| | | Model Railroad News Review of Model Builder Software
| Reprinted from Model Railroad News ,Volume 13, Issue 10, October 2007, Page 75-80.
This review has been published to this web site with permission of LampLight Publishing, publishers of Model Railroad News.
Copyright © 2007 LampLight Publishing
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Structure Design
using Model Builder,
a software package
for Windows
Review and Images by Phil Scandura
Model Builder Software (Windows
2000, ME, XP, Vista)
MSRP: $45.00
Evan Designs
P.O. Box 2044 • Broomfield, CO 80038
303-410-1118
www.modeltrainsoftware.com
Structures for model railroads
come in many forms: readybuilt,
plastic kits, wood kits, resin
castings, etc. They are used in various
ways — as part of the foreground scenery,
as a centerpiece in a special scene, as
trackside industries, or as background
scenery. Depending upon the structure’s
location and the amount of viewing
attention it will receive, you may spend
weeks building a craftsman kit board-byboard,
or you may glue a simple plastic
kit together in a matter of hours and call
it “good enough.”
Sometimes all you need are temporary
structures, something you can place
on the layout as an experiment in constructing
a scene, or to represent where
a “real” structure will be once you get
around to building it. Often these temporary
structures are built of cardboard
and covered with photocopies of what
the eventual structure will look like.
I’ve built several, slowly replacing each
with the intended structure over time.
There have been cases, however, when I
wanted to leave the temporary structure
in place permanently, but couldn’t do
so because it didn’t look very convincing.
Now with the latest software design
package from Evan Designs you have
the ability to create realistic looking
structures for use in background scenery,
or as placeholders for future structures.
The product is Model Builder and it
allows you to combine bricks, shingles,
siding, roofing, windows, doors, trim,
and more to create building sides or
backdrops. Once your building sides
are designed, creating the structure is
a simple matter of printing on a color
printer, trimming around the edges with
scissors or a modeling knife, and gluing
the paper to a cardboard shell.
As shown in the screen capture of the
start-up screen, Model Builder supports
all modeling scales, including 1:24, 1:32,
1:48, 1:64, 1:76, 1:87, 1:160, 1:220, as
well as numerous metric scales. In fact,
it would be more correct to state that
Model Builder supports “any” scale between
1:10 and 1:500, since in addition
to the scales listed above you can also
enter your own choice in the “other” box
when starting the program.
Installation Requirements
Model Builder runs on all of the
newer Microsoft Windows platforms
including 2000, ME, XP (Home and
Professional), and the most recent
Windows operating system, Vista. For
those still running Windows 95 or 98,
you’ll need to upgrade that old computer
first. Minimum system requirements
include an 850MHz processor,
250MB RAM and 200MB of available
hard disk (in actuality, the program
consumes closer to 220MB of hard disk
space). Model Builder is supplied on
a CD-ROM, which includes a typical
Windows installation wizard.
For this review, Model Railroad News
tested Version 1.4.1 of Model Builder
on a Dell Latitude D610 Laptop, with
a 1.86GHz Pentium M processor and
512MB RAM running Windows XP
Professional. Even though this is twice
the recommended minimums for Model
Builder, the video-intensive nature of
the program still taxed the system during
screen zoom and redraw operations.
The program has a slight learning
curve, easily overcome by a quick read
of the brief user’s manual, as well as
working through one or two of the simple projects in the Model Builder
Project Ideas book. It contains five
fun projects, including a Quonset Hut,
Backdrop Building Flat, Industrial
Shed, Service Station, and Industrial
Building. These project ideas are the
closest that Model Builder comes to
providing a tutorial; while they don’t
quite lead you by the nose through the
program, they do a pretty good job
of hitting the key features. The one
formalized tutorial that is provided can
be found under the Help Menu called
“Modeling Help” - not “Building Help”
as mentioned in the User’s Guide. This
tutorial, however, doesn’t teach you to
use the program; rather it teaches how
to assemble a building using Model
Builder printouts and includes a discussion
about the tools you’ll need.
