"Photo-Realistic Building Kit Release From Sally 4th" Topic

Very interesting – I like this idea.

Interesting solution to the "puzzle pieces" knock some have for MDF buildings.

I wonder how much adding all these details adds to assembly time. Then factor that, plus additional cost of printing, against a basic resin building.

I like that.

Looks awesome.

Definitely looks interesting.

Some look rather AWI-ish.

This was a very fast kit to put together as the shell is made of big chunky pieces. Gluing a texture sheet on a wall is a lot, lot quicker than painting a resin building. I'm going to be making another copy of this kit up tonight to photograph for instructions so I will record how long it takes. The only time consuming activity is tiling the roof, but once again thats personal preference, very quick if you just glue the printed sheet down, but takes a little longer if you cut the strips out and overlap them.

A very clever idea. I wonder how they get around the problem of laser burns?

You do not see any laser burns because the laser cut MDF is covered with photo textures printed on paper. I'm realy convinced this is the best of both worlds, you get the cheapness, strength, rigidity, accuracy of laser cut MDF, without the burnt edges, jigsaw joints or cartoony looks you see in some kits, and you get a stack of choices with free downloads and optional extras to build as basic or as detailed as you prefer.

I understand that this is a sort of "prototype," and it looks pretty good. Hopefully, later versions will have "floor" options, to allow the 2nd Floor to be taken off.

Brilliant!

A very clever idea. Congratulations.

Phil

Chris – thanks for the quick update and feedback.

These look great!!!

This is the start of a range of photo-realistic buildings from Sally 4th. It's not a prototype, it's on our website for sale. If their is a demand from customers who have brought the kit, for an interior we will make an interior kit as an add on for those that want it. The idea is that we often pay for a lot of detail that we don't need, so if you need a street of 20 houses, and the one objective house needs an interior you can just add one to that build.

Can you do custom buildings? Send you a picture of a building and have a kit made for it?

Can you change the color of the walls or say make them brick instead of stone? I have been doing this for a while with mdf buildings, you go to a place like rpg drive thru, purchase what would be a paper model building, print it out and glue it to the mdf building. Looks great.

Total improvement over the featureless expanse of MDF that's swamped the hobby in the last couple of years!

Excellent idea!

10mm and 15mm please!

I am happy to see these sorts of kits coming into play. For years, I made similar ones from Matte board and/or foam core, and used pre-printed photo-realistic sheets like these that I purchased through model railroading stores.

Although it seems a bit tedious and labor-intensive, cutting and overlapping the tiles/shingles isn't near as difficult as one would think, and the results are really nice.

Total improvement over the featureless expanse of MDF that's swamped the hobby in the last couple of years!

Agreed. The German model railroad industry is heavily into lasercut kits, which are far superior in realism to any wargame kit. The kits are the equal of plastic injection molded ones.

The more advanced manufacturers don't use mdf but rigid board e.g. thick card and thin Gatorboard-like foamcore. Rather than having to stick a texture on mdf, the material is pre-colored (e.g. printed in color) and then lasercut.

The kit comes with a choice of three free downloads at the moment to finish the building in either stone, brick or plaster render. If the kit is popular we will produce further variations. We are working on a Pub and corner shop / Post Office which shold be available in the next couple of weeks.

Good idea.

As promised last night, I've put a second pair of houses together to get some timings that you can compare with your experiances of putting together and painting a resin kit of similar size and complexity.

Model Assembly : 8.5 minutes
Cutting out paper textures 55 minutes (including roof tile strips)
Gluing on photo textures including photo windows & doors 45 minutes
Roof tiling 50 minutes (this can be left out if you do not need this detail)
Weathering & Varnishing 10 minutes

… so in total around two and a half hours including roof tiling for the two houses, outbuildings and yard.

If there is sufficient demand, we will add an interior set with rooms, stairs and internal doors, and a front garden add-on.

I wouldn't need a "full" interior with doors, stairs, rooms, etc., but an optional "Floor" set with a 2nd floor panel, and 'riser' strips to glue into the corners to support the floor panel, would be handy. And maybe a hole cut in the middle somewhere, to allow easy removal of the floor panel so you could access the 1st floor of the building.

I'd just want a support that allows a place to put figures at the windows. If I wanted rooms, etc., I could build those from plastic card, or foamboard, as needed.

This verges on solving some problems for me :)

I assume that there's no way to knock these down and store them flat between sessions?

Forgot to mention: a U.S. production partner would make a huge difference. Postage on this runs as much as the set, changing it from, "Wow, that's really affordable to such high quality!" to "I really have to think about this …"

This is really clever. Gets my vote for innovated model product of the month. I would like pieces for just the basic four sided building, without all the out works. Sell the outworks as a separate kit to modify the simple building. Then possible to have three different shaped and textured buildings.

Hi emckinney,

Just checked. This kit weighs 500g so postage to USA will cost £7.45 GBP.

Scale Creep stock Sally 4th products so you can ask them to get it in for you, or club together with some mates to put in an order that qualifies for Free Postage to US (£100).

Bobgnar, will look at making basic building without yard available next week together with simple building dividing wall and first floor and a front walled garden add on.

"If you do not want to print these yourselves, these are available pre-printed on self-adhesive matt photo paper."

This is the key for me. Otherwise it's not much different from the tons of print and play paper buildings out there. So long as this option exists for all the buildings, I'm in!

thank you so much for offering the texture pages for FREE non-the-less too. will really encourage me to get to work on some buildings