Tomytec Building Collection

[Drunkenclam]

I was wondering if any one had the 164 thin hotel building. I was thinking about getting 2 and positioning them in an 'L' shape.

But was worrying about the window overlap.

 

[MeTheSwede]

Here's a quick look at some configurations. No windows overlap problems.

 

[Drunkenclam]

That's perfect. Thank you. I'm looking at the configuration as in the last picture. Although I forgot about the balconies:D if its standard clip together affair. I might swap the ends round. 

[cteno4]

I wonder what the floor plans of these buildings look like. Very long skinny apartments! I guess small elevator and stairwell in the big end.

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

I think it is just a model railroad low relief building not based on a prototype.

[cteno4]

Yeah I’d say that but with all the strange buildings in japan I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Favorite saying there’s a prototype for everything in Japan!

 

jeff

[Drunkenclam]

Oh. I didn't realise they were wedge shaped. That didn't look obvious I  the promo pics on hobbysearch.

[MeTheSwede]

You guys think those Tomytec buildings are thin?
Take a look at these prototypes:

 

https://weburbanist.com/2010/06/06/narrower-towers-20-of-japans-thinnest-buildings/   😅😆

[MeTheSwede]

7 hours ago, Drunkenclam said:

That's perfect. Thank you. I'm looking at the configuration as in the last picture. Although I forgot about the balconies:D if its standard clip together affair. I might swap the ends round. 

 

If I remember correctly the clips are located in such a way that only one way of assembling in possible using them. But you can of course ignore them and assemble the building by some other method.

 

The clips aren't good anyway, as they don't hold the bulding together properly without showing cracks (which should be obvious during a closer inspection of my photos).

[gavino200]

I just put together this "abandoned warehouse". I though it would be simple, but it was actually a tad difficult, due to precise fittings that you have to make with ever so slightly warped pieces.

 

I'm not sure why I bought this, as I don't have any purpose for it. Something I didn't realize from the picture is that it's absolutely giant. Big enough to be an aircraft hanger. I stuck it randomly at the end of my improvised layout. It may be useful later as parts for a kit-bash "building under construction".

 

 

 

Edited December 24, 2021 by gavino200

[railsquid]

5 minutes ago, gavino200 said:

 

 

Looks like it's being used for a clandestine gummy bear smuggling operation 😉

[Guest]

After seeing the new Tomix building announcement this week, I really like the window cleaning equipment that’s part of the new building. So I CAD’ed something up and printed a set for my existing building...

 

[cteno4]

Nice Bob, you gotta start selling these!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Wolf]

10 hours ago, Bob Martin said:

So I CAD’ed something up and printed a set for my existing building...

 

OMG awsome! I have several of the old ones, are you willing to share the Files, I would love to print these as well! These absolutely are worth money like Jeff said!

[Kamome]

Finally got around to putting my Shinto shrine #2 kit together. 010-2

 

The kit comes with 3 bases which were all at different levels of bowing. I mounted the bases on some 5mm foam board. This makes the whole structure moveable when I eventually have space for a layout as well as brings the height up to the same as the tomytec bus roads.

 

I wasn’t enamoured with the colour of the bases, a bit too yellow, nor the large gaps between the slightly bevelled base plates. For the paths I used some thin plastic card to replicate the metal grates that cover the drainage channels and then covered the whole of the base with ballast to replicate gravel. Most of the shrines in my area have this kind of ground cover. As I only had grey ballast, I toned it back a little with some sandy coloured paint wash to give a dusty sand, grey. This also helped to blend with the foundation edges of the building that you could still see some of the yellow base colour on. 

 

It’s a really nice kit and the level of detail on the lacquered fences around the shrine building is very intricate in places. It does really need to be glued together as a lot of the tabs and recesses to push fit, have a lot of play in them and fall out easily. 

 

[cteno4]

Nice. Years ago with my first gen version of this set I was also bit disappointed with the gravel texture. I looked some ballast spread and it really said gravel from a distance, but didn’t get to gluing it down.
 