In general, Model Builder has followed
most of the typical Windows
conventions, giving it the classic look
and feel of Windows software. Model
Builder does not provide a traditional
Window’s help file system, instead it
provides an Adobe PDF reader function
that opens up a searchable version
of the User’s Guide and Project Ideas
book that are also provided in printed
form in the CD-ROM case.
Evan Designs provides a money-back
policy on Model Builder (and their
other programs); if you’re not satisfied
you can return it for full refund of the
purchase price within two weeks of
delivery. In addition, registered users
of Model Builder receive free software
updates for one year. See their web site
for more details.
One last point regarding installation;
be sure to review the license agreement
displayed during the installation
process. It is important to note the
third clause which reads, “3. Artwork
Copyright. The ArtWork and images
contained in the software is the copyright
of Evan Designs. This license restricts
you from profiting from the resale of the
artwork or images for profit.”
Using Model Builder
Model Builder includes an extensive
collection of siding materials (e.g., brickwork,
wood siding, corrugated metal,
shingles, etc.), windows, doors, shutters,
cornices, trim, stairs, trees, utilities, and
more. Each and every one of these is a
photographic image of the actual thing,
not clip art. The staff at Evan Designs
spent countless hours photographing,
trimming, and cropping to create these
digital images. Once added to your
building design, the result is a remarkable
likeness of the prototype.
After you choose a material or object
and place it on the drawing, Model
Builder provides two main tools for image
manipulation. The first is the crop/
paint tool that removes or adds material
to the image as you change its size
without changing the scale of the material.
For example, if you want to make a
particular brick pattern wider or longer,
this tool adds more bricks in the chosen
scale, rather than enlarging or stretching
the bricks. The second tool provides
the ability to stretch the material
or object, changing the appearance as it
does so. For example, stretching a four pane
window object would increase the
size of the windowpanes, rather than
adding more panes to the window (for
that you would use the crop/paint tool).
You can also design your own brickwork
or siding using the designer tools
and adding them to your palette of
materials to choose from.
To pull this discussion all together,
refer to the photo essay for a quick tour
using Model Builder to create a building
flat in HO scale.
Opportunities for
Improvement
Being a seasoned computer user of
many years, I tend to find the quirks
and bugs that lurk behind the covers of
commercial software packages, which
is probably why Model Railroad News
sends the majority of software product
reviews my way. In the case of Model
Builder I noted a few that should be
addressed in the next available release.
None of them are major problems;
they tend to fall in the “inconvenience”
category. I’ve listed them here in no
particular order:
Values in the Material Dimensions
box (i.e., object size and position)
tend to blank out after editing a
value, even though the object remains
selected. In order to make the
values visible you have to reselect
the object by clicking on it again.
When checked, the “Maintain
Aspect Ratio” check box in the
Material Dimensions box allows
the user to drag the drawing
handles on an object to change its
size while maintaining a consistent
length to width relationship. This
only works, however, when dragging
the handles on the right side
of the object. When you drag the
handles on the left side the aspect
ratio isn’t maintained, i.e., you can
resize the object any way you want.
Or didn’t want. {this has been repaired V1.4.1}
When zooming between views
there is a noticeable delay while the
redraw occurs. During this time
the drawing appears to be “messed
up” as pieces and parts are scattered
about the screen. It’s quite
disconcerting at first, especially
since the Model Builder doesn’t
display an hourglass or other indication
that work is happening in
the background; it just looks wrong
and then recovers after several
seconds. While this is related to
the horsepower of your computer
and video card performance, it
would be nice if the program let
you know it was busy doing the
zoom and wasn’t finished yet. After
using the program for several days
I eventually persuaded myself to
be a bit more patient and gave it
time to settle out. [Editor’s Note:
This type of problem can occur when
using graphics-intensive software on
Windows-compatible PCs that use
shared memory between the video
card and system or have insufficient
video RAM. This is common in
laptops and budget-priced systems
designed for home use. Evan Designs
does not list a recommended graphics
component, but this software will
probably perform best on a PC with
64MB or more of dedicated video
RAM. As with all software, MRN
suggests you check your system’s
specifications.]
