Ground Goop recipes?

[Bob Bufkin]

Thank you sir, from the photo angle it looks kinda strange.

[PAL_Houston]

It all comes down to "how big should a scale brick be?" Scale soil, to my eye, tends to look like paint instead of soil. If you take just a teeny bit of liberty with the scale of surface details, they read better to the eye. Ballast is the same way--scale cinders for a yard, again, looks like paint instead of cinders.

For my first NZT structure kit, I rendered the bricks exactly to scale. And you know what? I'm not head over heels about it; I have this temptation to make them just a tad larger--not much, just enough so they read as bricks better.

IMO, of course, and we're all different when it comes to this.

So it's more texture quality than texture size....up to a point.  The point of balance is probably when it starts to look rocky instead of soil-like; (or, cinder-blocks instead of masonry brick.)    How the surface reflects or diffuses light probably affects the impression as well -- paint tends to smoothness and is more reflective (...in most cases, I think) than a porous surface (like hydrocal, grout or joint compound) that you stain.  On the other hand, ground goop is not (is not intended to be?)  the final surface, but more of a filler and shaping medium, to which you add other stuff to achieve final desired colors and textures.

[MichaelWinicki]

Dave makes a good point. 

I remember Spookshow talking over on the Atlas forum about giving a stucco finish to one of his buildings on the Hope layout and in the discussion the point was brought up that if you gave it a true, N-scale stucco finish that it wouldn't see the stucco.

The bottom line being that there are some things like stucco, bricks and maybe even soil texture that need to be larger than their N-scale equivalents in order to be convincing.

[diezmon]

I tried using grout for the first time a while back, and it seemed much too rough.   What I found works great is after you sprinkle it on, put a sheet of paper over it and use that to smooth it out.  I sprinkle it until the surface it pretty dry.. then smooth it.

it turns out like this:

[Scottl]

That grout turned out beautifully.  I'm going to try that.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Yep, you definitely have to do something to smooth it once it's on. I've used one of the foam sponge brushes turned on its side to good effect too.