Construction Details

Graphic Details

Buildings, walls, roads, and other module surfaces can be enhanced visually with imaginative materials and custom images – paint, laminate, acrylic, and digital prints – for added realism. This is also a great way to refurbish existing buildings and bridges that had a rough life in the toy box.

Images can be as simple as pictures taken of nearby buildings or walls and then scaled appropriately. They might also be assembled with graphics software in combination with stock photos, textures, and visual elements from a variety of sources. Public domain images can be found online and many commercial image or texture collections are available.

Public Domain
A web search will turn up many sources for free textures and images. After investing many hours, however, I found that most were inadequate for the quality and convenience desired.

Several sites were marked as having ‘dangerous downloads’ which is something to keep in mind... Available images were often either low resolution or skewed at an angle. Color quality was sometimes poor with some or all of the image washed-out. Tileable versions were rare. Many images were also incomplete, lacking edges for example.

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Commercially available images and collections
A wide selection of images and textures are available from various online sources. Texturama offers building pictures as well as architectural textures and individual images that can be purchased. A hobby version of their collection is available, from which selected elements were used in combination with personal photos to create graphic details incorporated into my modules. Sources for textures and images that may be of interest include:
www.texturama.com
www.handdrawnimages.com
www.absolutetextures.com

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Personal images and textures
With a good camera and some determination one can create quality custom images. Shown are a few developed using photos taken during a trip to Manhattan. Pictures were taken with an older Canon EOS 20D camera, manipulated with Adobe� Photoshop� Elements 2.0, and corrected for lens distortion using the PTLens plugin from ePaperPress.

Additional details outlining one method for manipulating images to generate a straight-on front view follows in the next paragraph...

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Creating custom images from photos
A number of resources and instructions can be found online. Here are the basic steps involved using one of my building photos as an example.

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