As with the painting thread, it's time to start porting a few years of terrain thread over to the new forum, and then updating it to the present day... October 2010 Our club needs some more terrain, so next week we're having another scenery bashing session. As I'm slowly introducing people to Infinity some of that terrain is going to be a bit more urban than originally planned... The plan so far is to make eight 600x600mm tiles with roads on using 25mm blue foam as the basis with 5mm foamboard to raise up the non-road areas. This gives us the choice of a couple of 4x4' tables for Infinity, Necromunda & other SF skirmish games, a regular 6x4 for Infinity & 40k/Cities of Death with more options for tile choices, or lastly an extra large 8x4' table. To make this modular, each tile will have a road entry in the middle of all four edges to make the maximum number of layout possibilities: 5" roads plus 1.5" pavements gives us reasonably wide roads plus 8" blocks in each corner, so buildings and terrain will be in multiples of 8" blocks or smaller: Construction plans for the tiles: 1. Cut out foamboard raised areas (covering the whole of the tile from road edge to tile edge at the same height). 2. Glue foamboard raisers onto blue foam. 3. PVA + sand on the exposed blue foam road surface. 4. Textured paint covering all the foamboard. Once all that is dry, the roads will probably end up dark grey + drybrush with some sponge+stencil work for white lines & crossings. Pavements/raised areas will be lighter grey, probably all the same tone rather than painting the 1.5" width a different colour - that way if a smaller building is placed in that corner it just has a wider bit of pavement around it. Building construction will depend a lot on the people taking part, but I'm going to try and encourage three separate themes: - Gothic 40k ruins (we play a LOT of 40k and have a tournament coming up). - More generic urban terrain that we can use for Infinity as well including removable roofs owing a lot of inspiration to Antenociti's Salute table, Bostria's magnet-cubes, low-level versions of Palocles' foamboard condos and panzerkunst's foamboard apartments. - industrial storage tanks etc. We'll go for trying to finish six tiles by the end of the month, and enough buildings for a 4x4' Infinity table by some indeterminate time... P.S. I'm now up to nine iKubes, a couple of cardboard shipping containers and five (unpainted) die-cast cars so we're not starting totally from scratch. Apart from 40k scenery like barricades & barrels that work really well for Infinity. P.P.S. I'll also be trying to make road layouts that don't give direct LoF all across the board, so any tips for that would be really useful! The only reason this will succeed is because there's a whole bunch of us wanting more scenery. Anyway, some clearer sketches of tile layouts: Apart from the crossroads and the T-junction, pretty well all of these have areas in the middle of the tile where buildings or other structures can be placed, to stop the dreaded 'LoF all the way across the board' situation. I did wonder about 12"/300mm tiles as that gives a lot more potential for wiggling the roads, but we already have to lug tables and boards in from a shed outside the community centre and then pack it all away at the end of each club night as it is - anything smaller than 24"/600mm just gets irritating when you're laying out/packing up/laying out/packing up each week. Regarding LoS/LoF issues, another workaround I've come up with is footbridges between roofs, so that even if the street has turned into a fire corridor it's possible to crawl across the footbridges under the parapets. This should also add a nice extra level of manoeuvring to the game. The bridges tie into some of my rough ideas for building templates - 3" high floors to fit in with our existing GW terrain, with separate roof pieces that have low walls around the edges with some gaps in the walls like Bostria's magnetic boxes - the gaps can then have external stairs leading to them, or join to the next roof, or have a footbridge leading across the street to a corresponding gap in the next lot of buildings. The roof section undersides will have a little lip slightly in from the edges so that they fit into the walls of the building, that will also allow stacking buildings for more floors as long as the floor plan matches. Building template ideas (in metric as the PVC is 3mm thick): Basic cube is 200x200mm (~8x8") and 75mm (~3") high. Basic form has a floor 194x194mm with walls glued onto the outer edge, each wall is the same 197mm long. That means we can do loads of walls all the same size with 3-4 variations on window and door cutouts and be able to put the walls on in either direction for maximum variation from similar pieces. If I get the door positions right it should be possible to put 2+ forms next to each other and have connecting doorways between them. The roof uses a 200mm square with 197x25mm walls on top and some little ledges on the underside about 4mm in, this will then sit inside the walls and stop the roof section moving around. In the same way, ledges can be added to the undersides of some of the basic forms to make them stackable. The roof walls will probably have some gaps in, to allow for footbridges and links between neighbouring roofs. Now the deluxe bit, inspired by Bostria's magnocubes - make some more basic forms but using 155mm as the outer dimension, and some more using 120mm outer sides. The medium size 155mm form can fit on the roof of a 200mm form, leaving a 32mm balcony wide enough for both 25mm slottabase models and 30mm round-edged bases, and for storage will fit inside the large size. The small 120mm form can fit on the roof of a 155mm form, leaving a 32mm balcony, and for storage will fit inside the medium size. The small form can fit on the roof of a large form, leaving a 67mm balcony wide enough for 40mm and 60mm bases. The three sizes are also distinct enough that pre-cut pieces won't get mixed up during construction. P.S. I tried some regular thin superglue on the foamed PVC and it worked OK as long as the butted joint was a good fit. I'll have to see if I can set up the mini saw table so that the cuts are all at 90 degrees... The foamboard tiles arrived this morning. On my travels through the internet, this photo of stacked static caravans caught my eye: http://thereifixedit.failblog.org/2010/10/12/white-trash-repairs-kludge-city/ Blue foam tiles, doh! Assorted glues etc. I finally got around to digging out the Minicraft saw bench to see how it does for cutting foamed PVC: The results are pretty good: It's a good thing that I started drawing out a full-scale floorplan of my large/medium/small cubeform as I'd got the dimensions slightly wrong - it's 200mm/155mm/110mm outer dimensions. Now that the dimensions are checked, here's a cross-section:
