Created by Chris Free
I thought that it would be helpful to put together in one place some information about the various types of software available to help with our modelling activities in the same way that useful physical workshop tools are listed elsewhere in this Wiki. The focus will be on free to use software running in Windows PCs. High end professional programs are also listed, these are often available as free trial versions or as free versions with limited functionality. I am aware that there are many useful programs running on other systems such as MacOS, Android or Linux but have no experience of them.
The list continues to grow thanks to suggestions posted in the forum thread here.
Contributors are acknowledged in brackets at the end of each entry.
LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It uses the Open Document Format and can also open and save most commonly used office files including pdfs. It might lack some of the refinements of paid-for office programs but is more than adequate for everyday use.
By contrast Microsoft Office 365 is available at a minimum £59.99 per year subscription.
Inkscape is a free and open-source editor used to create 2D vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Other formats can be imported and exported.
Drawn shapes can be given a variety of line styles and can be filled with solid colours, patterns or bitmap textures. The latter makes it suitable for producing printable buildings, signage and so on. It can also import DXF files drawn in your favourite 2d CAD program so that they can also be rendered before being printed.
One minor drawback of Inkscape is that the method used to adjust the size of bitmap fills is a bit cumbersome and this makes it tricky to create accurate and consistent artwork for things like brickwork.
An excellent source of textures to use in conjunction with Inkscape is Textures.com, this has free, downloadable textures for all manner of building materials, signage, building components and even rust and gunge for printable weathering.
I would thoroughly commend “Using Printed Papers in Railway Modelling” by Peter Smith (of Kirtley Model Buildings fame) ISBN-13:978-1505358476, for anyone interested in drawing and printing their own buildings.
Inkscape can be used to make drawings for cutting on a Silhouette Cutter as described in detail in Rob Pulham's forum thread.
Rusty and others have also used it to produce artwork for water slide transfers as described in this forum thread.
JR Screen Ruler is a very useful little program which puts a pixel ruler on your screen. Very handy when drawing diagrams and parts to be printed. (Martin Wynne)
Also available commercially:
Affinity Designer, Similar functions to Inkscape in that it allows shapes to drawn and rendered in a variety of ways. £47.99 for a single user license.
Adobe Illustrator, long established, market leading comprehensive graphics program. Only available on subscription at £19.97per month, there is no one-time purchasing option.
CorelDRAW, another long established graphics editor similar to Inkscape, part of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite which also includes image editing, font managing, bitmap-to-vector tracing and other applications. £469.99 for a single user license.
IrfanView is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter program, it is free for non-commercial use. It is known for its small size and speed and is very useful for simple things like cutting a small section out of an image such as when you have use “print screen” to capture an on-screen image and want to save just a portion of it. It can also be used to adjust the rotation, size, colours and intensity of an image.
Paint.net is a freeware graphics editor originally created as a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program. It has similar features to IrfanView with the addition of drawing tools so that simple images can be created from scratch.
GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. From the railway modelling point of view, the two most useful functions of Gimp is the ability to edit images to get rid of unwanted areas and to correct perspective distortion. The latter is described by Mike Hopkins in this Forum thread.
Hugin is a free program that can be used to stitch photos together to make a panorama and can also be used to remove perspective from an image to enable an orthographic version to be made.
It has a fish-eye grid which, when applied to the photo, removes all the perspective effects. You “move” the fish-eye to the point where the camera was closest both vertically and horizontally (you also estimate the distance of the camera from the subject). You end up with a perfectly rectangular carriage side with importantly all the doors/windows along the side shown the same width (at least those that should be). This is in contrast to GIMP which can be used to remove distortion but does not automatically compensate for perspective foreshortening.
It is not the easiest tool to use but there are on-line tutorials for example
For anyone wanting a personalized back-scene Hugin will match up hand held landscape photos, colour and size, then stitch them together. A powerful tool. (Ian Major)
CombineZP is a free photo stacking program discussed by Rob Pulham in this forum thread.
Other free photo stacking programs Picolay and Chasys Draw IES
Fusion 360 for personal use, free 3D cad for hobbyists. This is the current favourite 3D CAD program with Guild members with several forum threads devoted to as as below:
There is also an active Special Interest Group for Fusion 360 here and several items on the Guild's YouTube channel.
Having downloaded and installed Fusion 360 my first impression is of a well thought out program that anyone familiar with the basic concepts of 3D design; work-planes, extrude, revolve, and so on, would be able to to make progress with very quickly.
