Like
many of you, my hobby is model railroading, and like much of
our industry, the upsurge in popularity has brought with it
the need for more and more detail.
My
space for a layout was restricted in size by the walls of
a bedroom in the basement of our home. In an effort to make
the room seem larger, I decided to order just the fronts of
buildings manufactured and sold by O Gauge Railroading Magazine
under the name of AmeriTowne
Buildings. I spent about a hundred hours painting
and detailing these building fronts and attaching them to
a shadow box and anchored them to the wall on one side of
my layout to be used as a faux "Main Street".
The
buildings looked great, but with all those empty windows staring
back at me they lacked personality. I set about to find images
which I could use from magazines to give interior detail,
but found next to nothing. I acquired a digital camera and
started going around taking pictures of interiors of various
building that I wanted to feature in my businesses.
Using
several existing computer programs, I began the project on
just one building front. Getting the picturessized to fit
each window was a task in itself, not to mention getting them
spaced right for the openings in the building fronts. Next
making and adding the signs I wanted in the vent windows about
the main floor windows and doorway, equally challenging. With
about seventeen printouts in an effort to get correct placement
on a single sheet of paper and three and a half hours later,
the result was terrific! But oh, the time and effort. Something
had to be better.
Talking
with my son, Brandon, a computer graphics design artist and
my son-in-law, Stephen, a computer programmer, the decision
was made to see if, with putting our heads together, we could
come up with a program which would allow the same process
to take place with ease, add a few bells and whistles, and
cut the time to do a similar project to just a fraction of
the several hours first used.
The
result after several hundred hours of work and over a period
of about a year was the Software Tangents program called "Window
Works". With several hundred color digital images, an
easy to use ‘drag and drop’ style format, our
hope is that you can use this tool to give life and personality
to your layout as I have to mine.
Sincerely,
Dennis
Jensen
Software Tangents a subsidiary of Car-Tune Shop Inc. |
