What is perspective?

Before we look at trying to force it, we need to understand what perspective is. Perspective describes how objects appear to the eye in relation to angle and distance. Figure 1 (right) illustrates this concept: the rectangles appear to increasingly distort and reduce in size the closer they get to the vanishing point. What I’m trying to do is force perspective, to fool the eye into perceiving a greater depth than is actually present. This will be achieved with the strategic placement and gradual reduction in scale of objects as they move towards the horizon line - illustrated in Figure 2 (below). In Figure 1, the horizon line appears to sit high above the foreground. To force perspective in model form, this must be replicated. As such, the layout will have to sit on a slope - but will appear flat when viewed directly from the front. This complicates the placement of objects (especially buildings) as you’re unable to model on a flat plain. Refer to Figure 3 (page 72) and look at the pink lines, both the base of the rectangles and the tops of the rectangles point towards the vanishing point. I was tempted to model this distortion on all of my buildings to represent this, but identified two potential problems. Where does one stop? Manually distorting a building that is made up of rectangles and straight edges is one thing, but other elements would prove troublesome. I wouldn’t know where to start with the Sherman tank in the foreground. I’ve no doubt that distorting objects manually would look extremely effective, but only from a very specific viewpoint. Look at the layout from any viewpoint other than head on and the objects will appear wonky and not at all realistic. Choosing to simply reduce the scale of the objects the closer they are to the background won’t look as effective as objects modelled to reflect the distortion of perspective - but I’m still confident that it will look good enough. The advantage, of course, is that the layout can be viewed off- centre, with buildings and objects still appearing properly formed.

FRONT ROW SEATS

When modelling forced perspective you must consider the point from which your audience will view the model. As I’m attempting to increase the depth of my layout, I’ll require any viewers to stand directly in front of the model (the sides will be completely blocked off) otherwise the forced perspective simply won’t work. But audience members will still be able to view the model from anywhere along the baseboard’s 4ft width. So, how do I stop this impacting the effectiveness of the forced perspective, which is

only designed to be viewed head on? The answer is to use view blockers. Paul mentioned the value of view blockers to me, and thankfully they already feature on the track plan. The three buildings in the centre of the layout (Figure 4, below) prevent the viewer from gazing directly across the layout. This reduces the chance of anyone seeing the layout from a viewpoint that would compromise the forced perspective, and also encourages onlookers to move along the layout and enjoy the finer details.