Model Builder Community

HI All,

I have been having entirely too much fun with the software, my hat is off to you for creating such a great program. I do have one question though. I have been looking to see if I could get the software to shrink the materials like roofing down to the angled lines required rather than just printing out enough material to fulfill the requirements and then cutting it out free hand. This also pertains to the tops of the ends of building panels that have a peaked top to accomodate a sloped roof. I don't know if I am being clear, so here is another way of stating it.

Once you have the shape you want, say an angle, how do you go about fitting the material to fill just that area from base to peak without having it over hang the angles above the sloping sides of the roof?

I noticed this when I went to take a try at the filling station model you have as a pattern in the building plans. It is a nifty way that you have it opened up to be folded into the shape required, but manipulating the panels of shingles to keep their patterns with in those various angled shapes eludes me. It also occured to me when making a four sided pyramid type roof for a switch tower. I got around this by just laying out four equal sized roof angled shapes in line form then making four rectangular patterns that would fill all of each completely to cut out to keep the shingle patterns oriented the correct way.

Jay
teadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV

Hi Jay
thanks, glad you are enjoying the software!
In Paper Tools, there is a "filled" triangle that has it's outside edges set to white, and a simple outline triangle. Have you tried both of them? The filled one has the effect of chopping off excess material for you. Also there is a filled white square that you can put on top of any material you do not need. This may be what you want. Buzzy2377's New England salt box uses paper tools, try downloading that and see what you think.
I hope SRVRon has time to upload a file or two soon, he makes a lot of use of paper tools in his projects (hint hint Ron )

I had a look at the filling station, the only way to fill roof area without hand-cutting would be to have rotate and angled crop.
Rotate is on our wish-list already. Angled crop is a huge step more complicated, possibly rotate would be enough to get the desired effect without needing angled crop!

Thanks Evan and/or Shelly,

I was wondering about what that triangle with the white edges was about, just hadn't gotten the courage to give it a shot yet. I will have to experiment around and see how it goes.

I can understand about the rotate and angled crop, so I will just be patient and amuse myself with all the excellent features that the software does have.

As I said, I am having a blast with it and can hardly wait for some ink jet decal paper to arrive so I can get busy with weathering and graffiti embelisihing some of my RR Rolling Stock. The weathering part I pretty well have covered, it was trying to do the graffiti that was giving me fits, now with your software plug in, it is just as easy as the rest of it.

Jay
treadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV

Been a busy summer with outside work and the PRR route add on for MSTS.

My detailed work is based on Model Builder, but, because the finished product has been highly modified through PSP, they cannot be reloaded into Model Builder. Evande has several of those models on file in ready to print jpg format.

When I get some time later this fall, I will work some less complex models that can be loaded in Model Builder and get them uploaded.

The paper tools are very useful for cropping roof lines for gable walls and creating tabs for gluing. Once a rotate tool is perfected, it will open up making available many more of my models for upload into Model Builder.