Now with lips under the roof sections to keep them in place, and a figure on 25mm base for scale: Like this, the dotted line shows where the smaller floor would fit: If the locator blocks are made smaller (10mm instead of the 20mm seen above) then the large roof would still fit centrally on the medium floor: Thinking about that further, it's probably enough to have locators on two opposite corners instead of all four. Note that this bit is just thinking ahead, to start with we'll just have the outer locators. Overhang scale: The blue foam laid out: There are a few dented corners but by the time the foamboard is on top of all the corners that won't be visible. Convoy! I hit the pound shops again today, there were another three packs left on the shelf when I left but they were yet more of the red & yellow combo which I already have too many of. On the other hand it's another dozen cars for Marking out another tile, the one with two angled corner roads. Starting by marking the 12cm-width of the road in the middle of each side, plus lines 40mm in and points 40mm out from that for the pavement to rotate around the corner. I mislaid my compass, and they're not much use on blue foam anyway, so a 75mm diameter can does for the moment. Which gives me the inner edge of the two 45 degree corners. However this still leaves the problem of drawing the outer radius. One of my test cuts of foamed PVC to the rescue! I drilled a hole for the pivot rod (and also into the blue foam on the cross marks) and then holes just the right size for the pen to stick through, making a nicely accurate compass that doesn't rip up the foam. Whee! You may notice that there are two sets of holes - one is for the CD marker that I'm using for the foam, the other smaller holes are for a ballpoint pen for when it comes to marking out the foamboard - which is the bit that really matters. Now the result: Looking good, but the area between the parallel sections of road is only 190mm so no 200mm square building sitting in there. However it's just right for stacked 100mm iKubes.
The textured paint that I'd planned for use on the pavements is very textured, and also quite wet to be putting on the foamboard without priming with PVA first. I put a thick layer on the left end, the middle had about the same amount but stippled with the brush and the bit under the Eldar had only a thin layer. One thing that's sure is that the foamboard will need to be filled on the edges, but one brainwave I had is to use a thickish layer of the textured paint on the road areas, and then use the sand for all the pavement areas on the foamboard. That will also mean less moisture soaking into the foamboard. Third tile marked up: There's a 280mm gap in the middle, so plenty of room for a bigger building or a small park. 'We demand... a shrubbery! Nigh!' Each 'horn' of the turning point has space for a Rhino, a Land Raider (by a few millimetres) or two cars. Alternatively, a Dropship etc. The T-junction next, because it was simple & fast... Tile 5: the diamond-square. This one was a bit more tricky to mark out... The angled roads are slightly narrower at 80mm instead of the standard 120mm of the rest - enough wider than a single lane that a Rhino's tracks will fit between the pavements, and just wide enough for a Land Raider's sponsons to fit between buildings placed 40mm in from the road edge. Now the scale shots: Pedestrians are probably OK if they duck fast enough. Any street furniture like streetlights, bins etc. on the other hand... P.S. Not to forget the big stuff. Look out behind you! Traffic jam in Blue Foam City! Plus the sixth tile, the last to be marked up for now:
Unless anyone wants a detailed description (I took photos for one), I'll just add some before and after photos of the saw bench work: It was quite a bit of work, but the second guide and much wider plate means that I can cut more accurately and with larger pieces. Six tiles ganged up together: Plus whatever I could find lying around to bulk it out a bit. Anyone else remember playing on battlefields that looked like that? And a few detail shots: One new concern is warping - the crossroads tile is already lifting slightly along the edges and a layer of PVA on the top is only going to make that worse. Looks like we might need some 6mm ply on the bottom after all, I was hoping to do without it. More close-ups: 'Welcome to Colander Towers!' As you can see, with the right combination of tiles it'll be possible to put down some pretty big structures. Picking up the foam board today, fortunately from my ex-Uni department where they have a massive cutting board and I can cut the the 60x40" sheets down to something I can fit on the train. Looking at foamed PVC sheet quantities, making the buildings out of just 3mm sheet is going to mean we can manage about twelve of the 200mm size plus six-eight medium or small. So a slight compromise is in order - the floor for each room will be 2mm thickness with the walls still being 3mm. The roof sections and parapets will still be 3mm as they aren't supported by the ground... Hopefully that will mean we have enough sheet for twelve large buildings and a mix of medium and small buildings adding up to another twelve. Add in the excess foamboard from the tiles for some bigger buildings and it's looking good for numbers. Foamboard - lots of foamboard! There are 600mm squares for the roundabout, double-corner and parking lot tiles, a 600x240mm piece for the long side of the T-junction and a pile of 240mm squares for all the other tile corners. Lots of corner cutting to come...
