Now that the tracks are glued and wired, it's probably time to start thinking about the scenery. The first stage is ballasting and track weathering, but I need to do a bit of research on this to decide how to proceed. The second stage is to start drawing the outline of the streets and building and to decide the exact location.
The main issue here to have an outline at the exact scale. Here's my current thinking:
- I got a DXF file from cadastre.gouv.fr
- On that same website, I measure the length of the front of buildings
- I then convert to those dimensions into HO scale
- I build a rough prototype in foam board
DXF file
I found multiple software that can open a DXF file; those include AutoCAD, nanoCAD, or QGIS. The issue is that the DXF file has drawing units, not real measures. Therefore, measuring in the DXF file does not help scaling the outline.
Cadastre
I chose one building: 25 rue des Martyrs that is lot #100 on the cadastral plan:
Autodesk Viewer
As I was doing some research on CAD software, I came across this free tool from Autodesk: Autodesk Viewer. It allows to open DXF file and do basic operations. One of them is to make measures and smartly enough, there is a calibrate function:
House facade
Now that I have the width of the houses, I need the other dimensions. For this task, I will use my own photos, as what you can get from Google Street View is too distorted:
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| Google Street View |
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| My photo |
While the photo is quite good, I still need to fix the perspectives. I was pleased to find this article that explains how to easily do this in Gimp:
- Load the picture in Gimp
- Place 2 vertical and 2 horizontal lines to help framing the perspective:
- Drag from the left or top ruler to get a line
- Place the lines where things should be vertical or horizontal, like doors, windows, and roof cornice
- Use the Perspective tool (Shift+P)
- Drag the corners until things start to align to the reference lines
- Iterate until it aligns nicely
- Select the facade and crop to it
- Use Scale Image or Print Size to scale the image
- Go to cadastre.gouv.fr and measure the width
- Use this HO scale calculator to get the size in miniature
- Print from Gimp to get a scaled print of the facade
Here are all those steps in images:
Other online maps
Besides the cadastral website, I think those two can also be helpful: