What up with that?
I've struggled with rendering scenery for my Lego model railway for quite some time. I was initially going to use a hybrid brick/scenic products approach similar to bricktrix's Corfe Castle layout.
In order to avoid raised eyebrows and the ire of the brick purists, I ambitiously attempted to render all of the scenery using brick elements. It was partly an experiment and partly a challenge to see if it could be done. I am mostly pleased with the results; however it has come at great cost (literally). The brick cost of building scenery is easily underestimated. Here is a rough idea of the cost:
1) Baseplates: my layout has the equivalent of 160x 32 sq baseplates. At retail prices this is around $1200
2) Track ballast: my layout has 100s of pieces of track each with 45 additional parts added to render the ballast and tile sleepers/ties. This amounts to around $1000 just for the 220x straight tracks alone.
3) Scenic brick - I don't have a hard number for this, but the amount of green brick and plate elements to render elevation and scenic texture is easily 4 digits price wise.
4) Foliage - at current prices, building trees is very costly--one 6x5 foliage element is around $0.40 each, a tree requires around 20x at least, so its easily around $10 per complete tree.
If I were to ballast the the track with Woodland Scenics O-scale ballast, I'd probably need 2 or 3 containers of ballast at around $13 each--no more than $50 worth. Compare this to $1000.
Building landforms with carved extruded styrofoam and coating with several Woodland scenics products (nothing complex, just a simple uniform grass texture) would amount to much less than $150. It would also yield much better scenic profiles since the cost of the extruded foam board is trivial and I could use it without the anxiety of running out of bricks to make a simple embankment!
When I came across the photos you see above, I had very mixed feelings. In some ways I felt cheated--having "played by the rules" scenery wise--only to see a scenic display from TLG use a hybrid approach. In other ways I felt liberated--"if TLG can do it this way, so can I!" I have a scale model train background, and I am comfortable with rendering beautiful landscapes using the rich assortment of scenic products available. I am now even more tempted to build using a balanced hybrid approach more than ever--it will cost orders of magnitude less $ and in some ways, I feel it has been quasi-sanctioned by TLG (if its good enough for a discovery centre).
I am curious to hear other views on this topic...
What up with that?
I've struggled with rendering scenery for my Lego model railway for quite some time. I was initially going to use a hybrid brick/scenic products approach similar to bricktrix's Corfe Castle layout.
In order to avoid raised eyebrows and the ire of the brick purists, I ambitiously attempted to render all of the scenery using brick elements. It was partly an experiment and partly a challenge to see if it could be done. I am mostly pleased with the results; however it has come at great cost (literally). The brick cost of building scenery is easily underestimated. Here is a rough idea of the cost:
1) Baseplates: my layout has the equivalent of 160x 32 sq baseplates. At retail prices this is around $1200
2) Track ballast: my layout has 100s of pieces of track each with 45 additional parts added to render the ballast and tile sleepers/ties. This amounts to around $1000 just for the 220x straight tracks alone.
3) Scenic brick - I don't have a hard number for this, but the amount of green brick and plate elements to render elevation and scenic texture is easily 4 digits price wise.
4) Foliage - at current prices, building trees is very costly--one 6x5 foliage element is around $0.40 each, a tree requires around 20x at least, so its easily around $10 per complete tree.
If I were to ballast the the track with Woodland Scenics O-scale ballast, I'd probably need 2 or 3 containers of ballast at around $13 each--no more than $50 worth. Compare this to $1000.
Building landforms with carved extruded styrofoam and coating with several Woodland scenics products (nothing complex, just a simple uniform grass texture) would amount to much less than $150. It would also yield much better scenic profiles since the cost of the extruded foam board is trivial and I could use it without the anxiety of running out of bricks to make a simple embankment!
When I came across the photos you see above, I had very mixed feelings. In some ways I felt cheated--having "played by the rules" scenery wise--only to see a scenic display from TLG use a hybrid approach. In other ways I felt liberated--"if TLG can do it this way, so can I!" I have a scale model train background, and I am comfortable with rendering beautiful landscapes using the rich assortment of scenic products available. I am now even more tempted to build using a balanced hybrid approach more than ever--it will cost orders of magnitude less $ and in some ways, I feel it has been quasi-sanctioned by TLG (if its good enough for a discovery centre).
I am curious to hear other views on this topic...