Solid Edge Community edition is currently a free version of this program from Siemens. It works in a similar manner to the expensive Solidworks and will feel familiar to anyone who has used Solidworks. There are numerous tutorial videos available on line.
Tinkercad is a free-of-charge, online 3D modelling program that runs in a web browser, described in a Forum posting as “Fusion 360’s little brother”
FreeCAD is another free 3D CAD program. It’s user interface is much less intuitive than that of Fusion 360 and I found that it froze when trying to draw large panels of 3D brickwork.
QCAD is a free open source 2D drawing program that works on Windows, macOS and Linux with several recommendations on the Forum. (Lancastrian and Rusty)
"Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modelling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation..….Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers.“ Source: Blender web site
It is a very powerful program with a steep learning curve but there is a very active on-line community supporting it and many video tutorials on YouTube. As can be seen from their own description, Blender was not primarily intended for 3D design for printing, however there are a number of add-ons available that turn it into a fully featured parametric 3D design system. The best of these add-ons is Cad Sketcher
The Makers Tales YouTube channel is recommended for those wishing to master 3D design in Blender. It includes very clear step by step instructions in Blender basics and introduces several very useful Blender add-ons, also clearly explained.
TurboCAD, is a very good 2D drawing program with built-in support for both architectural and engineering drawing, and the Deluxe version is also fairly good for 3D work. Like any complex program it takes a bit of learning. A useful feature of the program is that it allows image files to be inserted into a drawing, the individual components can then be drawn by tracing over the GA drawing and then copied and pasted into a new drawing for detailing and eventual exporting in a printable format.
TurboCad is available in four versions ranging in price from Designer (2D drawing only) £59.99 to Platinum £1299.99.
Inventor by Autodesk, top of the range application for 3D mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation developed by Autodesk. Only available on subscription at £2,526 per annum. (Chris Ward)
Onshape is a high end professional cloud based 3D product development program. The full version is free with conditions while an unlimited license costs $1,500 per user, per year. (BrushType4)
VirtualMEC is a simple 3D CAD program for designing Meccano models and projects. Useful for those under-baseboard gadgets for driving level crossing gates, turntables, lever frames, etc. (Martin Wynne)
Rhino, a very powerful 3D design system used in many areas such as architecture, ship design and for the latest London double decker bus! Used for design and instruction graphics for Finney7. (Simon Thompson)
ZW-CAD a comprehensive 2d and 3D CAD and CAM system available in a range of versions starting at $2299. (Simon Thompson)
Alibre Atom 3D is a powerful parametric design toolset in an efficient user interface available for amateur use at a sensible standard and price. It has a particularly good visual display which shows the construction planes in a very helpful way. A free trial version is available and the paid for version starts at £900 per year. (Simon Thompson)
Draftsight, almost a clone of the much more expensive industry standard Autocad and uses all the same tools with different names. It used to be free now it is subscription based (£190.80per year). Used for all the Guild exhibition plans. (John Hobden)
See also Nick Baines's Introduction to CAD
3D scanning, one alternative to drawing your own 3D objects is to scan an existing one, this is the method used by Modelu to produce their figures. For small scale objects, all that is needed is a turntable, a camera on a tripod and a photogrammetry program such as 3DF Zephyr. There is also a project on Thingiverse ”The $30 3D scanner” with downloadable files to 3D print your own scanner.
All the above CAD programs can export drawing files in STL, OBJ, X3D or 3MF format. The files occasionally need repairing before being printed.
Meshmixer is the most frequently recommended program for repairing and tweeking 3D meshes. It is a free download.
MeshLab is another free open source program with similar functionality to Meshmixer.
The final stage is to use a slicer program. This translates the object file into G code that instructs the printer how to make the object. It does this by slicing the object into thin layers, these layers are then printed out, one on top of the other to create the object. The programs come with numerous pre-sets for different printer and filament types these work very well and it is rarely necessary to adjust them.
PrusaSlicer is a free, open-source program that is bundled with Prusa’s excellent FDM and SLA printers and also includes pre-sets for commony used printers by other manufacturers.
Ultimaker Cura is also open-source and is bundled with the Ultimaker range of printers.
Chitubox is a slicer program for 3D resin printers. Free and paid-for versions are available. (Martin Wynne)
Simplify3D is another slicer program for 3D filament (FDM) printers, similar to Ultimaker Cura. A paid-for program which means you get support from the company. (Martin Wynne)
Lychee Slicer, an easy to use slicer and will also support the latest Photon Mono Series resin printers. A free download for Windows Mac and Linux with optional paid for upgrade. (Christian Mueller)
Digital Command Control (DCC) by its very nature, lends itself to computer based control systems and several commercial DCC systems have build-in facilities to enable connection to a computer.