Later, in a hurry for a show I glued about 70 figures onto the shrine like a festival was happening (we use to have this shrine next to a closed off street on the street cad 25mm Ttrak with a street festival). A bit later I put some ballast down to finish off the scene but realized that with people next to it the gravel looked huge, not the 2cm or less stuff that would be there usually. I tried some finer sands I had and they looked much better up close with the figures but they don’t say gravel to the eye from a couple of feet or more. One of those things like side walks we are use to looking at up close (ie at scale less than a foot away) but mostly we look at the layout at a few feet or more so more like 500’ away in real life. It’s a toss up as one way looks right to the minds eye but not the other way and at times hard to cheat on both. I kid of put it aside but need to go back and see if if there is some happy medium of blending colors of finer sands might stove the visual effect of gravel at a distance, while not being softball or larger sized scale…

 

thinking mixing white and tan or white and gray at some different ratios to see if that can give some better texture data to the eye from a distance wirh more prototype sized gravel.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Kamome]

Thanks for the input. This is fine ballast but as you say, with figures next to it, it may look too big. I’m hoping the eye passes over the texture rather than focusses on individual grains. The are probably a few clumps here and there that need some tidying up to smooth out the cover for a flatter looking surface.

 

Update:

 

Managed to find some shrine people. To my eye, if I focus on the ground cover, yes the individual grains are too large but the eye tends to be drawn to the figures so the eye, my eye anyway, brushes over the surrounding scatter. As it’s a similar but lighter colour to the paving, I think it works ok. 

 

It would be nice to hear what others think.

Edited July 2, 2022 by Kamome

[Kamome]

I have recently procured 2 more of the Tomytec coaling towers.

 

The newest release is a darker, more heavily weathered version with some dry brushed rust and fading on the roof, with the frame work also receiving a rusty wash colour. The newest release does not have the base pre-glued which makes things a little easier. 

 

I also found an older version in a small hobby store collecting dust, came with some 10 year Tomytec DC stickers from 2013. Despite the yellowing box, the model was in good condition and the same colour as my initial purchase. 

 

The idea is to kitbash some kind of limestone facility, either as a small diorama which may later be added to a layout, or a smallish module that could also be added to something bigger in future. Something slightly overgrown and less used like Shigeyasu in Yamaguchi prefecture. Now disused. 

 

 

I will need some other buildings too, considering other Tomytec options or even perhaps modifying a Walthers kit. 

 

This may be a slow burn project, or something I create to piece together for temporary setups for now. 

 

Everything will need painting the same colour, especially toning down the upright tanks and making it all look well used. One idea is to create a larger conveyer housing from some corrugated plasticard, similar to that seen in the video but this may have to wait for a proper layout build, perhaps with a rural mountainside station. 

[railsquid]

Tomix/ Tomytec do love to vary colours between releases (having spent most of my discretionay time this weekend unifying two variants of the same Tomix structure from very different production eras). Mainly not a bad thing though, IMHO.

Edited December 11, 2022 by railsquid

[Pashina12]

On 6/27/2022 at 6:59 PM, Kamome said:

Thanks for the input. This is fine ballast but as you say, with figures next to it, it may look too big. I’m hoping the eye passes over the texture rather than focusses on individual grains. The are probably a few clumps here and there that need some tidying up to smooth out the cover for a flatter looking surface.

 

Update:

 

Managed to find some shrine people. To my eye, if I focus on the ground cover, yes the individual grains are too large but the eye tends to be drawn to the figures so the eye, my eye anyway, brushes over the surrounding scatter. As it’s a similar but lighter colour to the paving, I think it works ok. 

 

It would be nice to hear what others think.

 

Hope yous don't mind my necroing such an old thread, but since I have a little shrine in mind for my own layout, this got me wondering: since the shrine area is all on a level surface, how about using some fine sandpaper painted grey for the gravelley areas?

[cteno4]

Sand and even gravel are tough textures to model at 1/150. If you get it anywhere near scale in size you loose all the visual texture at a foot or two away and any paint layer reduces this even more. One of those tradeoffs where if you look close or in close photography it looks off but the exaggerated sand/gravel looks right at 2-3’ as enough visual texture is seen for our minds eye to say sand/gravel. Always tradeoffs.

 

jeff

[Pashina12]

Yeah, you're right... I guess it's a matter of playing around and seeing what looks best to one's own eye, I guess.

