Much improved from first release, but still not ready for Prime Time
By Craig Bisgeier
I was recently notified of an upgrage to Evan Designs' Model Builder program, which I had previously reviewed here. Hoping they had improved things over the earlier version (reviewed immediately below this article, scroll down), I downloaded and installed it. After playing around with it and trying to design a couple of simple buildings with it, I can report that the new version (1.3.6) is definitely an improvement over the original as-purchased software, but there are still a number of frustrating issues with the program. They have moved in the right direction, I would say, but not far enough yet to charge real money for it. Not yet.
Right off the bat, I can see they have made a lot of progress on the worst problem from the old version, frequent run-time errors (which crash the program and cause you to lose all unsaved data). They are not all gone, but the software is much less frustrating to use now. I still recommend backing up your project file every second or third operation, as you still never know when something will happen that breaks the program. At least it is now possible to make a dozen or two additions / changes - usually - without the program dying.
I still believe that if you are going to charge real money for software there should not be ANY unhandled errors that crash the program. That's the sign of an ametuer programmer, and of little to no testing before going to market. It is a minimum requirement in my book that the program should WORK, and Model Builder still isn't there yet.
As a test, I started off trying to make a sample wall for an N-scale structure I'm working on for a friend of a large zinc mine in NJ. Essentially it is a brick-curtain style of building with a metal frame, large multi-light windows and brick inserts below them.
Model builder has a brick designer feature, which allowed me to select a similar color to the prototype's blocks, and even let me select a stack bond for the bricks (one over the next) and choose a square pattern that resembled the blocks used in the walls. I chose to let the program fill the page with this pattern, which worked well. This is definitely a strength of the program. So now I had a page full of bricks to overlay the other building elements onto.
I still find it annoying that there are no tools that allow you to make an outline of the wall sections of the building you want to make. There is now a tool allowing you to import a line drawing in Windows MetaFile format which will allow you to overlay the line drawing on the drawing window, but I have not tried it yet.
I selected a window style from the supplied examples which wasn't exactly right but would work for testing. I clicked on the menu item to select it, then clicked on the drawing window to place it. Apparently drag and drop options still haven't been programmed into the software. It's also still frustrating that the copy command appears when you right-click an image or part, but not the paste command. Why isn't the paste command there? This is still a silly and easy to correct problem IMO, and frustrates me that I have to go to the menu bar over and over again to click several times and paste a image object.
Still, the copy and paste commands do work, and I was able to draw about a half dozen window images onto the drawing window. I tried to size them identically but had some trouble with this, it seems if you try to resize an image using the top and left handles it will end up changing the size and positioning of the right and bottom sides. I learned quickly to place the upper left corner where I wanted it and to adjust only the right and bottom edges. Right-clicking and selecting the Properties option gives you a nice window that describes the currently selected image and allows you to make some changes to it.
The building I'm modeling had a metal frame structure so I wanted to draw that in, separating the windows and bricks. I wanted to use a rusty metallic image and there was a useful one I found in the metals section. A little too orange for my tase, but at least there was something I could use among all the corrugated metal options (too many IMO and not enough others). I selected and dropped these on my drawing, and resized them to thin and tall images and short and wide inages to appear as the steel girders framing the window and brick sections. The started looking all right, I was pleased so far. I decided to print off a copy to see what it looked like on paper.
Well I should have taken my own advice, I for got to save the project and the program crashed on the print command. It took about 10-15 minutes to rebuild the drawing and save it back to where I was before. This time the program printed the project well, and the results looked good.
The next day I went back into Model Builder to work on the drawing some more and got a rude surprise. The brick designer apparently failed to save the brick size properly in my drawing, and I had to go in and redefine the brick size back to where it had been before. Except I didn't know what the previous dimensions were, exactly. It took 20 minutes to get reasonably close to where I'd been before, and still it wasn't a very good match. I spent another 15-20 minutes resizing all the image objects so they lined up with the brick mortar lines again.
So 45 minutes later again I was back to where I'd been (mostly) the night before when I saved the document. I saved it again, closed the program and reopened it, only to find that the brick designer once again screwed up the size and proportion of the bricks. So you absolutely cannot count on the designers to maintain the image as you see it once the program is closed and reopened. This is a big problem for me because I want my windows and windowsills and lintels to match up properly with the bricks, and if I can line them up precisely it's a pain in the program can't recreate the image exactly as I saved it.
Next, I saw that the program now includes a feature that I was told about when I bought it but wasn't delivered in the original version, the ability to import an image into your drawing. This should be a great feature, assuming you have photos of a structure or architectural feature or sign you want to use. I tried it out by selecting a JPEG image of a rusty sheet of metal. Big rude surprise #2, as soon as I got the image into my picture I lost the brick background made by the Brick Designer! Apparently it doesn't co-exist with imported images very well. You can bring it back by going into the material designer again and clicking the Return to design screen button, after which you'll get quite a flicker show as the program attempts to re-draw the background. This lasts several minutes during which it's impossible to do any work.