October 2010 continued... Right, the first evening's construction. Due to a variety of reasons including my being overly ambitious/too long since I did a big scenery project, not bringing big enough clamps for the sawbench and there not being many people doing terrain, progress wasn't as good as I'd hoped. On the other hand we have three tiles assembled but not textured, and the foamed PVC sheets cut in half. The first interesting bit was getting two packs of 2440x1220mm foamed PVC sheet to the club. The back of my Trafic wasn't quite long enough so the packs came up over the headrests and made it a bit hard to use the rear-view mirror: Onto tile assembly - gluing, pins to hold the boards in place while they glue, a glued board: Another glued tile, note the manhole covers which are some Airfix Platformer squares with the sticking out bits removed from the rear: Close-up of one of the manhole covers, this one has a hole cut out underneath so that some pipes can be added, the cover will probably be magnetised: All three of the glued tiles: Immediately after gluing, each tile was placed onto a pile placed under an upside-downe folding table which appears to have done the trick as far as having them dry flat is concerned. Once I'd got everything home again, I put the tiles back into an ad-hoc press, after removing the pins: The Peli case on the top is quite heavy! The PVC sheets were cut in half with the aid of a cutting mat, steel metre rule and new scalpel blade. My plan of cutting them into strips appropriate to the various-sized buildings didn't happen because the sawbench bed by itself isn't wide enough, and the clamps I'd bought with me weren't long enough to hold down the aluminium profile I'd bought with me to use as a guide: However this has given me a few ideas for making an alu profile framework that the sawbench attaches to, ready for next week, then we can get a couple of us at once passing a big sheet through the sawbench. Assorted dimensions for the buildings: Large: 197x75mm outer walls 194mm floor 200mm roof 197x25mm parapet, with some 40mm gaps for bridges. 80mm and 77mm for gap parapets. Bridges (to take 25mm and 30mm bases): 35x240mm floor 3mm, chamfer around last 20mm each end. 25x200mm 3mm walls butted onto sides so bridge is 41mm wide in total but has a 35mm wide 20mm long tongue. Make some bridges an extra 45mm long and some an extra 90mm long to go on upper floors. Wide bridges (to take 40mm bases): 45x240mm floor, chamfer as above but cut tongue down to 35mm wide. 25x200mm walls as above. Medium: 152x75mm 3mm walls 149mm 2mm floor 155mm 3mm roof 152x25mm walls with 40mm gaps for bridges. Walls 57mm and 54mm for gaps. Small: 107x75mm 3mm walls 104mm 2mm floor 110mm 3mm roof 107x25mm parapets. Walls 35mm and 32mm for gaps. By next Tuesday and the next club evening I'm hoping to rebuild the sawbench again, and texture one of the tiles so that we can see how it looks. I might cut & glue the foamboard on the other three tiles, but i doubt I'll have time. Quick sketch/cross-section of the manhole and subway entrance ideas: The manhole hole has already been cut about halfway through the depth of the 25mm tile but I'll need to add something to the inner walls for the cover to sit on as the hole was cut to the same size. The subway hole hasn't been cut (there may be more than one), the idea is to cut all the way through the tile to get the maximum depth, then make steps from stacked 3mm PVC (or 5mm foamboard) with nothing sticking out from the surface so that tiles can still be stacked properly. A separate PVC cover can then be placed over it to make a subway entrance, or hatches for a cellar entrance, or just be covered by a building. Now with added foamboard... I think it's going to make more sense to use foamboard for the steps as the numbers are nicer.
Start with a square(ish) hole: Cut a bunch of round stuff to the length of the hole: Dump them in the hole and see if it looks right: Start adding some sides. There's a bit of spacer so that the manhole doesn't fall down inside, plus some brick texture plasticard: Big glob of PVA glue in the bottom, the first layer of pipes added: Some more smaller pipes added, with some bends to make it look less neat, with some poly cement added in places to hold the plasticard rod together: Now the other inner walls are added, sitting on top of the pipes: Plus manhole cover: I'll do a bit of filling around the edges before texturing the road with sand, but apart from that the manhole is ready for priming and painting. The inner edges of the foamboard are now filled, ready for PVA + sand at a later stage. First the dents in the blue foam: Then the edges of the foam: Not much visible change but it should help a lot later on. I hope to get the road textured this evening but I'll have to see how time gets on. Hmm - silly objective idea - make a manhole with cover on each tile, and hide different-coloured tokens in each one, sides have to make Discover rolls to find the hidden package and then get the correctly-coloured one. I'm going to add sand to the paved areas on the first tile later this evening. A cardboard tray from an IKEA flat-pack to catch the excess sand and be able to pour it back into the bag, plus a dust-sheet to protect the carpet: Plus a temporary foamboard cover for the manhole, as per PsychoticStorm's suggestion, ready for textured paint on the road: The PVA straight from the bottle was a bit thick, resulting in distinct raised lines where the glue was thicker: Thinning down the PVA helped, but didn't hold enough sand on to make the surface really tough: While a second layer of thin PVA covers really well: Here's the board for now, I may go over with another layer of PVA + sand or maybe not, it's not as thin as it looks in the photo: Close-up of the sand: The sand is what was left over from texturing our 15 4x2' boards, I think it was just a bag of sand from a builder's merchant. On the whole it's not as even as I would have liked, but it's not bad. Now to add some textured paint to the road areas...