[cteno4]

Yeah and it’s also a lot at where you want it to shine at. If you are going for the casual 1-3’ viewing distance that’s like 150-450’ 1:1 viewing distance where you will see little texture and our minds eye is not very trained actually looking at the real world at those distance much for retaining a lot of visual memory any detail (we don’t have to much). Our minds eye and visual memory is much more trained looking at stuff with in like 50’. Makes sense evolutionarily. But this means for not up close viewing you have to, at times, overdo textures, heights, contrasts, etc some to ping the visual memory and get the minds eye making a better picture. if you want things to look great really up close and in up close photography then yeah you need to get close to scale on most things or things will look off to the minds eye and then ruin the model scene there. Sand/gravel is one of the worst like this. I have some different sized sand blasting sands at much closer to scale rough sand than usual craft sands but when I played with it it just did not say sand to the brain at 2’ away. But some fine candle sand that had a bit of sparkle to it (you don’t see sand sparkle 1:1 at much distance) and was much larger (more like 1” stones), but did say sand really well to the brain at 2’ viewing. Tradeoff was ok as 1” stone beach wasn’t that noticeable in close up views but said sand to the brain at longer views.
 

Our brains are sort of like doing mpeg in some respects for the processed sensory data going to the conscious mind to deal with, our conscious mind is actually pretty slow and more serial and to take the deluge of sensory data being processed we tend to not update very thing with fresh data and fill in details from easier accessed visual memory at times. This is one of the reasons suspect ids can be suspect! But it’s also the fun of playing with this and seeing what buttons you can press in visual memory and play with what the mind’s eye believes it saw. Our first club layout was all done putting track down on the fly on colored paper and plopping buildings and scenery islands around. Folks would later swear it was a finished layout from memory as enough visual cues were there for the mind’s eye to fill in many of the holes and be happy with having a more complete layout in its vision. This is what I like most about doing n scale modeling.

 

I’ve been fascinated by this stuff for a lot of my life when doing exhibit models when young and with the right details there and good lighting you could take pictures that folks would swear were real places and not models. These were not super finished models at all, mainly chipboard, basswood strips, and colored art paper. It was all about what cues you presented to the mind’s eye and its use of visual memory to smooth over the rough spots and gaps. Over the years I’ve talked to researchers interested in consciousness and perception about all this and it’s wild how we perceive the world in our brain vs what’s actually happening like this. The weirdest thing is how we must deal with the processing time lag between sensory processing, thinking and reaction.

cheers,

 

jeff

[Pashina12]

Perception is a fascinating thing indeed. I'm a linguist and one of my particular interests is acoustic phonetics. It's remarkable, for example, how a dozen or so milliseconds is so short that on a conscious level it's almost impossible to perceive, yet it's enough for our brains to distinguish between a long and a short vowel... or on one study I did, how a difference of about 100 Hz in one particular formant frequency was enough to distinguish between two utterances that were otherwise as identical as they could be.

 

I expect photography will be a big focus for me on the layout I'm building, so I expect I'll be trying a lot of different things out before committing to one or another method.

[cteno4]

Very cool! Yes the brain is amazing. So much of our sensory processing happens in massive parallel processing in the sub conscious mind to be given to the conscious brain in such an abstracted way and with always some delay! Amazing we make sense out of it. An old marine biology mentor of mine late in his career got really deep into this stuff and wonderful chats with him on it all. The brain is an amazingly designed machine, but it’s freaky when you think about how all this distillation of data ends up being what we “think” is the world. 

 

Yes always good to experiment to make sure you are happy with what you end up with. It’s funny it’s one of the things I’ve heard over many times over the years with folks’ modeling, saying “It’s dead on scale, perfect but it looks wrong to me!” Hence I always preach experiment a lot!
 

Your thinner modules do lend themselves to much closer viewing than larger layouts do. Ttrak is similar but the issue there is usually on a 28” high table and folks rarely squat down so most view at 2-4’ distance with a lot of that looking down. One of the reasons mini onetrak idea sucked me in was I am hoping smaller modules gets folks looking in closer than Ttrak does.
 

cheers,

 

jeff