Detailing and Weathering Models at Extreme Scales

Hi everyone,


I have a lot of enthusiasm for the prop building and model making scenes but currently lack the time, money, or space to fully engage in this hobby at the capacity I would like. So in the meantime I've been following other peoples' projects and researching techniques and resources. One franchise I'm a huge fan of is Mobile Suit Gundam, and one of the potential projects I would like to do is a scratch-build model of one of it's space colonies: essentially a 20-mile Island Three O'Neill cylinder which is home to millions of people. The model I plan to (eventually) build would be approximately 12" long at 1:10,000 scale, or about 24" long at 1:5,000 scale.


Building a model at such an extreme scale, one of my main concerns is detailing. I recall from discussion in one of the Zvezda Star Destroyer threads that the temptation to weather the kit should be resisted, since at 1:2700, any amount of weathering one would normally expect to see on a starship model would be overdone and exaggerated on a Star Destroyer. That discussion had me thinking since my scratchbuilt project would be at a scale nearly double or quadruple Zvezda's kit. One the one hand, I don't want the end result to be a plain, featureless tube: on the other, I'm aware that even adding millimeter-sized greeblies would represent objects hundreds of meters wide on the surface.


So I would appreciate any advice or insight others could provide, particularly from those who have worked on models at extreme scales such as this. Feel free to idly brainstorm on any similar projects you might have yourself!

I built a 38" Star Destroyer with no weathering at all to avoid killing the sense of scale, the ILM star destroyers had no weathering, the extreme detailed texture was the main sense of scale, on a plain surface might be more difficult to give it the correct sense of scale effect, maybe just very light preshades would be ideal.

GFollano

Paint it like the Death Star. Look for PH's studio scale build for details, but it's basically several different shades of gray and black applied by flicking it off the brush so it forms random patterns of dots. It gives the impression of detail seen from a great distance.

Listen to robn1. I used similar techniques on my recent SD build.

269A0787aa by Oscar Baez Soria, on Flickr

269A0783aa by Oscar Baez Soria, on Flickr

269A0782aa by Oscar Baez Soria, on Flickr

269A0771aa by Oscar Baez Soria, on Flickr