Partially-covered road area: As you can see, this stuff is quite gloopy: All of the road covered: Minus the bit that was covered with a foamboard square: Once it had dried a bit I tried flattening it, and also putting a layer of sand on and flattening it some more, but it looks more like a mud lane than a road. Tomorrow I'll have to bite the bullet, scrape the textured paint off and go buy something less coarse. Even a layer of sand and then flattening out the surface didn't help, it would have made a great rutted muddy track, but not a road... So late last night I got up again before the stuff had gone rock-solid and scraped off what I could: Then this afternoon headed off to B&Q to pick up some proper Sandtex: http://ijw.on-rev.com/oldsites/images-ei/IMG_1425.jpg First test, painted on with a brush in a couple of different amounts, then a hairdryer to see how it looked when dry: Same again but sponged after painting on the left and a simple thin coat via brush on the right: I also did a quick paint+sand test but it wasn't that useful: In the end I went with the single thin coat as the parallel lines weren't too bad and looked a bit like extruded tarmac. However, once some paint was on the surface I had a brainwave - put the paint on with a 1" brush to get it in the right places, then use the tip of a much bigger brush held vertically to stipple the wet surface and destroy any lines/marks. This seems to have worked well, but you'll have to wait until the morning to see the results. Obviously, with remnants of the crappy texture paint left on the surface this tile's roads will be rougher than the rest, but I can live with that! As you can see it's pretty rough due to the remains of the old paint, so this is going to be the 'rough' quarter of the city. http://assets.infinitytheforums.com/en/emoticons/default__wink__rvmp_by_bad_blood.gif [IMG]http://ijw.on-rev.com/oldsites/images-ei/2010_terrain_154.jpg However the areas that were flat before the Sandtex went on are pretty good scale-wise: On a slightly different topic, the tile had been stored on one side before the PVA in the manhole had fully dried, which I didn't spot until this morning. Should be easy enough to paint as some grungy stuff leaking into the hole, though... A bit more done to the sawbench:
I have to give up on the sawbench for sawing up foamed PVC sheets 1.2 metres wide, it's just not up to the job. Fortunately we now have a sixth 6x4' table for the mini-tournament on Nov 6th, so there's no rush any more. So in the next couple of weeks I'll take a few hours off and use a scalpel to cut the PVC into strips the right width (200mm, 197mm, 75mm etc.), then use the sawbench to cut the strips into pieces the right length. I managed to get another tiles-worth of foamboard cut and attached this morning: Domo then filled the edges of the foamboard on three tiles this evening, but apart from that there's no more progress on the tiles as I can now do them at home at my own pace, however we got several small pieces of terrain done this evening: That's some surprisingly effective chainlink fencing, made from wooden stirrers and some hexagonal mesh fabric I found for pennies in a local shop. 1. Cut out something to use as a base, cut a strip of fabric 40-50mm wide and slightly shorter than the base. 2. Then cut the stirrers slightly longer than the width of the fabric. 3. We used a hot glue gun to sandwich the fabric between paired strips of stirrer but you could use PVA if you have more time to wait for it to dry. 4. Once the uprights are firmly glued to the fabric, a line of hot glue was placed along the base, with extra globs where the uprights would go, with the uprights immediately held in place. 5. Once that glue had set, a bit extra was placed where the bottom edge of the fabric was loose, or where the uprights looked wobbly. 6. Some filler was then used to build the bases up towards the middle, hiding most of the glue. We also did some generic storage tanks using different sizes of fizzy drinks cans - the mini 150ml ones are a great size for this if you can get hold of them, but of course make sure that you've rinsed them and let them dry first! Important tip - if using a hot glue gun, make sure that you draw around the can and then put the glue on the base and press the can onto it - trying to put the glue onto the can doesn't work as it cools/sets immediately... With the Helcat Engineer for scale: Plus some GW barricades based up ready for some texture to be added to the bases. In theory they work by themselves, but are easier to handle on bases. I also persuaded a club member to cut-n-fold some of Topo's iKubes that I'd printed out and brought along. I made a start on the concrete planters. Here are some tubs, but they are too high in themselves: Stick a small sawblade in the min bench drill and carefully rotate the tub, making sure to keep fingers well clear... A bit of cleaning up and they are a good height to take cover behind. Note that the lipped half is slightly lower than it should be as I had to re-cut it with the drill on a slower speed - on full speed it was melting the plastic through friction! The top halves will need gluing onto some kind of base, then both halves can be filled with gravel for weight and have some plastic aquarium plants hot-glued in ready for painting. Concrete planters part two. I drew a circle on foamboard the same size as the interior of the bigger planter and cut it out with a scalpel, then cut some holes in it to fit the aquarium plant fronds. Nothing is glued yet. The foamboard will get hot-glued into the plastic outer, then PVA+sand or superglue+sand for some earth texture, the plastic outer will get Sandtex paint. Once it's painted I may add some lichen/flock bushes. A few more steps for the 'test' planter: Once the foamboard was glued in a thick (1-2mm) layer of PVA was added and then sand poured in on top. Because there is so much PVA it bleeds through into the fine sand and gives a lovely rough surface which makes good soil and is really tough. The same can be done with superglue but it would have soaked into the foamboard more and also leaves little room for getting things wrong... Plastic bushes in place: A bit of Sandtex covering the plastic and it should be ready to undercoat.
