a dense forest in my opinion. next is realistic water.
Bob C.
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I did a water feature for someone else's layout a couple of years ago. It wasn't tough at all.
Trees that look like real trees? Man, that's a nightmare. I've been experimenting as I'm very close to where I'll need to make trees. I bought the huge box of supertree sprigs, but covering them in accurate-looking foliage? Man, I'm still trying to work that out.
Running water, like in a river or tidal flow.
Sunlight
Concrete.
It seems like most folks take smooth surfaces and paint them light gray. Real concrete is a bit more rough and has lots of browns and yellows in it.
Waterfalls.
Wise guys here?? 
I'm no "master modeler." What is realistic to Tom, may be laughable to Dick. Harry? He's got his own, impossible to meet, standards! For others, bottle brushes painted green are fine!
I am presently very much involved in the "tree issue."
I am very happy with "furnace filter" evergreen trees! They look great to me. For deciduous, the Supertrees are excellent and not hard!
Now, there are great trees, absolutely superb trees, available commercially, but at 10-20 bucks apiece, that "forest" tends to shrink to a mere "grove" pretty quickly!
For the truly ambitious, there are home-made "trophy trees." Like these:
http://www.freerails.com/view_...orum_id=4&page=1
I built precisely one! I'm happy with it. It's huge! But it cost me about $10 in CA glue alone!
One "trophy" is enough!
One thing though, IMO, you just can never have enough trees!
People. Almost always, you find yourself in the "uncanny valley".
Some of the best hyper-realistic modelers don't even try--they do without.
There is a difference between "realistic" and "looks realistic". In many situations making a model look right requires deviation from geometric perfection.
A good example is modern glass-skinned skyscrapers. Very often I look at such models and think to myself "that looks like a toy-like model, not a real building". But, then I compare the work to a similar REAL building, and I see that the real building looks like a toy-like model, too! The models are geometrically perfect, but they still look wrong. We just don't look at skyscrapers carefully enough, so our expectations are wrong. For this reason, I prefer older, grungier subjects.
Scale-sized mountains! Few people can make "molehills" look like the real thing - I'm not one of them.
RoyBoy posted:Concrete.
It seems like most folks take smooth surfaces and paint them light gray. Real concrete is a bit more rough and has lots of browns and yellows in it.
Yep, too true. I tried badly to make my plastic turntable pit look right for poured concrete, and while it looks better than some (I used a flat tan, then dusted in flat grey over top of that, letting the tan show through), it still doesn't look 'right' to me.
How about rust? How many people can get that looking like it really does? And what silly bugger thought that the color every paint out there is marked as rust actually looks like the real thing? It is wasn't for the some powdered colored chalk stuff I bought at a hobby shop, nothing on my layout would really look like it's rusted like it does in the real world. real rust is very red, not brown, but why does all rust colored paint look more like dirt color?
Sunset or sunrise...
Terry Danks posted:Wise guys here??
I'm no "master modeler." What is realistic to Tom, may be laughable to Dick. Harry? He's got his own, impossible to meet, standards! For others, bottle brushes painted green are fine!
I am presently very much involved in the "tree issue."
I am very happy with "furnace filter" evergreen trees! They look great to me. For deciduous, the Supertrees are excellent and not hard!
Now, there are great trees, absolutely superb trees, available commercially, but at 10-20 bucks apiece, that "forest" tends to shrink to a mere "grove" pretty quickly!
For the truly ambitious, there are home-made "trophy trees." Like these:
http://www.freerails.com/view_...orum_id=4&page=1
I built precisely one! I'm happy with it. It's huge! But it cost me about $10 in CA glue alone!
One "trophy" is enough!
One thing though, IMO, you just can never have enough trees!
I used to use Yarrow. The weed that looks something like Queen Annes Lace, but is woody, so it makes excellent trees. They can be used as is or the tops can be made green by any number of methods.
illusion of dept and distance. in short space of 12 inches or less.
