this place is blowing my mind.

[Martijn Meerts]

I was being honest :D

[velotrain]

Well, okay.. It 'works', but it looks ridiculous ;)

 

And how do you feel about real water in N scale?

 

Jeff said:  "I thin martjin was referring that the water motion just does not scale well".

 

I would suggest that it partially depends on the vessel being operated at scale speed.

 

I was trying to find an HOe example of the railcar ferry to Rugen, but came across this instead:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ-DAoARSYE

[velotrain]

I finally found my source for the HOe Rugen railway with the Wittow ferry (a fine kit by Artitec).

 

It was in an article on modeling realistic water on the Country Gate site, which is a name the U.K. members might recognize.

 

http://www.009.cd2.com/members/how_to/introduction.htm

 

There are other instructional topics here.

 

It took a whole lot of searches with widely varying terms, but I finally tracked down a video of it.  Country Gate mentions that it's run by a hand crank (seen in the photo there - I think a larger diameter handle would have helped), and the jerkiness of the motion, combined with several mid-crossing stops, suggests that some other method is desirable.  One thing I noticed is that there is almost no surface disturbance on the water at all - but perhaps that what Martijn and Jeff are objecting to.

 

http://www.myvideo.de/watch/7227169/Wittower_Faehre

 

It doesn't matter to me if anyone dislikes the use of real water, especially in smaller scales, but let me suggest a possible perspective.  Imagination is a major factor in model railroading - all modeling when you think about it.  It's what allows us to make a connection between our inadequate models and the prototype.  We gloss over all of the failings and imagine that we're looking at a representation of reality - or even reality itself.

 

Now let's say that a modeler wants an operational railroad ferry.  Which would be easier for your imagination to accept - real water, with all its shortcomings, or watching the ship being pulled across painted plywood by a wire?  There's no reason to use real water unless you want operational maritime traffic, but if you do - I don't see any reason to use anything else.

[cteno4]

Velotrain,

 

I agree the mind's eye if given the proper cues can allow memory and the imagination to fill in details not there and make it feel very real. But the opposite is true that if effects are done that look wrong to the mind's eye it will do just the opposite of rejecting the scene as not real and really detracting from all the great modeling details and effects that may be there. Using real water is one of those effects that in modeling that has always had trouble of not looking real and thus potentially ruining the mind's eye effect (it's a special effect in the movies that has been the effects artist's bane!)

 

I think with the trains it works in a different manner of done well as being such a novelty to have real water and motion. But a well done static water scene with properly sculpted water,mood models and scene setting can be really realistic and work wonders with the mind's eye.

 

In N scale water is super tough for a number of reasons. Most vessels underway will give you a nice froth and foam at the bow and stern as well as usually on some of the wake, but this will never happen on scale wake 4-8mm high. Second in most marine (outside the tropics) or river situations at oblique viewing angles you only usually see a few feet or maybe 10' into the water, so that would be like 5-20mm scale. To get around this you need to heavily dye the water which gives you colored water, not the normal water look at 1:1. Just using clear water and painting the bottom does not work as our eyes see thru thru the clear water at scale and register they are looking at the bottom of the river or harbor all of a sudden (not something in our normal perception in 1:1). It's hard to get the constant surface wave action you have in most real situations as at scale the surface tension of the water wants to get keep the surface flat or warped in not a 1:1 looking way. Also small vibrations can cause odd motion in the water.

 

Animation is a tricky thing with model rr as from the start the whole scene is static and just the trains moving. Adding other animation can help overcome this or if not right enhance this incongruity. I personally find this true with the tomytec bus system when used in city or even town streets where the bus is the only vehicle moving and All the other vehicles static and the lane the bus is in is totally empty save the bus. Only could see this in gridlocked traffic where there are express bus lanes, but that's not something our mind's eye readily pulls up. I think it works when in on a little used rural road or neighborhood where there are few other vehicles and placing them in the right places makes sense to the mind's eye they arhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/app/national-cherry-blossom-festival/id426231420?mt=8e stopped and the bus is moving. So this is an example of where I see if used right it's really cool and works wonderfully and in other settings it just sets my mind's eye to saying WRONG.

 

I'm not saying it can't be done or shouldn't be done, it's just that it can have challenges to do, especially in n scale, and can ruin the imagination/mind's eye for many (like martjin)

 

Cheers,

 

Jeff

Edited March 10, 2015 by cteno4

[marknewton]

I'm with Martijn on this one. To me real water looks utter unrealistic.