November 2010 A couple of little tips - staple rungs (an oldy but a goody): I managed to pick up some staples with tapered ends, which makes it a lot easier to get them apart! Plus, inspired by Bugbait on Warseer, poppers as big valve wheels: They come in lots of different sizes and styles.
Production line time: Now a sadder tale - one of the local DIY shops, Langans Foam, Tools & DIY, are closing down. I've been buying stuff there for the last fifteen years. I made them an offer on their remaining stock of M2, M2.5 and M3 bolts: Feels odd to now own the box I've been picking from for so long... Pringles Tower - last bastion of crispness in a world gone mad! First things first, adding some way of getting up and down, in this case staple rungs. I want to add a couple of circular catwalks part-way up and some kind of aerial/comms assembly on the top so a service ladder fits. Rather than place the rungs directly on the tower wall I added a structure made of 1mm foamed PVC with a couple of small strips on the edge to account for curvature, glued it on and then drilled way too many holes for the staples... Marking the hole positions (10.5mm across, 7mm from rung to rung), gluing the strip onto the tube, some wood that was the right shape to rest the tube on: Now that there's something to keep the tube from rolling around, drilling time: 64 holes later it's time to start gluing in staples. To keep the staples looking regular I used a scrap piece of 5mm foamboard as a spacer: The finished service ladder: Marking out the first catwalk with some calipers - 5mm foamboard is a bit thick but I hope to disguise that (and the foam edge) with a low wall and some of the hex fabric on the top surface to make it look like mesh. Width of the catwalk carefully calculated to easily allow 25mm and 30mm lipped bases, but not 40mm ones: In place for testing, no glue yet. I'll probably make a small cutaway in the end so that it wraps partway around the ladder. Remember the magnets I added to the Tomcat Engineer? Just strong enough to hold the model halfway up the ladder: I may have a try at gluing down some of the hex mesh before going to bed, but on a scrap piece of foamboard as a test. There will need to be some wiring going up beside the ladder, and ideally some kind of data ports/control panels/access hatches above the catwalks to make them look more realistic. When it comes to using some of the other tubes for horizontal storage tanks I'll probably use a foamed PVC strip like the one under the staples in the same place, but this time to form a narrow catwalk along the top of the tank, with some rungs at one or both ends of the tank. It might need to be a bit wider, 2cm isn't really wide enough for 28mm figures to stand up safely - one nudge of the table and they fall off... I tried a partial cutaway for the ladder but it didn't look right, so I've gone for an edge at a right-angle to the plane of the ladder, looks much better: Positioning test for the two catwalks, the top one is longer: The overlap on the other end opens up possibilities for models to sneak up behind enemies by jumping... A couple of different circular cutaways marked out: In place: Thanks PS, that was a good idea. Mesh fabric as catwalk mesh test: That worked, so I did the same to the two catwalk pieces. I used a layer of diluted PVA on the foamboard, placed the fabric on the surface and then used a brush with more diluted PVA to press it down onto the surface: As it's PVA, I needed to hold it flat while drying, the steel ruler was quite good for not sticking to the glue too much! It only works well if the fabric is really flat to start with, it lifted off the surface slightly in a couple of places - not enough to bother fixing, though.
Coke Can Refinery, taken a bit further from where they were last week. First step, adding some popper valves by drilling shallow holes and gluing them in: Plus PVA & sand: In that last photo you can see a small bit of plasticard between the two cans, that's because the base wasn't thick enough and was flexing, the spacer has made it much more solid. Catwalks! Right-angle supports added and globs of hot glue along the underside, plus a 3mm wide strip glued on the top inner edge to disguise the edge of the fabric and to make the catwalk look like it's attached to the tower... Now some cabling between junction boxes. The boxes are made from multiple layers of 1mm foamed PVC, the cabling is plasticard rod: There will be more pipes/cables going out horizontally from the junction boxes, but not tonight... So, if there are catwalks, there must be a reason for the catwalks, apart from providing a raised firebase. Cue the bits box and a Rhino panel: I'll add some strip plasticard or PVC around the edge to make it look more like a hatch and to hide the rough edge, then run one of the cables up to it. P.S. I think I need some new grey paint. I painted up the chainlink fence sections ready for our mini-tournament tomorrow, starting by wetbrushing and drybrushing the ground from dark grey up to a biege-like colour, Boltgun on the fabric, foundation brown on the uprights and some patches of flock to brighten them up: I'm pleased with these as they are, but for bonus points they may get a highlight on the wood and some static grass on top of the flock at some stage. I think I've found a solution for the handrails. The outer edge of the foamboard catwalks will have a 7-10mm wide strip of PVC on them to disguise the thickness of the foamboard. Onto this I will glue some short sections of L-profile plasticard sticking up. The top end of the L-profile will have a hole drilled in it, with a curved piece of stiff wire passing through all the holes. Should look reasonably convincing but also be strong enough to survive games/being stored.
