Cardstock Model: Office Building Westby, Wisconsin

 

Back in 2004 my wife and I stayed at a B&B in Westby, Wisconsin.  On the main street was a small office building that caught my eye.  I took a snap with the thought of making a card-stock model of it.  Sixteen later, here it is.  Someday I'll update it with textures for color printing.  I left photos the PDF file of the building itself and the steps I took to create the model.  The N-scale PDF file can be found here.

Cardstock Model: House I grew Up In

 Most have fond memories of the house they grew up in.  My house was warm, loving, and always there.  I made a very rough model of my house from some photos and memories...somewhat stylized.  It's simple and will someday make a better one.

You can download a PDF of the model here.  

Old Chateau Theater of Rochester MN to SVG - Part II

Dimensions & Math

The best I can estimate is that the old Chateau Theater in Rochester, MN is about 70' wide and 165' deep:

For Inkscape, I'm using a standard 8.5"x11" canvas.  I'm using metric units.  I created a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs to determine the size in mm that the SVG elements need to be when creating the file:

num of feet	inches in foot	scale	scale inch/foot	scale mm/foot
1	12	160	0.075	1.905

Here's some various angles from satellite.  In addition to the marquee, there will be some angles to deal with such as the slope on the wall/roof where the window dormers are in front.  I may just do flat surfaces at the beginning, and then in subsequent revisions add more detail.

Old Chateau Theater of Rochester MN to SVG - Part I

Now that winter is fast approaching, I find myself getting back to some of my previous interests... such as wanting to make SVG models of interesting buildings in Rochester, MN.  The idea being to have a PDF that can be printed out on card stock, cut, and glued.   

Just below is the original photo I took looked like (f/10.0, 16mm, ISO100, 1/100sec).  Note all the distortion.  I had to use a wide angle lens.  Using Pixlr Editor (not the Express or O-Matic versions), I was able to use "Edit->Free Distort" and straighten it out as you see above.

I did a very rough/quick prototype in Inkscape of the front.  There's a lot of detail to model and I'll need to get the sizes/proportions done properly.

Aerial shot of the theater.  I think using Google maps I can get a direct above satellite photo to determine the outer dimensions of the building.  Once I have that I can then look at the proportions and figure out exact sizes/dimensions of the model.  I'll have to spend some time tinkering around with the entrance way and fitting up an accurate marquee.

What this is for...

Hi. The goal of this blog is to act as a repository for paper model PDF files that I make of homes and buildings in Rochester, Minnesota...for my N-scale layout I hope to make of it. I plan to try and follow the T-TRAK modular standard.