Creating a 3D 1:48 scale Model of Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning" Painting

[mmarcovitch]

I may have alluded to this project in my other threads, but it deserves its own thread. I have two other Edward Hopper-themed buildings on my O’scale model train layout. The first was installing his “Nighthawks” painting into a corner bar.

This model was created mostly old school with embossed brick paper, and al lot of hand crafting. it was my first laser cut project with the delicate bar stools cut by an outside vendor.

The second, Edward Hopper’s “House by the Railroad”, was well into my “3D Printing Adventure” with all the architectural details designed and 3D printed by me and the walls laser cut by an outside vendor.

Both of these building are uploaded into the 3D Warehouse.

My current project is a modified verison of Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning”, purported to be a block of stores in lower Manhattan. This building is going to be 90% 3D printed. I’ve designed and re-designed how the brickwork is going to be done and narrowed the width somewhat to fit into the spot in my railroad village. Like the others, I’ve uploaded this building a few times as I keep making changes to it.

Now i come to the dilemma… When I upgraded to MAC OS Version Tahoe 26, I no longer can convert complex drawings to STLs. No STLs = No print files. My MacBook Pro 2019 no longer has the horsepower to do what I’m asking it to do, but I don’t have the resources to upgrade to a +$3,000.00 MacBook Pro 2026 at this time.

Here’s my request. Is there anyone out there who would be willing to take the SKP files and convert them to STLs for me? This is a stopgap approach. The real answer is getting a new computer.

I thought it might be the newly upgraded SU from version 2025 to 2026, but I reloaded the older version and the problem persisted. It’s not that it converts nothing, it just converts little bits of the entire file. When I say, little bits, I mean things such as window frames and five bricks leaving the rest behind.

This problem is a mess for me. I have another naval project I’m starting and not being able to convert files is a show stopper.

[bmike]

Why do you need to get a new computer? Do you use TimeMachine? Can you roll back your OS? If you were to buy a new Mac today it would come pre-installed with Tahoe - so if that is causing the issue you would still be out of luck

If you send me a direct message with a DropBox location for your file I can give a it try. I am still on Sequoia running 26.

[mmarcovitch]

Backdating to Sequoia requires erasing the hard drive and starting from scratch. It can’t be overlaid over the newer OS. I’m not going to do that. It may not just be Tahoe, but a combination of the weaker PC and Tahoe. Other SU users have Tahoe and don’t have this problem.

Let me send you one file as a test. Send me a DM with you eMail address and I’ll send it via Drop Box.

I’ve reached the point where a new computer is not debateable.

[bmike]

If you have TimeMachine, yes it is a PITA but you have your work backed up, but I understand not wanting to deal with it.

Will send a message.

[RTCool]

You can also get a good external SSD, restore your system to that and boot from that when you want the old system, and then reboot from the new one when you need that one.

[franciscofiallosb]

I love Edward Hopper’s job. Definitely my favorite new American realism movement painter.

[mmarcovitch]

Time for an update. First of all, I love Edward Hopper too and he is my favorite American Realism/impressionism artist.

Somehow several things aligned properly to get me over the STL-Conversion-dilemma. The first was redrawing all of the wall sections ensuring that they were fully solid and refining the brick laying technique. I grouped the wall substrate, laid out a section of guidelines where the bricks were 8"L and 3"H with the horizontal mortar space at 3/4" and vertical space at 5/8. Didn’t have to grid the entire wall. Copy/pasted the bricks in ever-enlarging groups until the wall was covered. I then went back and deleted brick over window and door openning.

Here’s the sequence. To ensure that the bricks meet nicely at the corners, I’m beveling the adjoining corner walls so the bricks meet at the corners. In the sequence you can see that I’m extending the bricks a scale 5/8" at the corner. I will hand sand the tiny brick extensions to give them the same 45º bevel. I understand that another way to accomplish this is to bevel the bricks in SU. I’ve done that in the past, but it means making the corner bricks “Unique” since all the bricks are a component, and it’s a bit finicky to do that tiny bevel. It will take just a few seconds to knock off the corners of the protruding bricks. There’s no rule that you have to 3D print everything.

