Old Layout Scenery - Need Feedback

[ljudice]

I've posted some shots of my LAST layout here:

http://www.louisjudice.com/N-ScaleRailroading

I hated the look of it enough to tear it down and not rebuild it for several years. I used the Tony Koester "Cotton Wad" technique - in some cases painted, in some cases with ground foam. As someone mentioned to me at the time, it looked like Trebbels (from Star Trek).

What am I doing wrong?  Should I forget about dense vegetation?  Use something else?  Anything redeming in these shots I should try to repeat?

Thanks...

- Lou

(Ignore the bridge pier situation, please....)

[TiVoPrince]

Vegetation 
is seldom as dense as we model it.  Even eastern old growth is layers upon layers, not a single surface represented by wads of dyed cotton heaped up along a hillside.  Work shown near the tracks is first rate but seems to fall away in quality towards the backdrop.  Perhaps choosing locations that don't need vertical canyon walls would help.  Sky is just so much easier to model...

[ljudice]

That's an interesting point, since I seemed compelled to back the tracks against hills everywhere.  Of course it was set in mountainous terrain. 

I also agree I put massive amounts of attention near the track and then rushed to finish the tops of hills...

[wm3798]

Lou, the first thing I notice is there is no attempt to make the puff balls become "background noise".  They're all POW RIGHT THERE.
I use them too, but try to put some more detailed trees in front of them.

I'm on my mom's Mac at the moment, so I can't see how to open another pane to access my gallery, but I'll post you a couple of examples as soon as I unravel the mysteries of this infernal machine...

Lee

[GaryHinshaw]

What am I doing wrong? 

It's not terrible Lou, but I'll bite.   Let's take this shot as an example: the evergreen trees tower over the deciduous trees, making them look like shrubs.  It's a great rendition of a recently logged hillside in the Oregon cascades though - especially with all that UP power rolling though.   

Should I forget about dense vegetation?  Use something else? 

Study photos of scenes you would like to capture the feel of, and share them with us.  Are you going for the dense forested hills of Pennsylvania, or something a bit sparser?  The best example of eastern mountain scenery I can recall is Caleb Austin's C&O layout, but that may be a bit more open than you're after.

Anything redeming in these shots I should try to repeat?

I like the foreground scenes in these shots

http://www.louisjudice.com/N-ScaleRailroading/OREN-Layout/19787727_ZWGvFn#1554892449_SNzfk4J
http://www.louisjudice.com/N-ScaleRailroading/OREN-Layout/19787727_ZWGvFn#1554892663_hrhTD8H

The trains recede a bit from center stage, which they often do in reality.  Also, keep the western power!    

-Gary

[ljudice]

Gary,

Yep - that layout was kind of a East-West mixture...  Beginning to think maybe I should build the layout for my western stuff and stick to connifers and leave the deciduous trees out of it!

It's a tough decision since I have quite a bit of stuff to go either way and like them both!

Lee, it's amazing how the "balls" stand out in photos, but you lose perception of them when you're standing there in front of it.  I think I read someone say in MR once that you need to keep checking your work in photos as you go along as a sanity check.

Thanks again for the help here...

- Lou

[wm3798]

I also found it's easier to make them disappear if you use the same turf material on the puff balls that you do on the foreground trees.  I've also had better results when I go from larger puffs that are more defined in the front and move to more of a "canopy" effect toward the back.  The trick is making the transition with a fair degree of subtlety.

Lee

[MichaelWinicki]

Vegetation 
is seldom as dense as we model it.  Even eastern old growth is layers upon layers, not a single surface represented by wads of dyed cotton heaped up along a hillside.  Work shown near the tracks is first rate but seems to fall away in quality towards the backdrop. 

Brilliantly stated.

I agree on the whole layering-concept, layering the scenery from top to bottom and front to back.

I think the narrowness of the shelves that many of us use,  kinda forces the idea of having good looking scenery from the front all the way to the back, because the eye is seeing the entire width of the shelf... And not just the very front that has the track on it.