 

And while we're on the subject, I should say that layouts like this Miniatur Wunderland don't really do anything for me. I don't say this to be controversial, or to wind anyone up, it's just my honest impression. 

 

Cheers,

 

Mark.

[kvp]

I think the problem with real water is that it's not scaled properly. By using better scale alternatives to plain water, you can get better results. The whole thing can get highly unsafe and hard to maintain though.

 

I've been to the MiWuLa and it's nice, especially the technology behind it, but it's so compressed that it's completly unrealistic, even on that scale. On the other hand, there is another layout, a 1 gauge club layout that survived the WWII bombings and represents only two old stations of Hamburg, but allows prototypical running. The whole analog layout is controlled from a 1:1 scale tower placed above the center of the layout with constantly modernized electronics.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdwuiqwdro

 

ps: The idea to open it as a visitable exhibition layout came when many members of the club didn't return from the war to get their trains. Since then this collection is constantly growing. There are young members too and they are housed in the attic of the local museum, so there is a good chance that the club and the layout will remain active in the future.

[ozman2009]

Maybe MiWuLa has got to be too big, and too diverse? Perhaps it's trying to do too much? I visited in 2007 and thought it was great then. At the time the Swiss section was being built. Maybe if they'd stopped at that, and an Austrian section of course   :)   , it might have been better.

[cteno4]

size can be your enemy in exhibits. There is the thought bigger is better no matter what, but it tends to overwhelm the visitor and then they never make a good connection to the exhibit. Ive seen this happen so many times in museum work. After a certain point the viewer just becomes numb. some can even feel belittled or hurt by this shock that large exhibits make them feel and that is really bad.

 

when exhibits do get large its important to try to scale things where possible so the visitor is not shrunk and also places where the exhibit can really communicate on a human level so that they can shake off the numbness. its sort of like hitchcock always mellowing the scene after some suspense to allow folks to catch their breath and re relate with the characters before hitting them again...

 

jeff

[ozman2009]

I'm sure you're right Jeff. Bigness was one common theme I noticed in German museums as a whole.

[kvp]

Usually i don't have a problem with size. Last time it took me 6 and a half hours to see a Rembrandt exhibition (an average of 2 minutes for each picture) and i still remember most of the paintings, including smaller details. It took me around 6 hours to see the miwula (walked through it twice, before and after dinner) and i do rembember most of it, including some of train and car movement patterns. My only problem was that they took scenes and buildings that are well known and put it into a fantasy like setting. Personally i prefer a closer to reality copy of a smaller scene and accept multiple distant scenes next to each other instead of a single near enough fantasy scene with everything. A good example is the Hamburg part, where they put in a little speicherstadt, a little hochbahn and a little landungsbrucke. It's there, but not close enough to be an actual model like the static diorama in the city museum and they are added together in a completly unrealistic way. They did the same with switzerland, including the famous landmarks of the rhb. On the other hand, the airport and the german town are completly fantasy and look very good as a single scene. The austrian section is typical, but shows mostly terrain only, so it's general enough to be realistic, but rather uninteresting. The us section is a joke, but a bad one at that. The north european part is again a mix or real and imaginery, so it's again a close enough but something is off feeling. There are a few tiny realistic scenes separate from the layout that shows that they could work very well from historic photos, but don't have the space to do it on the main layout. Overall it's nice and a huge feat in modelling and engineering, but the mixed, almost real but not completly scenes make some people feel like something is off.

 

The same problem is copied at the hungarian version, including mirroring the oldest station building in budapest (nyugati) to fit better into the scene and using german style houses instead of hungarian ones because those were available off the shelf and moving different famous buildings found all around vienna into a single small scene to save space. This is like putting the tokyo tower and the skytree into the garden of the imperial palace because that's close enough to reality for most people.

[westfalen]

I found myself going around the layouts looking at the small detailed scenes rather than the layout as a whole.

 

I came away with the same opinion of the U.S. section which is why I hope they don't try their hand at a Japanese layout, but my biggest dissapointment was the gift shop which was 99.9999% generic German and Hamburg souveniers that I could have bought at a gift shop anywhere.  The only railway/model railway or Miniatur Wunderland related items were a couple of freight cars in HO and N and a book/DVD set.

[Martijn Meerts]

I finally found my source for the HOe Rugen railway with the Wittow ferry (a fine kit by Artitec).

 

It was in an article on modeling realistic water on the Country Gate site, which is a name the U.K. members might recognize.