JMRI, is an open source suit of programs for setting up and operating DCC systems. It is supported by a large on-line community including several YouTube Channels.
It includes: DecoderPro® for programming decoders.
The Guild’s YouTube Channel includes James Aitken demonstrating using DecoderPro to programme a DDC locomotive controller here
PanelPro™ for creating and operating virtual control panels.
DispatcherPro™ for dispatching, grouping your stock and throttles
OperationsPro™ build trains from your stock and printing train working diagrams
SoundPro™ a set of tools for using Audio with JMRI
JMRI also allows for the automation of a layout’s scenic lighting and signalling.
RocRail “Rocrail is free software for controlling model trains for Linux, Apple macOS (Intel&M1), Windows and PiOS operating systems. Rocrail assumes all responsibilities for controlling a model railroad and their accessories. Trains can be either manually controlled or completely controlled by the software in automatic mode. A mixed operation, i.e. controlling some trains manually and other trains in fully automatic mode is possible. “ Quote from the RocRail web-site
TrainController by Railroad & Co costs between $220 and $930 depending on version. Julian Best’s Gazette article Loch Lochy - DCC Control includes a description of the capability of TrainController.
iTrain is another layout control program that is mentioned favourably on model railway forums. There is a free trail version with very limited functionality and four paid for versions ranging between € 119 and € 349.
MagicQ, is a free program for controlling lighting. It is intended for controlling complex lighting installations in theatres and concert halls but can be used to control ambient lighting on model railways. This is also described in Julian Best’s Gazettte article as mentioned above.
A good source of information about DCC is the DCC Wiki here
The most proficient of all track design and layout planning programs is Templot, developed by Martin Wynne. Like many computer aided design programmes, the learning curve is steep but the result is rewarding. Templot produces templates for tracklaying, adhering to prototype principles. It can be applied to almost any scale, to produce flowing realistic track layouts.
Templot is free to download, but a donation is always welcome to support continued development. (John Birch)
Xtrackcad is a free program for layout design. It has some rudimentary CAD tools for drawing up baseboards, scenic items and trackwork. Libraries of commonly used trackwork components are available including Peco.
There is also a wizard for drawing some custom pointwork but it lacks the subtlety and detail of Templot. Completed designs can be exported in DXF format and then opened in your favourite CAD or graphics program for further development. A word of warning; Xtrackcad, like other design programs that were originally developed to use Imperial measurements is prone to export DXF files that are 25.4 times too big in all three dimensions.
SCARM is another layout design program with similar functionality to Xtrackcad. It is a free download but requires the purchase of a license key for $39.90 to unlock all its features.
It does not have the facility to create custom pointwork so O Gauge layouts are limited to proprietary pointwork. Libraries for Peco Code 124 and 143 are included.
Anyrail another program for designing layouts using ready made track components, includes libraries for Peco Code 124 &143 but as with SCARM no facility for custom pointwork. A free trail version is available, the full working version £47
3rd PlanIt is another layout planning program. It's the top-end expensive layout planning program which includes advanced 3D capabilities and full train simulations. Design your layout and then operate and run the trains on it in full 3D. Trial version available. (Martin Wynne)
Audacity is a free, open source, program for recording, analysing, editing and exporting sound files. It's web site also includes links to other useful audio and audio-visual applications. (John Birch)
Magix Movie Edit Pro, this is used for all the videos in the Video Library, and all the slide programmes converted from slide sets to DVD videos. “”At the time I took over the library, Magix was rated as one of the best in magazine reviews. One tip is to search out older versions of programmes, which can be obtained either free or at much reduced prices. For basic work, older versions are fully capable, with later versions just adding more and more complexity that we don't need. Magix, and many other software houses usually offer updates every year, but I only updated mine 2 or 3 times in the 18 years I was using the programme.” (Chris Simpson)
PTE AV Studio is a program for creating audio-visual slideshows for a club presentation, exhibition or similar. Merge your model photos and layout videos into a very professional looking presentation with added music or spoken commentary. (Martin Wynne)
Shotcut is a free open source, cross-platform video editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. It has lots of features and is fairly straightforward to use compared to the more powerful editors. Plus there are loads of tutorial videos online. (Softvark)
Davinci Resolve, available in both Free and Studio (paid for) versions. Works with Windows, Linux and both versions of MAC (x86 & M1 cpu).
A complete package, with video editing, audio editing, compositing, colour corrections and final exporting of the edit. (Paul_l)