Your First Model Shapes Hobby Interests

Model makers ply their skills in many undertakings usually with differing sets of objectives:

* Engineers who require scale models to test the likely performance of a particular design at an early stage of development without incurring the full expense of a full-sized prototype.
* Architects who require architectural models to evaluate and sell the look of a new construction before it is built.
* Filmmakers who require scale models of objects or sets that cannot be built in full size. * Salesmen who require scale models to promote new products such as heavy equipment and automobiles and other vehicles.
* Hobbyists or amateur modelers make die-cast models, injection molded, model railroads, remote control vehicles, wargaming and fantasy collectibles, model ships and ships in bottles for their own enjoyment.

Director Model Hogwart's Main Hall	Precision Engineered model for promotion
Designer's model of a Yacht concept	Wargamer's Civil War battlefield Dioramma

Scale models can also be objects of art, either being created by artists or being rediscovered and transformed into art by artists.

There are different forms of modeling (planes, cars, trains, buildings, ships and dioramas and there are also assorted scales (sets of proportions) usually depicted as letters or letter pairs¡XG, O, S, HO, N and Z scales. These determine many things like the size of your finished object, the work area needed to complete it and the space required for display. You will find a good conversion table an indispensible tool.

Ostensible, man in an inch-based system averages about six feet in height. For many modelers imagining this height against an object being modeled is all that is needed to scale the life-sized into the scale being modeled.

Scale modeling is by no means drawing participation from everyone, but surprisingly many besides hobbyists are drawn into the action.

Commercial interests are represented by craft stores, hobby shops, manufacturers (big corporations to one-man shops) and a vast number of Internet web sites like this site.