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I saw this thread on the Trainz forum discussing a model of Battersea Power Station in London and a couple of photographs. Although they were pretty low resolution I decided to give it a go with Canoma, a program that lets me model 3D right on top of photographs. Here are the original 2 photographs (click on any photo below to get a higher resolution version) The process of modeling in Canoma involves loading the photographs, selecting a geometric primitive (like box, roof, plane etc.) and pinning the corners and edges of the wireframe to the photograph underneath. Here are some shots of work in progress: The image is loaded as background, and you can see some wireframes on top of it (Click to get a larger version of the image) The primitives available for modeling are shown at the bottom of the screen.   Canoma always maintains a 3D model for the current scene, so you can switch to a 3D view, change camera angles, perspective etc. Here the camera angle has been changed. CanomYou can ask Canoma to extract textures for your 3D polygons directly from the source images, just press a button and you get this (same angle as picture above left). Whereever there is no texture information available from the source images, Canoma tries to make a guess what colors might fit. You can export the model as Wavefront OBJ, Caligari Truespace, VRML2 etc. You can also create and record Quicktime animations (see the thumbnails definining keyframes at the bottom of the screen.) Click on the picture below to see a movie made directly in Canoma (Titles and music added in Windows Movie Maker). Movie requires Windows Media Player (approx 1.8mb). The model took about an hour to create and futzing with Windows Movie Maker and Dreamweaver to make this page about another hour and a half. The primitives Canoma uses have very few polygons (boxes, wedges etc.) which is handy if the models are used in a realtime environment (such as Trainz). The textures create most of the impression of visual realism. They can easily be touched up in Photoshop, I have not done that here yet. Canoma also helps a bit by "stealing" the textures from one side of a primitive and wherever sensible, sticking it on the other side, so even if you do not have a photograph from the other side, a lot of the textures will already have been taken care of for you. You can find more information about Canoma at the website, ask questions at the forum (or in the Trainz forum thread). There are also a lot of demos & movies on this page. If you want to play with this model yourself, you can download Canoma. Then, make a folder "Battersea" and save photograph1, photograph2 and the canoma model file into that folder (Right Click, Save Target As...) Then start Canoma and open the model file. You can use the trackball on the left to rotate your model. Click on the turtle icon in the toolbar above to create the textures. More info in the Canoma documentation (which is also installed). If you want to model yourself, you should follow the tutorial, it really explains a lot of the basics of Canoma for first-timers. Good luck !

Follow-up information Actually other great sources for Canoma modeling purposes are aerial photography sites / companies or even satellite imagery (now down to .5m commercial, unclassfied) although those are usually more of a "floorplan" rather than an oblique view. Satellite / space imagery Space Imaging Corp 1-m Ikonos satellite Digital Globes .5m resolution Quickbird satellite Microsoft-sponsored TerraServer and Terraserver.com (US only, using older 5m Russian satellite images) Aerial imagery / satellite / browsers/flythrough These are small apps that run on your PC which let you fly trough texture mapped, DEM (Digital Elevation Map) terrain, and incrementally download just the bits needed to show your current view from multigigabyte databases. Keyholes Earthviewer Skylinesofts TerraExplorer (and London guide) Aerial photography providers / sourcers Multimap.com GetMapping.com, a UK aerial photography company that has some areas down to 10cm resolution. Robert Cameron's Above London, a great coffee table book and excellent hires source material for Canoma modeling (like his many other books) I used Skylinesofts free TerraExplorer browser to make these two images of the Battersea station area (click on the thumbnails for higher res versions) Especially for prototype - oriented Trainz layout creators, such imagery with tracks might be very useful - but also for Building modelers if you are interested in relative dimensions (although you can see things are slightly oblique in the imagery below which can confuse things a bit - btw Canoma models the camera and so takes the obliqueness into account) Of course, as usual, Google and Google image search are your friends.