Food for thought

Not everything this fellow does "works" necessarily, but he does think outside the (model railroader's) box, and there may be some ideas worth harvesting here:

www.behance.net/MatthewAlbanese/frame/366923

David,

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. The effects look so real.

Ed

Some of the natural materials he uses, such as ground parsley and probably the other spices, will lose colour over time when exposed to light. His work is definitely food for thought

So, who among us will be the first to duplicate his fire effect on their layout?

Not me. Too many trees on the Northern Division. The whole house would go up. Cheers, Jim CCRR:ohmy:

Jim,
I've given some thought about some lighting effects for my burnt area on my end module.
Even a little bit of smoke is possible, but not sure how realistic it would look.

Just one of many projects I wish I had time to work on...............

tealplanes wrote:

Jim,
I've given some thought about some lighting effects for my burnt area on my end module.
Even a little bit of smoke is possible, but not sure how realistic it would look.

Just one of many projects I wish I had time to work on...............

Like water, smoke is an effect that unfortunately does not "scale." This is why model locos with smoke generators tend to look like toys.

That said, unlike water, there are many different kinds of smoke. The billowing clouds of steam from a chuffing locomotive is impossible to simulate, but the lingering smoke of an extinguished forest fire just might be doable. Many moons ago when I worked in commercial photography (before the days of PhotoShop), I learned a lot of tricks. It's a funny industry: virtually everything was faked. To name a few, ice was plastic, ice cream was mashed potatoes, and coffee having cream poured in was molasses and Elmer's glue--I kid you not. We needed to use tricks like these because studio photography literally takes hours, so cold things like ice and ice cream would melt, and hot things would quickly become cold. Anyway, there was a special effect used to simulate steam rising from freshly-cooked food.

I need to do a little research to find out how some of these smoke effects were created. To quote, I'll be back.

I once helped my photographer-brother (he's no longer being paid as a photographer, but he's still my brother ) photograph several different foods, including asparagus. To make it look "right", he sprayed (misted) it with corn syrup. In his words, "once I've shot it, you generally don't want to eat it".

Perhaps the (metaphoric) fruit doesn't fall far from the tree: our late father was a newspaper photographer for better than 40 years (WWII until near the end of the Reagan Administration). One of his specialties was photographing food (and he enjoyed eating, too! that's where I take after Dad ) for the 'home' section of the paper: shots of salmon, peach ice cream - shot in an ice cream churn in front of a dairy farm - and pasta come to mind. I hate to think of what he did to each to make them look so good! Come to think of it, though, we ate the salmon. The recipe was a family tradition for many years.

Mike

Well Mike, maybe that is why it is often more safe to eat your own cooking?
Dave, I am going to experiment a little with some smoke effects. I've toyed with the idea of a little dry ice under the module with some sort of blower to allow a little to 'ooze' through the porous forest floor, but there are draw backs to that idea as well as real smoke which would stink. In my RC model boating days, I made a smoke generator, but that involves current and some heat and the idea of heat under a wooden layout frame is not particularly sensible, no? It doesn't hurt to experiment and of course, knowing me you can bet I would not model it if it looked hokey.

Loren

Here's the [url=http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fcreativ-modellbau-spurz.npage.de%2F&sl=de&tl=en
]English translation of Creativ-Modellbau[/url] website. Choose "Fire" from the left menu for a look at how smoke can be depicted. There are also German fire fighters shown.