Wallpaper models
Dear Martin (and any other readers having a hard time finding the buildings they need in their neighborhood
Google Earth program should be of interest to anyone wanting to at least see what a building looks like- The program is free and is used to locate interchanges, on-off ramps, roundabouts and such. You can also find what color your friend's house is before you drive there for the first time so you don't knock on the wrong door- if the house doesn't have the number on the door. But what is of interest is that if the building you want is still standing, you can capture its image on your computer.
For example, To look at any given railroad station. Type in the town and you get a sattelite view- move about to find the railroad line. Move along it till you find your station structure. In the toolbar at the top is a tool called RULERS. Select feet, inches or meters as you prefer. Click on one edge of the roof and drag across to the other for a numerical readout that is pretty accurate. Use this to scale all your images using the measurement of the roof including overhang. This is an important step, but it can be done later as well.
In the control panel on the right of the screen is a tiny gold figure. Click on it and begin to drag it towards the station- streets that have been photographed by Google appear in blue. "Land" on the nearest street.
Rotate your view (like moving on the Google Earth map) and it is as if you were standing in the street next to the station. You may even be able to get all four sides of the structure with images from side streets.
Resolution varies considerably and is seldom really good enough, but it is far better than nothing. And with even a reasonable image of a particular door or window, you might be able to get a better image from another structure, but at least you have a good idea of what everything looks like.
As you move about left and right, you can center the station image so it needs little or no perspective adjustment.
Enlarge the image area as big as possible.
Make an "area shot" (on a Mac, this is hitting the keys COMMAND> SHIFT> 4 and you get a cursor. Drag this diagonally across the area you want and you will see a boundry marquee. It shows up in OS 10.6 as "Screen Shot" on the screen with the time. (or something similar in other systems) If you have a photo program like Elements, or others, you can stitch several images together. These appear on your desktop and in the current system are titled SCREEN SHOT (even if you made area shots)
Or make a screen shot which includes the whole screen. On a Mac, the resulting file is called a .png fille and if you click SAVE AS you can save the image as a .jpeg or .tiff file if you wish. Friends who have PCs with Windows do the sme thing and I know it can be done.
If you are lucky, you will get good sharp doors and windows. Doesn't always produce images that are good enough but often it does. sometimes you get a big bus right in your field of view instead of the structure, but that is pretty rare. sometimes the image is blurry or was shot at night. At least you can see what kind of door is there so you can get it off a different structure.
I have built some structures 3000 miles from my location using Google Earth. This is also a way to generate plans for conventional construction- lighten the images and trace them in black, then delete the original image, but that is a whole other story.
Of course, the "right" way to do all this is to take your camera, get on a plane and visit the location right away to take your own photos. This method described is a poor second, but it usually works, costs nothing and won't take long to become proficient.
Google Earth images are copyrighted and should not be used for any commercial purposes. I doubt that the local constable will come knocking at your door if you use this method to put a structure on your model train layout.
I hope this is of help. Congratulations to Lance for his fine article!
Victor Roseman