I also noted that imported images only work in 'stretch' mode, not crop/paint mode, but that's not surprising. Stretch mode lets you play with the aspect ratio of an image, making it taller / shorter / narrower / wider than the original. Crop/paint mode will actually make the image repeat as you pull the handles on it out, so a single window can be multipled into two, three or more by just making the image wider (or taller). This is a useful feature in the program. It would be nice if imported images could work this way too but I'm not going to fault these guys for that.
Another big problem for me is that the screen zoom feature changes the sizes of the image objects on the drawing window, but not the background generated by the material designer. This is really unacceptable in my view. It also appears to affect the printed image depending on the screen resolution selected when the image is printed, but I need to look at that further to be sure.
In the end, the new software relase is significantly better than the original version I bought, but still has quite a ways to go before I'll say it is reliable and gives repeatable results, and is worth the asking price. I originally wrote that it was not worthy of shareware status, let alone $50. But I now think a fair price would be more like $20 considering the functionality. It needs a wider range of possible materials / objects to select from; doors, windows, sidings, metals, etc. need to be added to make the program more versatile than it is. I'd like to be able to adjust the color of the images, but that's probably too much to ask.
The designers need to be tighened up so they can render the backgrounds more accurately, and they need to be re-rendered when the screen resolution changes of how are you to know if the brick size is set properly?
Maybe I'm being too critical with all of this. If you intend to use the buildings you create with this as background or temporary stand-in buildings perhaps such precision isn't necessary. As I said for $20 I would be satisfied with the results. But for $50 of my hard earned money I expect to be able to make a building I can place in the foreground and have it stand up to the two-foot away test, at least for a few moments. The frustrating thing is that I think the software is nearly there, but there are frustrating problems that degrade the image if you save or manipulate it. If these problems can be corrected it has real potential.
The Original review can be read below:
I found what promised to be a useful computer program at the NMRA National Convention in Philadelphia this year, Model Builder Software from Evan Designs. Their website is www.modeltrainsoftware.com. Model Builder Software is a program that lets you design and make realistic buildings by selecting photographic elements like Brick, siding, windows and doors and ‘paint’ them onto a screen, which can them be printed on a color printer, glued to a cardboard or foamcore base and placed on your layout. I bought the program for $45 at the convention. Sounds like a great idea to populate a layout with decent-looking background or mockup structures, but the program has a lot of issues. Read on.
First of all there are very minimal directions included, which makes the program difficult to use. It does not always follow standard editing conventions, which would have helped male it more intuitive. That said, after a little adjustment the interface works adequately. There is no undo function which makes correcting mistakes like deleting an object difficult to fix. And instead of standard copy and paste functions, you get a function called Duplicate which combines the two.
After some fumbling around, I figured out how to define the size of a wall I wanted to draw. The program includes a siding and brick wizard, which fills the entire window, even past the limits you set, which makes it useless. Compounding that, the background does not appear to print out, which makes it doubly useless. There may be a way to make that happen, but without instructions I could not figure it out.
Fortunately there are a selection of photos of brick and siding textures you can choose from and drop onto the drawing. If you select / highlight the object and change the size of the object using the top / side / width / length input boxes, it will enlarge the image (and repeat it) to fill the size you indicate. In fact this was the only way to define a wall segment that I could find. There are no ‘line drawing’ features in the program that I could locate. This function actually works pretty well. Other objects like windows and doors can be similarly resized, even with square handles that pop up when the object is selected
But another problem is that the palette of selectable textures and window / door objects is very limited. This makes it really hard to match a particular style of construction, assuming you are trying to match a real structure. When I bought the program I was told I’d be able to import existing pictures of doors, windows and textures and use them within the program, but it appears that was not true. This was a major feature that sold me on the program, and I was very unhappy to find it was not true. The images are stored in proprietary DLL files that are not editable. It’s possible there may be a way within the program, but without instructions again I am not able to find it.
With all these problems I was able, eventually, to construct all the walls of a square building, print them out and assemble them. However, it took hours to learn to use the program well enough to do this, each wall had to be saved as a separate file which made editing all the drawings very difficult, and finally the worst problem – about every ten to twenty operations the program would randomly cause a run-time error, which would crash the program in the middle of whatever you were doing. It’s fortunate the program automatically checks for a drawing that was open when the program crashed and opens it, but that’s a band-aid on a much more serious programming problem. These run-time errors render the program nearly unusable if only because of the frustration factor.
But we are not through yet. Sometimes after printing or saving a drawing the program will randomly move objects about on the drawing, or drop out the background texture for no apparent reason. It seems that closing the program without saving the drawing and re-opening it corrects this, but it should not happen at all. Both of these issues are due to poor programming and are correctable, and in my opinion should have been fixed before this program was released and sold for good money.
Since I already own it and have spent the time to learn to work within all the frustrating aspects of this program, I will continue to use it with some frustration. But I have to tell anyone who is considering buying this program to stay away, and do not waste your money. If this program were shareware or less than $10 to purchase, I would be a lot less hard on it – but at $45 it should not experience random and frequent run-time errors or re-arrange objects on your drawing.
If the authors fix the problems and re-issue the program (I believe I should be given an updated copy without charge when that happens as an apology for all the problems) with better reliability, and stop promoting features that are not available, I will be happy to review the program again.