Model Builder doesn’t consistently
display the filename of drawing
being edited. The typical
Windows convention is to display
the filename in the title bar
of the active window; I noticed
that sometimes while editing the
filename was displayed and other
times not.
Model Builder includes a single level
Undo command, but it only
applies to image manipulation (e.g.,
move, stretch, copy, and paint). It
doesn’t work on other actions such
as Bring to Front/Send to Back.
Because of this, if you try to undo
an action that isn’t covered, the
program seems to perform the
Undo on the last action that it
can undo. This results in drawing
changes that you didn’t expect.
The good news is if you catch the
errant change right away, you can
use the Redo command to put it
right again.
Depending upon the complexity
of the drawing, the Print Preview
function doesn’t always show all of
the building objects, e.g., sometimes
no windows or doors are
shown. Fortunately everything is
there when the building is actually
printed out.
Model Builder allows you to choose
the type of display units used by
the screen rulers. Using the Units
menu you can choose from Actual
Inches, Actual Feet, and Actual
Meters at any time. You can also
set the default display units for the
program using the File/Program
Setting menu, however, Actual
Inches is supported on that menu
only. Furthermore, the units chosen
for a particular drawing don’t seem
to be saved with the drawing file;
the program chooses the default instead.
So if you’ve chosen to work in
Actual Feet you have to deliberately
select that setting every time you
open a drawing file, as the program
has reset you back to Actual Inches.
The problem also surfaces on the
File/Project/Page Setup menu, as
it often displays the incorrect units
setting (e.g., if the drawing is set
to Actual Feet the page setup menu
shows Metric). The printed manual
also neglects to mention these other
unit systems, suggesting to me that
there was a change made in a previous
version to add this functionality,
but that change was not uniformly
applied throughout the software.
Next we add a cornice by choosing a slightly different brick pattern and stretching it. Edge trim has also
been added using an image from the Model Builder image palette. Just a note, we could have chosen a
cornice from the images but instead decided to create our own simple one instead.
One last quirk, possibly related
to video card performance, is
that the granularity of the scroll
bars seems to be quite coarse; as
you scroll through the drawing
it jumps rather than scrolling
smoothly.
Suggested Design
Enhancements
Aside from bugs, the following are
items I’d like to see added in future
revisions either to enhance the usability
of the program or to bring it more in
line with other programs of this class.
Model Builder doesn’t include the
ability to define a default drawing
folder; it always defaults to “My
Documents” and you have to navigate
from there. As a work-around
I tried setting the “Start In” field
of the Windows Properties menu
for the program shortcut, but that
didn’t work either. In a similar
fashion, if you double-click on a
drawing file in Windows Explorer
it successfully starts Model Builder
but does not actually open the
drawing file; instead you get the
start-up splash screen as if you
double-clicked on the program
shortcut. In my opinion these are
both desirable enhancements and
supported by most all Windows
programs.
I’d like to have the ability to add/
edit text to my drawings. This
could default to the fonts already
available on the computer, as well
as additional fonts that could be
supplied with the program. In this
way you could create your own
simple signs for buildings, or add
assembly notes to your building
plans.
Finally, I miss not being able to
“nudge” selected objects using the
arrow keys. Many of the other
drawing programs that I work with
let you select an object and move it
around the screen using the arrows
(as well as the mouse, of course).
More than once I found myself
trying to nudge an object only to
end up opening a different drawing
palette instead.
Closing Thoughts
Model Builder provides an easy way
to create realistic custom structures for
your layout, using nothing more than
a computer, paper, cardboard backing,
and some glue. Despite the quirks and
suggested improvements noted, Model
Builder works reasonably well. I consider
Model Builder to be a welcome
addition to my structure scratch-building
toolbox. For more information on
Model Builder, visit the Evan Designs
web site. There you’ll also find the
Modeler’s Toolkit, reviewed in the
October 2005 issue of Model Railroad
News. With it you can create signs, billboards,
window trim, and many other
details for your layout.
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