Trees have always been of interest here. Partial to sage as stem with stems from super trees glued on them for the foreground. A gradual reduction in detail of trees as I move to background. For canopy effect in background have used various natural materials that have been spray painted For Evergreen I have used a mix of furnace filter style and purchased.
Lee,
I've had the same thought on trees as you have, it is difficult to make realistic trees. What I have ended up with are Woodland Scenic tree armatures. I have coated the branches with Hobbytac glue and then stretched out their poly floss to a very thin covering and adhered that to the branches on the armatures. I then spray the tree with an aerosol glue and sprinkle on fine turf in the color I desire. The results are reasonably good. I did purchase a few ready made trees that looked realistic and tried to follow the way these were made.
Ray
Try this thread:
"What Is The Most Difficult Scenic Effect to Achieve ?"
Snow, Ice, and frost without making a mess.
I agree with depth and distance. Very few can get it to look right.
Grumpy old men actually enjoying their trains and the hobby.....That is an impossible scene!
Snow , Ice cover , slush and depth
Mark Diff posted:"What Is The Most Difficult Scenic Effect to Achieve ?"
Snow, Ice, and frost without making a mess.
For Snow I found Noch to be the most realistic.
that is very realistic looking snow
Bob C.
For Snow I found Noch to be the most realistic.
What is Noch and where is it available?
Ray
I think very few have mastered a road continuing onto the backdrop. For easy, cheap trees that look great, check out Joey Ricard's Trackside Scenery videos on Youtube.
chain link fence
wsdimenna posted:
Is it me or does it look like someone had a snowblower accident here?
Jerry
p51 posted:Trees that look like real trees? Man, that's a nightmare.
Almost every layout I have seen has trees that are just too small or short. All I have to do is go outside and see that the average tree around the house is taller than a 2.5 story house by quite a margin. How many have trees that are 40-60 or more scale feet? Most of us are using HO trees on an O scale layout.
p51 posted:I did a water feature for someone else's layout a couple of years ago. It wasn't tough at all.
Trees that look like real trees? Man, that's a nightmare. I've been experimenting as I'm very close to where I'll need to make trees. I bought the huge box of supertree sprigs, but covering them in accurate-looking foliage? Man, I'm still trying to work that out.
I found some JTT trees on eBay I really like. The problem is the price: $15 bucks for an 8 inch tree.
Rayin"S" posted:I did purchase a few ready made trees that looked realistic and tried to follow the way these were made.
Ray,
I used my Hobby Lobby discount app to buy several sets of Woodland Scencs birch trees and I'll be doing the same thing; reverse engineering how they made them. I bought a massive box of "super tree" sprigs but they're awfully short for O scale. They'll do good for the background trees to hide the dividing line where the backdrops start, though.
Almost every layout I have seen has trees that are just too small or short. All I have to do is go outside and see that the average tree around the house is taller than a 2.5 story house by quite a margin. How many have trees that are 40-60 or more scale feet? Most of us are using HO trees on an O scale layout.
Agreed. In O, a good sized tree should be at least a foot and a half minimum if you compare them to the real world.
I remember seeing somewhere online where I guy with a 3-rail layout used fir trees intended for G scale. They actually looked about right for O, as where I live in the Pacific NW, non-deciduous trees look like they're almost tall enough to parachute out of the tops of them.
Scott T Johnson posted:p51 posted:I did a water feature for someone else's layout a couple of years ago. It wasn't tough at all.
Trees that look like real trees? Man, that's a nightmare. I've been experimenting as I'm very close to where I'll need to make trees. I bought the huge box of supertree sprigs, but covering them in accurate-looking foliage? Man, I'm still trying to work that out.
I found some JTT trees on eBay I really like. The problem is the price: $15 bucks for an 8 inch tree.
That's only 32'. Small tree. I've used a few of them in some scenes....