Extruding one brick to the 5/8" reveal extrudes them all.

This view shows the bevel and scaling the bricks to all extend 5/8" past the corner.

After scaling:

And from the front.

Doing it this way, everything came out solid and the STL conversion worked well.

I noticed that the STL viewer did not showing a complete object, and yet when opened in the slicer, the complete object was there perfectly. Could be my troubles have been with the viewer misinterpreting the drawings and not the drawings themselves? For example: when I exported one of the walls, only the cornice showed in the viewer. I decided to take a chance and send the STL to the slicer, the entire wall was there in perfect order. For the rest of the time, I ignored how the STL appeared in the Mac Finder and just sent them on to the slicer.

The other annoyance that solved itself was the inability for my slicer to export, via WiFi, print files. It kept saying “Printer off line” and for months I was relegated to carrying a thumb drive down to the printer to produce work. I relogged onto ChiTuBox’s site and, voila, the unit transmitted all nine print files.

So I don’t have to get a new computer…yet. It’s still horribly slow when manipulating big files. I’ve gone back to the Classic Graphics Engine, by SU Tech’s suggestion, to have less glitching. It seems to be working… but I’m not so sure.

So here is the final drawing of Early Sunday Morning.

The roof and internal floors will be old school MDF, but all the vertial walls will be 3D printed. I’ve gotten two successful prints already.

The bricks extending out from the sides will key into slots on the adjoining wall, almost completely hiding the intermediate joints needed to get the walls to fit on the printer. That would be one advantage of laser cutting the walls, I wouldn’t need those joints. But the printed bricks’ resolution is incredible.

This one is hanging on the printer draining. I will clean it up today. That’s 2 down and 10 more to go!

I did some test renders in VRay to see about lighting. There is a stairway, but it will be very hard to really see.

I have to update an an earlier version I uploaded on the SU 3D Warehouse.

[mmarcovitch]

Moving along and finding some glitches. The printer is performing flawlessly. On the other hand, I may have to have a friendly chat with the designer.

There are 15 parts to print for the entire building (not counting a chimney). I’ve finished 8. The mid-rt front wall has extended bricks on both sides. It should have notches on its right side to accept extended bricks from the rt frt piece. I repriented a corrected piece.

I’ve always wondered what difference upping the X-Y resolution on the printer makes. My first generation Elegoo Mars had a 2k LCD mask, my Mars 3 had a 4K, and the Saturn 4 Ultra has a 12K LCD. This has been upstaged by the Saturn 4 16K. The S4U has been producing wonderful product. I’ve been able to use very fine supports on the whole part except to for the lower edges where I use heavy supports. The higher resolution produces supports with stronger, more dense cross-sections. Smaller and less supports means less cleanup and reduced surface damage. Now I have another example.

I’m printing the walls without glazing—obviously—but I added glazing to produce the renderings just for fun. The VRay rendering engine “knows” how to interpret the glazing panels as “Transparent Glass”, but to the STL converter, there are simply solid panels. And very thin panels at that. I made the panels a scale .3" thick. In SU, unless the geometry has some thinckness, the textures applied to them don’t work right. .3" is 0.006" thick in 1:48 scale.

When I converted the reprint of the apartment door wall section I forgot to delete the glazing and it got printed. it’s so thin it’s almost transparent. I’ve often said that the printer is so precise that it will print whatever it’s directed to, but that printed feature may be too frail to exist in our 1:1 world. The glazing is completely full, but my quess that at 0.006" it wil probably disintegrate during the alcohol/ultrasonic cleaning phase. But it sure is interesting! My older printers could not have resolved this feature. Regardless, it was only able to print at all because it was oriented directly vertical on the build plate. If it were angled, the feature would have needed supports to help it disengage from the teflon barrier film. The other reason the S4U can do this work is the “tilt-vat” technology. Instead of the plate pulling straight up to provide space for fresh resin to backfill for the next layer, the vat itself tilts, peeling the layer off. The plate only rises on layer instead of the previous tech’s 5mm. Peeling instead of a direct pull means the separation exerts much less force on the new layer and gives much better results. My failure rate is less than 5% and most of them are due to my drawing errors.