Another two planters prepared, this time with bigger trees. Foamboard cut to size and a hole cut in the middle: Foamboard glued in with hot glue: Note that the wire stem of the tree has been cut down so that the whole thing will stay upright. Plenty of PVA: Finished sand layer: If there's a hint of dry weather tomorrow I'll get some Sandtex paint on the gold plastic parts ready for undercoating. It was a dry, sunny day today. Which meant that it was time to texture and undercoat the concrete planters... With a coat of Sandtex paint: While I was at it, I decided to see what Sandtex does to disguise expanded polystyrene - on it's own not much, with a scattering of fine sand pretty good although it's still a bit like pebble-dash. Another coat of Sandtex on top might look pretty good. Once the Sandtex was thoroughly dry, the planters got a two-part undercoat of grey followed by a partial spray of white. This is something I've not tried before but it should add a bit of extra depth to the paint job. I'm very pleased with them so far, the texture is just right. Planters are now painted! The concrete areas got a thin wash of bleached bone mixed with black* to get a slightly warm darkish grey. A slightly darker mix was then placed under the lip and the ridge halfway up the sides. Then drybrushed from mid-grey up to near-white, again with some bone mixed in. The soil areas had a thick wash of assorted browns including foundation khemri, old brown ink, a bit of dark green and red and a touch of old chaos black, with a bit more black and brown ink near the plant trunk holes. No drybrushing as there seems to be enough tonal range anyway. Note that the images have come out slightly too orange-brown, they are a better colour in real life - I still need to sort out proper lighting for photography on the painting desk. With a Tsyklon for scale, just right for claiming cover behind. My first painted terrain for the new table! *Note that this is really old GW colours so colours won't match new ones!
November 2010 continued... Got a bit of detailing done on Pringles Tower - a surround for the terminal and the start of the safety rails: The next bit is curved, so I bent some of the 1mm foamed PVC around a pen barrel first: Then extended cabling: Rest of the low wall - I've been adding some 3mm-wide strip along the inner bottom edge to make it easier to align the walls. Plus the usual 'with a figure' photos for scale. One idea I had is to stick some 1" sections of right-angle profile plasticard to the outer edge as uprights, with a horizontal hole in the top of each one with a stiff piece of wire running through them for the handrail - hopefully that would be strong enough to last more than two games... Painting is likely to be more of a joint project than the construction - the tiles are likely to get a grey undercoat all over, thick black wash on the roads, some sponge work to get colour variation and then a bit of drybrushing, which is the kind of thing that can be done as a team. After the success of the Sandtex conrete on the planters, the foamed PVC buildings are likely to get a similar treatment but with some airbrush work rather than the washes and all the drybrushing. Work started on the upper catwalk wall: I'm now cutting out another 20mm-wide strip from a bigger sheet... Overview so far: In theory the walls are high enough to grant cover to shorter models but I'll be doing some house rules for the catwalks anyway. Pringles Tower is finally approaching finished assembly! Texture/filler added to the base: Next comes the guard rail: The plasticard profile was cut to a series of pieces the same length with the hole cut in the same place each time, then a mark on a piece of card was used to get them in about the same height when supergluing them in place: The snipped ends of the wire weren't looking good, so the ends were filed down flat: The wire was bent to the right shape, then fed through the holes and glued in place. I then added an end section to make it look more complete: In theory it could do with a second wire/rail about a centimetre lower, but at some stage you have to say 'Enough!' or you never finish anything...
After what I said about the second rail being too much, why am I now doing rivets? Because I want the safety rail to look as if it was bolted on as an afterthought, which means that there needs to be a visible attachment method. Step 1 - take some plasticard rod and carefully cut it into short sections, without knocking the cut off bits all over the floor. Step 2 - use the tip of the knife pushed into a rivet to pick it up... Step 3 - and dip the rivet into poly cement... Step 4 - then place the rivet where you want it glued, the poly cement should have just enough tackiness to hold it in place as you pull the knife out. Step 5 - repeat steps 2-3 as required... Overview of the upper catwalk. Once the rail on the lower catwalk is done, I'm calling this finished, ready for undercoating! Preparing for the second hand-rail: Handrail complete: And at last some photos of the final assembly and details, shot under proper lighting: All-angles:
And while I had the lights set up, the planters: Side-project time - at some stage I was trawling through the games-table lighting thread and saw the video of a Mira Ball LED display and thought that would be neat. I've now managed to pick one up cheap on eBay: I've finally started cutting up the big sheets of foamed PVC, ready to make a start on some block buildings... The fullsize 2.4x1.2m sheets had been cut in half a couple of weeks ago, I started by cutting some of the halves in half to get something small enough easily to cut with a metre rule and two cutting mats taped together: First batch of cut pieces - some 200x200mm squares for roofs: Followed by a big pile of 197x75mm walls: Quick test to see if 194mm 'floor' square plus 3mm-thick sheet matches up with the 197mm-wide wall: It does! I then used masking tape to fit four walls to one of the floor pieces to double-check it all worked before cutting out any more pieces. Easily big enough for some interior divisions if needed, although that would stop the smaller blocks stacking inside: I'm happy. This one will get stuck together tomorrow morning before I head off to Nurgleonbass's club for a couple of Infinity games against new opponents. Even with really accurate gluing the wall ends are going to show on the corners, this one will be used as a test to see if the 'concrete' effect from the planters will cover it, otherwise I'll have to order in some 4x4mm right-angle plasticard profile to cover the corners. This will also be used to test the door and window sizes/positions that I'm thinking of using. The basic construction is done, although the large flat areas of the roof and two of the exterior walls probably needs some kind of detailing. If you go down to the shed today, you're sure of a big surprise... As you can see, the window height is pretty good for visibility (20mm above the outside ground & 20mm high) thanks to the added height of the model's bases and the extra 2mm of the interior floor. The back door is also visible in these shots: Game-wise I'm not sure about numbers of windows and doors per building, presumably a mix would be best.
