Paper buildings

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 10:16 pm

Some time ago I made some more paper buildings and finally found the time to put them online. You can find them on my Miniatures and Models website under buildings and Arhnem/Nijmegen.

Please let me know if you find any errors or the like.
Enjoy,
Patrick

fredjg · Post by **fredjg** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:41 am

Thank you, Patrick.

The files opened and downloaded without any problems.

Regards,

Fred

BattlerBritain · Post by **BattlerBritain** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 5:02 pm

Gompel - well done!

These are really, really good. Fantastic work.

They must have taken you hours.

They will certainly add to any gaming tabletop.

Many Thanks,

Battler

rct75001 · Post by **rct75001** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 2:14 pm

Thanks Patrick

These are beautiful - and so well done.
Very generoous of you.

Now the obvious question is when the Hartenstein, St Elizabeths and Museum will be done

Richard

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 4:11 pm

Thanks for the replies.
And yes, it takes quite some hours to make those. That's why sharing them makes it worthwhile.

Richard. About Hartenstein... well, that one is on the to do list, but since this is a complex building, it will take the same amount of time to make than like 5 simple buildings.
Check the picture below.

This is a nasty side of the buidling (miniature wise). Either I can make this as a flat piece of paper, or I can make a flat piece for the wall and then the veranda and balcony of little bits of paper and plastic. The first method is easy, but not very nice/realistic. The second will be nice looking but a lot of work to design and again a lot of work to build. Downside is that some people might not have the skill to build it and the result might be rather fragile too.
Any ideas are welcome.

Baphomet69 · Post by **Baphomet69** » Wed Sep 15, 2010 8:18 pm

Awesome website! Thanks for sharing your building files, not to mention your terrain ideas (always good to have new ideas)!

Quartette · Post by **Quartette** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 4:16 pm

Those are pretty epic, especially the church. What is your method for creating the pdfs?

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:10 pm

Haha, thanks.
Well, to put it simple: you make photographs of the sides of a building, you edit them in for example Photoshop to make them straight rectangles and without unwanted stuff like cars, you put all the walls together and scale them to the proper size, then you export them to a pdf.
If more people are interested in a 'how to design paper buildings' tutorial, I might do that some time.

Quartette · Post by **Quartette** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 6:39 pm

The problem I seem to have is with perspective and lens distortion. To be fair, this is only a big problem for tower blocks and large buildings they just seem to come out looking a bit wrong.

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:13 pm

Yes, those are some annoying problems indeed. You don't always have the choise, but most cameras have a certain zoom that has hardly any distortion. Though, most of the time I am to close to the building and have to fully unzoom.
The newer versions of Photoshop make things a lot easier since there's a 'lens correction' filter so you don't have to do this manually anymore. Check those two tutorials:
http://www.khulsey.com/photoshop_tutori ... ction.html
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/ ... n/lens.htm
But sometimes you still have to manually skew/distort the image.

opsctr · Post by **opsctr** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 3:00 am

Gompel, beautiful buildings. Only one thing would make them better...

Color the edge of the paper where it shows.

The white line distracts from the beauty of the miniature, ...in my view.

I realize these models (pictured below) don't come close to yours but the building I forgot to do the edges stands out (middle building of closest row) and distracts from the whole, ...in my view

Again, your buildings are beautiful.

Will

exodusforever · Post by **exodusforever** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:39 am

opsctr, Really great setup and buildings.
Gompel's paper buildings are magnificent. But I do like ur setup of houses and the landscaping.

Hardly looks simple.

Nice work

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 2:40 pm

Thanks for the tip Will, it does indeed make them better.
Though, some of my buildings have kinda grey/white lines on the sides of the roof. In reality that's a painted plank to cover the edge of the roofing tiles so the wind doesn't blow them away. But I must admit it looks more like the white edge of a piece of paper in the above picture.
I've seen that picture before Will, but I still enjoy it. A lot of detail that adds to the small scale. Personally I really like the pedestrian pavement and the weeds/plants that grow under the fence. Almost make me get my garden tools out there!

And the slightly darker color of the lines and some other parts of that pavement on the corner is just perfect. Did you make those tiles yourself? What are they made of? (I miss pedestrian pavement in my scenes)

fullmetaljacket · Post by **fullmetaljacket** » Wed Sep 22, 2010 1:51 am

Hello

Beauitful buildings guys. Gompel one question for you or anyone that has played around with paper buildings before. Can they be enlarged to 25mm or would the distortion be to large and looked to warped? I game in 6mm and 25mm mainly and would love to use some of these buildings on your site for 25mm.

fullmetaljacket

Gompel · Post by **Gompel** » Wed Sep 22, 2010 2:28 am

Hi fullmetaljacket,
the buildings that are on my site are 300dpi. For myself I consider 150 dpi ok for printing and 100dpi as just reasonable. So enlarging to 15mm scale wouldn't be a problem I think, but 6mm to 25mm is en enlargement of over 4x and you will have only 72dpi. That's the same resolution as your screen which is rather low for printing (if you ever did a print screen you will know as you can see the seperate pixels).
But my original files are generally 1000dpi, which would give you very nice detail (you could see every brick and all my little errors).
Though, there's another problem with enlarging 4 times. I standard house in 6mm of 4x3x2.5cm would become about 16x12x10cm in 25mm scale. At this size I think a flat piece of paper for a wall or roof would look rather 'flat'. Although you could have nice details graphic wise, it would still lack real details in depth (like windows, doors, etc.).
But if you like to try: I can sent you a high resolution example any time.