[TiVoPrince]

Years 
of scenery 'experts' telling us that we must compress miles and miles of distance into the last three inches of layout has not always served us well.  Modern shelf/door layouts have changed our perceptions of the hobby in so many ways but we collectively seem to cling to scenery concepts from the first popular 'fully' sceniced layouts.  John Allen, Linn Wescott and David Barrow did so much with the material of that time we try to reach a standard that we simply don't have the artistic eye to accomplish as mere mortals amongst the gods of scenery.

The lens of time has convinced us that it can be done, so we continue to try again and again without applyng the state of the art methods and materials we use elsewhere.  Materials and techniques have improved, but we concentrate on the foreground and slapdash the background.  Whether it is because we put up the background before our skills improve installing it early.  Or, we rush to add it after the foreground is finished and slapdash it to avoid damaging the hard work done. 

While I personally don't do it well (yet) I'm trying to compress less and use a photographic background to accomplish distance.  Avoiding compression to create a slice of reality for trains to run through and treating the distance 'beyond the benchwork' as a blur that is necessary to imitate reality, but ultimately uninteresting to the viewer.  This would be the David Barrow CM&SF influence on me, making the distant scenery so common and mundane that it hardly registers while moving the eye back to the sharp focused 3D world.  EdK's kidney layout illustrated this well, where a very plain background still registered 'right' because many layers created a 'reality' that we could all understand.

Improvements to photography have made us all slaves to the camera eye.  For me looking 'right' in person is 87% of the goal.  Sharing via photography is nice, but what I really want from a layout is an immersive experience that just happens to photograph nicely...

[cv_acr]

One thing I've found with looking at photos of layouts done with the puff-ball technique is that they don't really look like trees. They're too low to the ground and there's no trucks and underbrush - the puff-ball "forests" end up looking like vast areas of bushes and low underbrush.

[MichaelWinicki]

One thing I've found with looking at photos of layouts done with the puff-ball technique is that they don't really look like trees. They're too low to the ground and there's no trucks and underbrush - the puff-ball "forests" end up looking like vast areas of bushes and low underbrush.

True.

Plus the challenge is the shape.  Way too round.  Trees are angular. 

[MichaelWinicki]

Years 
of scenery 'experts' telling us that we must compress miles and miles of distance into the last three inches of layout has not always served us well.  Modern shelf/door layouts have changed our perceptions of the hobby in so many ways but we collectively seem to cling to scenery concepts from the first popular 'fully' sceniced layouts.  John Allen, Linn Wescott and David Barrow did so much with the material of that time we try to reach a standard that we simply don't have the artistic eye to accomplish as mere mortals amongst the gods of scenery.

Interesting point and certainly some truth there.

But I also think the further away from the track you get, the less interested modelers become in the rest of the scenery.   

There is some artistic "eye" to the whole thing, but there's also the time, effort and money factors that have to be considered.  Many folks simply want to finish off that hill between the track and the backdrop in one evening, and don't want to spend a lot doing it. 

[GaryHinshaw]

It's a tough decision since I have quite a bit of stuff to go either way and like them both!

Ok, stop right there.  You really need to have this question sorted out before you worry about how to make better scenery.  How far along are you in the new build?  Do you have a plan you could share?  Is there any sensible way to do both east & west in two halves of a layout?  This might be hard if you want to have an ops-style pike; easier if it's just roundy-roundy.  Once you have this better defined, you can start honing in on scenery techniques.

May I suggest that you start a thread in the Engineering Reports section? 

-Gary

[chuck geiger]

Puff balls from David Frary were the motif in the 90's and 2000's. With many new scenery materials
available, they have gone the wayside. I recommend making the background scenery impression
on the backdrop and foreground modern scenery methods and products.

[MichaelWinicki]

The foreground trees are a combination of Supertrees along with a few other brands, just so it doesn't look like the same type of tree from one end of the hill to the other.

Beyond the first couple of rows, I use clump foliage and foliage clusters to represent the canopy. 



I think clump foliage and foliage clusters offer a reasonable contrast to puff balls.