I'd been thinking about openable doors for some time - flat sheet looks boring, using strip to add frames etc. is hard to do accurately in large quantities, bought ones works out very expensive for a whole tables-worth of buildings. One idea I'd had was to add a slot down each side of the interior doorframe and then slot in some thick card or 1mm sheet with a printed door stuck to each side - fast, fairly cheap and looks reasonable - then you can open the door by taking off the roof and removing the door from the slot, close it by putting it back. So last night I added the two slots, but then realised that some micro-corrugated card would fit into the slots perfectly, making instant roller shutter. The slots are formed by taking some 2mm sheet and gluing it 5mm out from the doorframe, then some 1mm sheet and gluing it about 2.5mm out from the doorframe, so that the slots aren't easily visible from the outside but still have plenty of overlap to hold the door material. Bend the corrugated card a bit and it even curves over at the top and can be opened from the outside with a fingernail, without removing the roof! In hindsight the use of micro-corrugated card was inspired by Warseer's Bugbait and also some of the photos in the Infinity books, but I'm still proud of the idea of making a working roller door. Paint - for now, I think it looks pretty good as-is, but as already mentioned we'll try making it look like concrete with a layer of Sandtex on the outside. The interior will presumably get a grey undercoat and a slight bit of airbrush shading in the corners but that's all. The roller door could either be left as it is or painted rusty metal and should still be flexible enough. I assembled another block yesterday morning, before heading up to Bristol for a couple of Infinity games against new people: The 'new' one doesn't have roller shutters or door control panels, seeing the two side by side it's amazing how 'unfinished' it looks without them. I'll try and do a proper side by side shot later today. Assorted photos. Seeing what some L-profile plasticard would look like on the corners: The placement jig and strips for another roller door: And a side by side (or one over other) shot comparing the same basic structure with and without roller door and door control panel: Ignore the plastic bags, I was using the buildings to transport the car park... Cutting - lots and LOTS* of practice! Always using a steel rule to cut against, held in place firmly, and always use a really sharp knife - rather than a craft knife I use a Swann-Morton scalpel and replace the blades often. The blade is narrower than all those snap-off blades which means it's weaker but easier to draw through the material. Also, always make lots of shallow cuts instead of trying to cut through in one go. For the windows you have to make sure that you're always cutting away from the corner, so each window involves eight lots of cutting, and the door needs four (down one side, down one side, across the top from the left, across from right). Another important step is instead of marking out each individual piece, mark and cut one really accurately and then use it as a template to mark out all the other identical pieces. *For a couple of years I ran a 42"/1067mm inkjet printer in the local university's art & design department, when it came to degree show time I'd go through 30-40 square metres of foamboard in a month. After a big cutting session yesterday I have floor, wall and roof pieces for another four 200mm square buildings and eight 155mm square buildings cut out. They still need windows and doors cutting out, but that's a lot of building on the way! Gluing takes 10-15 minutes per building, so the basic shapes should come together quite quickly. Adding roller door guides takes another 10-15 minutes, though.
December 2010 I put together one of the 155mm buildings, timing how long the different tasks took: Marking the door and window positions (from a template), cutting out two doorways and a window - 14m. Assembling the floor & four walls, adding corner stops on the underside of the roof - 12m. Adding doorway guides & cutting out roller shutters - 13m. So about 40m all-in. This will probably go down if I do the marking and cutting in batches. The result? Stacking Russian Doll's-houses! Here is the unfinished 200mm building from the other side, giving a better view of the Rhino-sized loading entry: Unfortunately we also have the first casualty - the buildings were all held together in a pack with rubber bands and full of toy cars for easy transport when they fell about 40cm off a couple of figure cases and landed on a table point-first! A dented bottom corner and the upper part of the corner has ripped apart. However this should be easily glued (note that the PVC has snapped rather than the glue joint!) and when I got home and checked, it was 1.2kg weight that had fallen on that one small point - so it did quite well considering. Having realised that I had no small (smaller than 600x600mm) pieces of 1mm and 2mm PVC apart from what had been cut as building pieces, I realised that it was time to go cut some 50mm and 100mm strips that could be further cut down as needed. Then I could start on batch-producing short strips for the roller door guides: The damaged and now repaired 'garage' now has shutters, this time in brown rather than orange, with the usual suspects to show scale. It wasn't until I put them side-by-side that I spotted that the Clockmaker and RT Guard gunner were both looking at their watches... Unfortunately the big door is 2mm too short for a modern Rhino model, thanks to my forgetting the thickness of the floor. Oops, but it still works as a loading bay and anything less bulky fits in easily. Something I'd not mentioned yet is that there is more going on with the door positioning than is immediately visible - some of them are positioned so that several buildings can be joined up with interior doors: I got some templates done. First comes the marking-up, using a set-square: I've been planning out a guide to cutting PVC & foamboard and realised that it has to be split in two - marking-up is a whole subject of it's own! To go with the 'normal' window and door setup I'm also going to do some mirror-image ones so that we can place buildings together and have both the doorway and window line up. However it's not a straight mirror-image as they would be 3mm out due to the construction method: Garage door template: Two templates for the medium size 155mm buildings, the first is the one that will match up with the larger buildings.