Here’s the other parts done so far. The upper piece is the center panel for the back. I notched the walls to help in gluing them. Again, the overlapping bricks will completely hide the joinery.

And a trial fit for the first completed corner. There’s a gap at the door edge where it contacts the side piece. Instead of wasting resin to fix the drawing and reprint, I’ll just do some old-school modeling with styrene and fill the gap. Some final fitting will be needed to get the miters at the corners perfectly matched. I’ll use epoxy to hold them together. The 1/8th inch floor plate will extend out below the doors and serve as the entry step. The work to get those bricks to align properly in the corners was worth it.

The upper frieze panels and corbels printed perfectly also. They’re still hanging on the machine draining. It’s the weekend so I’ll get to the on Monday. Using all light supports on the fine details means very little cleanup.

[mmarcovitch]

Printing (and error recovery) continues. Hanging in the printer is the left side wall and recently post-cured is the left rear wall. That means that only the right rear, the three partitions, the roof parapet caps, chimney and electric power hook up and it’s all the exterior jobs would be done. That leaves any interior things I want to add.

First of all I’m questioning the sanity of attempting to print interlocking bricks. This idea worked out great on paper. In reality the printed bricks are very fragile and in manipulating the parts to get them to engage, they’re breaking. I have to now figure out how to fill in the missing bricks when I do final assembly. Other than that, the high fidelity and warp-free parts the printer is producing are wonderful. I’m going to use the digital vinyl cutter to score all the glazing out of 0.010" clear styrene.

Even with that, here are all four front components laid out.

The upper cornice came out great! Here it is assembled for the photo.

Front:

and top:

Probably by the end of next week all the parts will be printed and assembly will begin. Floors (main, 2nd and roof) will be 1/8" MDF or aircraft ply. Base will be 3/16" ply sitting on the 1/4" piece of foam core or MDF for the sub-base.

Stay tuned

[mmarcovitch]

Work is moving apace. The last outer wall part is hanging on the printer. I’ve just uploaded all the edited partition walls and modified the stair to make it meet code. I uploaded the parapet tile caps and and in another load uploaded the chimney and electrical meter assembly. Since this is a multi-lease building, it has 6 meters.

Initially I was printing the stair case attached to the partition wall, but when I added the side railing—to prevent people from falling over the edge to their death—I’m now printing the stair as a separate part. I modified the wall with a door openning to take you to the apartments on that side.

Unike the Woodbourne Gallery’s parapet caps where I idividually resin cast each on that took weeks to create, this time, armed with a 3D printer, I printed them as a subassemblies. Even drawing them wasn’t a challenge. You draw one and copy/paste the rest.

Instead of making the meters as a bunch of separate pieces I’ve chosen to produce it as a complete assembly including the conduit and the weather head at the top.

\

The meter was a drawing on the SU 3D Warehouse that needed extensive editing to make printable. None of the surfaces were solids and had to be made so to create a viable STL file for printing. The innards were completely rendered including the complete gear train and the induction wheel. All of this had to go, and I greatly enlarged the induction wheel so something would print. The cover glass was a separate part which I’m going to attempt to print out of clear resin. This may not work, since of this in 1:48 is ridiculously small for this much detail. But, hey, that’s how I learn what’s possible.

The glass is only 1/8" in diameter. I don’t think the print, even though it will print, will be able to hold up in our 1:1 world, but I will try. You can fall down a dark and deep rabbit hole when you attempt to satisfy your AMS (Adavanced Modeler’s Syndrome) and make parts that are too small to handle, see or glue. That’s the curse! Mine won’t be transparent blue.

