam-core mountains, or...hollow-core mountains made with poster board, very stiff cardboard strips, or chicken wire. Second would be the plaster to cover said mountain. Modeling a city scape will probably use less foam (perhaps only as a foundation) and maybe more spackle to lay down roads and get the concrete-jungle feel or you could simply use the plastic road/wall kits provided by Kato, Tomix, Greenmax, etc. Beyond these techniques, there are many individual variations to modeling a particular feature. So, what you pick to model and how you model will determine what you materials you end up using.

 

If you would like some extra help in the rural/mountain terrain area, I have several extra pictures that i didn't put into my thread that i can send to you directly or put up in some sort of photo dump and put in some commentary explaining what i did. I also recommend looking at a website that was very influential in my purchase of Scenic Ridge: Mediocre Layout Blogs. Starting with the layout #2, you can see a blow-by-blow construction of the layout and read the rather wry and comical explanations of modeler.

 

Hope this helps. :)

[Martijn Meerts]

I would recommend building a couple of diorama's. Apart from learning how to do certain scenery elements, you'll also have some nice diorama's to take pictures of your trains ;)

 

There's lots of pictures and how-to's on the site here, a lot of people like using foam, cut the shape of mountains out of the foam, and then use some plaster cloth to smooth things out a bit. You can also paste some newspaper wads on the foam where you want some rocky surfaces, or use  pre-made rock pieces for example. This is a fairly quick and straightforward way of making mountains.

 

Another way is to cut some cross sections out of wood which show the profile of the scenery. On those cross sections you fasten some chicken wire type stuff (except you need much smaller squares, not the huge holes that chicken wire has ;)). On top of the wire you put plaster cloth, and optionally a layer of plaster. Here too you could add newspaper wads for rocky surfaces (the chicken wire is very strong, but also fairly stiff, which makes making typical rock structures with the wire alone difficult)

[NozomiFan]

I've done tons of dioramas for scale models, and what I can say is that take your time.

 

Here is a good link to a Simple Scenery book that is great for first timers.

 

Welcome to the forum!

[cteno4]

Al,

 

I am a big fan of Gehry and his initial approach to thinking through a shape is to just crumple up paper and hold it in shape with some masking tape! this works really well for trying to figure out what you might want do on your layout. just start crumpling newspaper and taping it! we just did a new mountain for the jrm layout and curt and i took a couple of hours just fiddling with the newspaper blobs until we had the right shape and size. it gave us the time to think through the different views folks would have of it as they walked around the layout and we ended up with 4 very nice faces/views, each of which has its own shape and scene on it so as folks go around the layout the mountain changes. not sure if it would have worked out so well if we didnt play with the crumpled paper first!

 

if you make some cardboard tunnels you can also even run your trains with the crumpled paper scenery in place to get a good idea of how the trains will interact with the scenery!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[quinntopia]

I think the best idea of how to approach building terrain came from another 'modeler', and that was the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters. :-)  On a serious note, I sometimes feel like I'm trying to sculpt something out of mashed potatoes and it never comes out quite right!  So then I start all over again and get something a bit closer on my next version!

 

My inspiration usually comes from photographs of the scenery/landscaping that other modellers have done.  I recommend spending a lot of time looking at different photos of various layouts and find those things that you think are the most interesting.  Then you have the challenge of attempting to match a track plan to your vision, and that's where you put your own creativity and mark on it.

 

Beyond all that, the thing I love about N Scale is that its pretty easy (compared to the larger scales) to do a lot with very little.  I think sheets of styrofoam and sculptamold are about as simple as it can get, and pretty decent stuff to work with, but I wouldn't be able to use this method to same degree if I was doing HO or O.  But, as mentioned in an earlier post, there are lots of other options!

[Lawrence]

Al, perhaps you might find these pictures of interest, these were my first attempts at scenic work and I simply used standard household finishing plaster (on a base of scrunched up newspaper) with some acrylic paint mixed in for a base colour and then applied some mixed flock till I thought it looked ok!

 

 

The cliffs at the back were made the same way but using a woodland scenics mould

 

 

In this one I moved the wet mix around until I got a shape I liked then added more bits of colour to pick out highlight and lowlights

[scott]

I was thinking about Jeff's idea of creative crumpling (which he must have also mentioned a while back) while making the hills on our layout.

 

The biggest problem I had was keeping the terrain from looking like it was designed to fit the trackplan, rather than appearing relatively natural. I ended up re-doing a couple of hills because of this, but there are still a few places where I'm not happy with the "naturalness." So the design-as-you-go approach can work pretty well, since you can improvise a bit as you see it come together. (Disclaimer--this is my first real layout, so don't take me as the voice of real experience...)

[Fat Al]

Wow, that's pretty impressive work for your first attempt, Lawrence!

 

I'm going to look up the woodland scenic stuff first, and see what I can come up with.

 

And thanks for all the suggestions! I'm more or less inclined to try building a diorama to start off with. But first I have to restock my supplies....