Wow check this out

I was cruising the model rail forums the other night, in particular the Model Railroader forums and I came across a thread that had a link to CG Textures.

So after finishing viewing all the forums I trundled over to the textures site and wow what a fantastic find for the modeller railroader.

The site has an incredible collection of images of 35 sub headings. Now some of the headings are completely obscure and useless to the model railroader. The last entry is ‘X rays"’ and this further cascades down another 10 sub headings dealing with all parts of the human body. Now other than maybe having a ghost haunt your layout, this one you can forget.

But get up amongst some of the juicier titles such as ‘Brick/Modern Small/Dirty and then you have over fifty images of various weathered brick just sitting there to be downloaded. Just by simply clicking on the image you want, it then opens a page ready for downloading.

Now when you have all these images, you will need to bring them into a program such as Photoshop or some other image processer. If you are wanting a larger coverage you will need to bring the images together and duplicate.

When you read what the site is all about it seems as if it was just set up for people to freely go in and use what ever’s there. A daily limit of 15MB daily download is also set. When you go into the users gallery you can see how some artistic people have used these images. I can’t imagine any model railroaders submitting much of their work to the gallery.

Now not only is this site set up as a freebie, the site owner has under the heading of ‘Tutorials’ set up heaps of ‘Photoshop’ workshops to help you get better results. I haven’t opened any of these as yet. (I’m not a Photoshop user yet)

One folder I particulary like is the one headed "’Concrete’ Is has 9 sub folders. I have found concrete as one of the hardest colours to replicate. But no need, just download the images and it is already, weathered waiting to be printed out and stuck to your model. Just think how easy it will be do model concrete bridge piers.

Some of the other folders that are useful for the model railroader are: Buildings, Doors, ground, Metal, Roads, Roofing, Rust, Water, Windows and Wood. Most of these have subfolders with some fantastic images.

There are images that while are no good for use being one dimensional such as pipes, they are great reference material for weathering, and knowing how it all fits together.

If you ever wanted to know how to weather timber go to the ‘Wood’ section and under ‘Planks Old’ they have 349 images of old wood. You can use these get an idea on how to weather your own timber or print some off and try gluing it down.

I will be trying some grungy downloaded brick wall to go in front of Bodalla platform when i get around to that area.

I suppose by now you’ve had enough of me raving on about this site so hop over there and spend a day looking and downloading some of the great images.

http://www.cgtextures.com/

So far down the shed today all I have achieved is to saw some timber for the new oil siding at Narooma. Never mind still have all of Sunday to go yet.