I’m adopting the chimney I created for the Hardware House and adding parts that will extend inside the stairwell. Y’all know that NONE of this stairwell details will be see very well, but I will know it’s there, and you will too since you’re seeing it built. It will be our little secret. The lights are floating in space because I’ve hidden the floors. Lighting will not be scale can lights, but my usual LED on Copper Foil scheme.

[ateliernab]

uhh, I think you used links to another forum for the images, I can’t see them. clicking on them redirects me (but I need to login)

anyone else ?

[bmike]

@ateliernab

anyone else ?

Images? Can’t see them.

[ateliernab]

I wonder if @mmarcovitch just posted first on the O Gauge Railroading On Line Forum then copied his message here…

if the other forum restricts access to uploaded elements to non users, it make sense

[slbaumgartner]

Yep, same here.

[tweenulzeven]

Same for me..

[mmarcovitch]

Yes. I had copied the post from another forum. Funny… the images show up on my computer. Let me send the pictures again.

The Modified Stair

The modified partition wall

As set up on the Slicer

The electric meters

The cover glass

Parapet caps as set up on the slicer

The chimney extensions (to be used as a wiring trunk to the power supply below the base.

[mmarcovitch]

Bit the bullet yesterday and bought a new MacBook Pro 2026 with the M5 Pro with 48GB RAM with the hopes that it will solve the miserable performance I’m getting running SU 2026 with my MacBook Pro 2019 with the last of the Intel processors. I will let you know if it does what it’s touted to do. It has an 18 core CPU vs the Intel’s 8, and a 20 core Grapics Processing Unit versus the Radeon processor. I read the specs on this unit and couldn’t determine a 1:1 comparison that I could use to judge them. I did review some videos comparing my old machine to the new one and the new blows it away. I just posed a question on another SU Forum thread to determine if Trimble has run performance tests with the new Mac processors.

[RTCool]

I got an older M1 Max with 64GB – not the latest, but plenty of RAM and cores at the time. My biggest surprise is that Time Machine backups absolutely bring performance to it’s knees. On my older machines, you could feel a performance hit in SketchUp if it performed a TM BU in the background, but with this one, you can’t do any work whatsoever while it’s happening. I now try to time backups when I don’t need to do work.

[mmarcovitch]

And I now have a new MacBook Pro M5 Pro laptop. I was having so much trouble doing basic things on SketchUp that I finally threw in the towel and spent a ton of money on a new machine. It solved ALL the operational challenges I was facing, but it did have some growing pains. It came brand new with a totally defunct charging adapter. The Apple Store gave me a new after I convinced them that it was “truly dead” not “mostly dead” to channel “Princess Bride”. I felt like I was in the Monty Python bit where the guy was trying to return a “Dead Parrot” and had to convince the shop keeper that it was dead when he sold it to him. The Apple employee was too young and the reference flew over her head.

I had some other glitches that are almost solved, except for one, and I’ll have that fixed soon. The migration took 16 hours and transferred over 900,000 files.

I’m having trouble with VRay finding its license in the new machine. I’ve been working with Chaos, but still it’s giving an error. I’m thinking that it’s still viable on my old Mac and maybe I’m not licensed for two workstations. I’m going to approach Chaos about this. I’ve done all the things they’ve said i should and reloaded the License Manager, but it’s still erroring.

Meanwhile, I’m still printing, but unfortunately printed the same “wrong” wall twice. As a late design change, I decided to add unseen doors to the upper apartments. Why? AMS! That’s why. But once I committed, I changed the upper floor partitiion walls to have door opening. However, my file naming convention got a little off kilter and I was unable to clearly see which version I was printing, the blank wall or the one with the door opening. I guessed wrong! I’ve gone back and deleted all the old versions from my computer and the printer—which also has a significant memory—and am reprinting again as I’m writing this.

