side street vanishing point perspective scenes

Most of the time it only looks right from one vantage point. If you had say, two buildings with a street between that goes into the backdrop, then paint it so you cannot see it unless you are looking down that street. 

Disney has a spot in California Adventure (Disneyland) that is exactly that. If you stand in front and someone takes your picture it looks like a long street behind you.

Good luck and post a picture of what you do.

GVDobler has brought up the salient point.  And its not just one vantage point, its also the height that matters, too.  Paint it so it looks good to you and anyone significantly shorter or taller will see it as distorted.

In my experience (as an observer of others, I have never done this), on a layout, this only works well if you angle the perspective or hide it, and keep the depth of your imaginary street short, or use some of the mirrors and tricks I have seen and that have been discussed here, again keeping the imaginary street short. 

What I have noticed, particularly with rivers behind bridges, is that if it curves, the perspective is not as critical.

here is a Google search of city street images. Note the perspective (angle, point view) impact on the photos. An artist friend of mine has a painting of a country scene of an artist (brain cramp, can't remember his name) that had the ability to paint the perspective as if he were up in a tree. You don't notice it at first, but the high angle makes the scene appear ok, no matter which angle that you view it from.

Note layouts that you have seen with a road under a bridge or river that continues into a backdrop, but is curved. It just looks better.

I would say a high angle view of a side street that curves would look very believable. The attached photo from a higher angle would be close.

Edit: the second photo attached has a least a one story height perspective. It looks good, but a little higher would look better. Add a curve, so it disappears and I think you would have it.

Edit#2-by raising the height of the ground plane and lowering the "vanishing point" and then moving it to one side so you don't have to continue the detail. Diagram attached

ahhh..  stone street in manhatten, one of my favorite places on the planet. i just may try to use that somehow.

Someone posted pictures of just what you are talking about where they used a mirror at the end of a small street it was pretty neat how it looked. I tried finding it but was unable to do so maybe someone else will remember it or perhaps the original posted will bring it back up. Jim

Not exactly what you are looking for, but a mirror used as a backdrop to increase the size.

A consideration to the side street problem is to make the street at an angle, then the mirror is placed against the wall and reflects a section of building which is not seen from the front and is behind the visible building. With the proper angles, the mirror is reflecting more building at the right angle and the view continues out of site.  But you need some depth, at least a foot, of real background to make this work.

thats the problem with my application..  i will have a shallow depth. i think i will just have to play around with different photographic tricks somehow.

Seen city scenes done in perspective, mostly HO.

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/13536

Also try a search at the site above for backdrops

Also may want to check one of the backdrop vendors.  The key IMO is how the streets are framed in the scene. Usually a "visual block" in the scene helps

thats pretty cool.  i will do my best to try to achieve that.

Hello,

Not sure this is what you are looking for. This scene is under construction(note the blue tape holding up the buildings. I used a looking down the street photo pasted under the EL , and the EL hides the transition. The building flat to the right mounted on lexan to give it a little more depth.  I have a lot of work to do, and I will probably try to scale the photo better, but I like the direction I am going.

Scott

Great topic!

I will have a similar task when I get to the scenery part. I will have Penn Station with other buildings on the sides separated by side streets. I plan to use Korber's flats behind it all. I was trying to incorporate photos of New York City canyons into the backdrop; but couldn't get the scale right.

There is one trick that I learned from Lee Willis.

If you have MS Office, there is a cool photo editing tool in PowerPoint. When you paste a photo onto a slide, there is a 3D manipulation tool that allows the photo to be edited to enhance the effect for this application or building sides as he uses it for, which it can then be cropped to "square" up the edges. The "stone street" photo in my post above was enhanced that way to "squeeze" the end of the street and raise the viewpoint a little from the original photo.