But then you might need 200 of them......
mwb posted:Scott T Johnson posted:I found some JTT trees on eBay I really like. The problem is the price: $15 bucks for an 8 inch tree.
That's only 32'. Small tree. I've used a few of them in some scenes....
But then you might need 200 of them......
Yeah, exactly. Even the stuff made for G scale isn't all that taller than anything made for G, except for some cheesy-looking 'fir' trees that look like toilet bowl brushes painted dark green...
Guys all tree have to start small. Unfortunately we don't have a good way to make them grow.
Ken M
Ken M posted:Guys all tree have to start small.
Yeah, buy they don't stay that way. The only place you see small trees is in some place with newer landscaping...
Ken M posted:Guys all tree have to start small. Unfortunately we don't have a good way to make them grow.
Ken M
And, if I were modeling an area of PA that was clear cut relatively recently, and much of that was done 100+ years ago, smaller trees and scrub would work, but I'm not.
There were some really nice large trees on another forum a while back, but they were in area of ~$100+ per tree....
baltimoretrainworks posted:wsdimenna posted:
Is it me or does it look like someone had a snowblower accident here?
Jerry
just playing around with real candy cane pieces. The base comes up easy and was replaced later
My belief is that rarely is the goal to make layouts that are geometrically correct. In almost all cases, skillful modelers strive to make things that look right, which often means deviating from what you would get by using a tape measure on a real scene. It is like the difference between a painting and a photograph. The photograph is more "correct", but a great painting is more beautiful, exactly because of how it differs from reality. I think that great modeling is the same thing.
For this reason, I am fine with too-small and too-few trees.
What Pete said.
Just as buildings often have to be selectively compressed down from full scale to avoid dwarfing everything else, full scale size trees would also rapidly eat up available real estate and look out of place.
We sometimes forget that we are attempting the impossible in what we try to include on the typical size train layout. It takes a good deal of artistic license, rather than scale engineering, to make things look right.
Remember that each 4' x 8' sheet of plywood-sized area on an O gauge layout represents a piece of land less than 200' x 400' in real life. That's less than two acres!!!
And yet we fit loops of track, stations, small yards, engine facilities, etc. on not very many of those two acre plots! Keeping everything to full, accurate scale isn't the best way to model every element on a layout.
Big trees will look great to highlight some well-detailed foreground scenes, but the majority of trees on most layouts will be of the smaller variety.
Jim
Also, next time you find yourself high up in a tall building, look -- really look -- at the world below. From 20 stories up, even reality looks fake!
Jim Policastro posted:Just as buildings often have to be selectively compressed down from full scale to avoid dwarfing everything else, full scale size trees would also rapidly eat up available real estate and look out of place.
Mine aren't - all my structures are full scale. O scale trees that are barely HO look scrawny and anemic at best. I guess if you're content to use the majority of RTR structures that are almost always compressed in scale, then maybe that works
We sometimes forget that we are attempting the impossible in what we try to include on the typical size train layout. It takes a good deal of artistic license, rather than scale engineering, to make things look right.
Maybe....but I think it's more of a balancing act - I prefer to lean towards everything in full scale as much as possible.
Remember that each 4' x 8' sheet of plywood-sized area on an O gauge layout represents a piece of land less than 200' x 400' in real life. That's less than two acres!!! And yet we must fit loops of track, stations, small yards, engine facilities etc. on not very many of those two acre plots! Full scale just won't work for every element on a layout.
Jim
Actually, there's nothing that states that we must do anything of the kind............and 4'x8' sheets, really? My layout is wrap around the room and little is more than 30" deep, and the room is only 11' x 13' with the layout covering just barely 60' sq. There's a good stretch along the one side that will have nothing there except trees, brush, and other rural scenery stuff framing the tracks.
I'll keep looking for the largest trees that I can find - hopefully I can find something that will pass for black locust.
mwb posted:ere were some really nice large trees on another forum a while back, but they were in area of ~$100+ per tree....
Ouch!
I'm in the wrong business. 