 

http://www.009.cd2.com/members/how_to/introduction.htm

 

There are other instructional topics here.

 

It took a whole lot of searches with widely varying terms, but I finally tracked down a video of it.  Country Gate mentions that it's run by a hand crank (seen in the photo there - I think a larger diameter handle would have helped), and the jerkiness of the motion, combined with several mid-crossing stops, suggests that some other method is desirable.  One thing I noticed is that there is almost no surface disturbance on the water at all - but perhaps that what Martijn and Jeff are objecting to.

 

http://www.myvideo.de/watch/7227169/Wittower_Faehre

 

It doesn't matter to me if anyone dislikes the use of real water, especially in smaller scales, but let me suggest a possible perspective.  Imagination is a major factor in model railroading - all modeling when you think about it.  It's what allows us to make a connection between our inadequate models and the prototype.  We gloss over all of the failings and imagine that we're looking at a representation of reality - or even reality itself.

 

Now let's say that a modeler wants an operational railroad ferry.  Which would be easier for your imagination to accept - real water, with all its shortcomings, or watching the ship being pulled across painted plywood by a wire?  There's no reason to use real water unless you want operational maritime traffic, but if you do - I don't see any reason to use anything else.

 

The boat in the video is actually suspended above the water, which means there's no distortion of the water (as you also noticed). If you then color the water itself and maybe add something to make it a little less fluid, it does work. The problem is when boats actually sail ON the water. The ripples caused by that just don't look right at all, no matter how well the layout was built.

 

Miniatur Wunderland uses regular, uncoloured water, and the boats there do sail on the water itself, they don't use some system where the boats are suspended just above the water surface. In fact, their boats use a local GPS system to figure where they are and where other boats are (I don't think they ever got this to work well though).

 

 

That said, in the end what someone does with their layout is their decision of course, and if they manage to make real water look realistic, then I'll definitely not be against it at all :)

Edited March 11, 2015 by Martijn Meerts

[westfalen]

Miniatur Wunderland uses regular, uncoloured water, and the boats there do sail on the water itself, they don't use some system where the boats are suspended just above the water surface. In fact, their boats use a local GPS system to figure where they are and where other boats are (I don't think they ever got this to work well though).

When we were there last December they had a guy operating the ships by radio control, on the right in the photo.  Our guide said they were hoping to have the ships operating automatically sometime in the next couple of years.

[Martijn Meerts]

That's exactly what they said when I was there, which was quite a few years ago (the airport was under construction when I was there.) .. Guess the GPS system isn't getting much attention :)

[kvp]

The GPS system was actually operational in the past and it uses infrared emitters for triangulation. The only problem is camera flashes essentially blind any sensors looking towards the visitors. Prohibiting flash usage around the ships would work, but that's not really a good idea.

 

A good alternative is to use cameras and image processing. A slightly more stable and easier to implement variant could use pulsed infrared emitters on the ships and multiple ir cameras suspended on the ceiling above the water and looking straight down to calculate the position. You need a camera for roughly every square meter (based on the height of the ceiling), but it's a simple and well documented technology, used by many high school robot soccer teams to track their robots on the playing field. Then the radio commands can be sent down from a simple computer controlled emitter. If you make the emitters controllable, then you can track more than one ship by pulsing the three marker leds of each ship, capturing an image from every camera, mosaicing them together then looking for the two nearest dots, marking the tail of the ship and then the 3rd further away from this pair marks the tip of the bow. This gives the exact position and heading of each ship and by cycling through all ships, you can get repeated postions at fixed time intervals and calculate speeds from that. It's actually very trivial and only needs a few ir cameras (home security grade), a few ir leds (off the shelf ones used by tv remotes) and a 3 channel radio receiver on each ship. (for steering, propulsion and marker leds) The leds can be mounted looking straight up and the cameras can be mounted looking straight down in a square grid to cover the shipping lanes and make calibration easier. To calibrate the cameras, you have to place test leds to their overlapping region and move the images (or the cameras) until the dot pairs are on top of each other on the composite. It's painfully trivial, so i assume they probably managed to make an operational system since then.

[westfalen]

The GPS system was actually operational in the past and it uses infrared emitters for triangulation. The only problem is camera flashes essentially blind any sensors looking towards the visitors. Prohibiting flash usage around the ships would work, but that's not really a good idea.

Our guide wouldn't let us take photos behind the scenes at the airport for this reason.