I got a beautiful print of the 'unseen" staircase. The banister and newel posts were from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse and the stairs were generated of the 1,001 SketchUp Tools extension. Too bad you won’t be able to see much of it.

[mmarcovitch]

Thanks Kazar!

Only one more print and all the exterior parts for the model are done. I printed the interior doors and trim, the electrical service, and all the interior and exterior walls. What’s left is the tile parapet capping. I printed it once, but the individual tiles weren’t in full contact in the drawing and after printing, all the individual tile pieces started falling to the workbench. I don’t want to install them one tile at a time, plus they seemed to be a bit undersized. I re-drew them and they’re ready to be set up in the slicer. I’ll print them on Monday.

I’m starting work on designing all the interior fittings. I’m using as many finished drawings from the SU 3D Warehouse as possible and modifying them when necessary to make them printable.

The interior doors came out very nicely except I got layer stepping due to the angle I had the parts in the printer. They’re very fine and after paint will be invisible, plus no one will see these doors since they’re all perpendicular to the viewing angle. Regardless, I like them and tried something new printing the opening side of the door with both faces of the door and it’s trim, and then printing the opposite side’s trim as a separate piece.

This shows the layer stepping. Layer height is 50 microns (or about 0.002"). The door knobs printed perfectly and are sitting nicely away from the door surface on the knob’s stem. There’s a support showing on this one that I removed during cleanup.

The door trial fit. Because the wall hole and door outer dimensions were based on the same measurement, it is a press fit. I releved the door opening so it was not a press fit.

The backside before trim placement.

Trim in place for test.

Here are most of the parts to complete the building. Note: Chimney segments are done.

The six-pack electric meters printed well the second time around when I fixed the solidity of the back. The first attempt was a complete fiasco. I only need one of these, but I’m going to experiment on how to create the glass enclosure. I thought about printing them out of clear resin, but that’s not going to work well. I may simly build it up with clear Bondic UV resin. I did include the interior details of the meter which reproduced well.

The backside is nice and smooth and solid. The little bit on the end of the conduit is the weather head where the service lines enter the meter.

Re: The interior. The barber shop is going to have a beautiful set of consoles and chairs, plus waiting room chairs. I’m going to put some signage on the walls and probably have them white, not this yellow I’ve been using. I was toying with the idea of animating the barber pole but scrapped it. The inner rotating part is barely 3/16". It was a complication with a really benefit.

On the right end I’m having a travel agency. I thought about having a cruise ship model on display. I found lots of drawings on the warehouse and picked a beauty, but was sure it would not be printable without massive re-drawing. I was wrong. It was printable directly from the downloaded object. I set it up in the slicer and scaled to fit in the store window. I am confident it will print and will be fun to view.

I found a desk and made the surfaces thicker so it would be a decent print. I also found a separate desk chair that was printable. These will be VERY delicate prints, but the machine will print them. I’ll print a lot to give enough parts to screw some up in cleaning.

I’ve downloaded several nice travel posters to line the walls. I’ve started designing the exterior signage, starting with the Barber shop. Located a nice vintage imagae that will be the hanging sign. I put in the name of the proprietor. I’m working on the scrolls to support the sign. I use the “Curvemaker” extension on SketchUp to create the various spirals and volutes.

Re: The nw MacBook Pro M5 Poro. It took about 25 minutes with the VRay tech from Chaos to iron out the rendering engine’s difficulty in finding my perpetual license with VRay and SketchUp. SketchUp Studio includes VRay, but they are two separate companies: Trimble owns SU and Chaos owns VRay. Chaos is a European company (Trimble is Canadian). The tech linked directly into my laptop and did a lot of very arcane steps to get VRay to find me. Everything else is running great and running SketchUp at the speed of this computer is a dream. Renders take a couple of minutes instead of 10 minutes or more. Downloads and uploads are faster too, but I don’t understand how CPU speed affects Interact actions.