Blatantly ripped from JonnyM who in turn blatantly ripped it from my magnetised Nomads thread... The magnetic ramp/stairs! JonnyM's idea was to have a ramp with metal washers underneath, so that models with magnets in the bases could stand on the slope without sliding down or falling over. My twist is to add a little wedge with magnets underneath, so that non-magnetised models can also be placed anywhere on the slope. It still looks a bit odd, but should be very practical in gaming terms. The alternative was trying to make one of Antenociti's 'undercut staircase that the bases can slot into' affairs but I planned that out and it was getting quite complex. With buildings: Pure chance rather than planning, but it looks like two ramps should fit snugly into one of the 155mm buildings. Which reminds me, I need to cut down the walls for the remaining 155mm buildings so that they are 3mm lower and therefore able to fit into the 200mm buildings without raising the roof... Terrain from last week's game. The far building is 155mm but looks bigger because the roof from the middle building was on it while I moved models around the interior: There were a few fire corridors from the top of the hill (Line Kazak with AP HMG ) on the right down through the shipping containers because they'd all been set parallel, but apart from that it was almost all short-range firefights - my Lunokhod even got into Heavy Flamethrower range without generating any AROs on the way: And then fluffed it by trying to flame again, forgetting that one of the two targets was unconscious/prone from the first flame and was therefore out of LoF, lying there until the Doctor arrived. The Lunokhod had by then been disabled by the extra ARO shots. We'd classed the taller rock spires as too crumbly to be climbed, and nobody even attempted to go up the tower because the ladder was in full view of the HMG tucked in behind the brow of the hill... We're now up to four of the smaller 155mm buildings and three of the 200mm ones, this is really starting to bulk up our table layouts: Note the huge fire corridor down the middle, neatly capped off with a large red container and a windowless wall. Someone on Warseer asked for some photos of how the buildings can be combined, so here goes. All seven buildings neatly packed into a box: The newer 155mm buildings have been made short enough to fit inside the 200mm ones: With a ramp inside the 155mm building: Two-storey, note that against something that's actually orange, the Tomcat's gun looks more normal in colour: Assorted side-by-side versions, but these tend to end up with very few external doors or windows: However combining with an offset opens things up a bit: In other news, a friend has given me a big box full of ring/jewellery boxes, which make good crates when placed upside down, and great painting holders for models with magnetised bases.
Minor update. Tuesday evening's table - look no cars! Plus one of the ring cases with a bit of added detailing, ready to be undercoated when it finally stops raining... The test 'ring-crate' is now painted up: In between snow showers I gave it a black undercoat then oversprays of grey and white primer which gave it a nice speckled appearance - the cold helped with that. The frame then got a coat of boltgun metal followed by a thick wash of devlan mud mixed with watered down chaos black, while the panels got some layered streaks of devlan mud. The slightly thickened remnants of the black wash were then used to paint in a few darker shadows in the corners of the frame and a few touches in the lower corners of the panels. Finally, the control panel got some white blobs, then painted red & green. After a long period I've come back to the modular tiles again, in preparation for a game this Saturday: The aim is to have six tiles with the foamboard stuck down so that we can test LoF etc. The foamboard for the roundabout is now cut up, now it's time to get out the glue...
January 2011 A bunch of table shots from yesterday's battle report showing different areas of the table, including a photo of the tiles by themselves at the end: It does look like I'll have to add plywood sheet of the bottoms to counteract the upward curl, and 1mm foamed PVC to all the edges to stop the edges getting dented. A minor update - we now have five of the large 200mm buildings and five of the medium size, although I still need to add roller doors and switches to one of each. This is now getting to the point where the buildings cover a lot of the mid-ground of a 6x4' table. I forgot to take a shot of the whole table, but here is the centre, with a Djanbazan/UM Viridian Colonial Marines Link Team advancing across it in different directions: I'm down to the last few pre-cut walls and will have to cut more soon, but first I need to cut down the remaining 'medium' walls as the strip they were cut from was the edge of one of the strips and they're too squashed along that edge for butt-joints: The top piece is the new size, these small buildings will be 120mm square by 66mm high, fitting inside the medium buildings with a bit of room left over: After cutting down the walls that had crushed ends, here's one of the small walls with a model for scale: Stacking Russian Doll's Houses! I started gluing the plywood sheets to the bottoms of the 600mm tiles and quickly realised that I simply couldn't get enough weight on them to flatten them, so dug out the clamps and ratchet straps instead. Because some of the clamps were quite short this limited it to three tiles: Plus some assorted table shots including a wooded table: A bit more scenery now. I now have a bag containing about a dozen plastic balls, quite a good size for storage tanks. Here's a quick test glued into an upside-down pot: With a strip of thin card around the circumference to hide the mould line and some detailing on the lower part in the form of pipes, access hatches etc. this should look OK and be quick to put together.
