- This topic has 39 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 3 days, 21 hours ago by
.
-
It came to m, as the fellow says, in a moment of aberration. Using some leftover bits from other projects and some print and play buildings I’m doing a teeny tiny city for an experiment.
That’s asphalt texture applied to some square plywood with contact adhesive. Next I’m going to do a street grid, appropriately scaled for 3mm combat.Out of curiosity, I often see skewed city streets on people’s urban game mats. What do you think of that? It’ll make the tiles less modular of course, but it seems stylish. I guess the idea is so that two people sitting across from each other don’t get straight shots down a street towards each other? What do people think of straight versus skewed city tiles?
Oh I see.
Not sure what I prefer, though I suspect roads going off on a diagonal would make me want to go down them more right angled or straight roads.
The feel more urgent somehow.
I decided to dive in and start playing around, since I have a lot of this material and it’s going begging otherwise. Ruined one of my tiles with some masking tape which tore off the paper surface, but the second try was more successful.
Ruined one of my tiles with some masking tape which tore off the paper surface,
Bummer, can you go over the tear with roads to hide it?
Played around with the city tiles a little but they kind of lost their flavor. In looking for other bits and pieces I came across some old foam packing blocks from a box I had to build years ago for an architectural model. In the theme of doing some one off terrain with stuff I don’t have to buy, I pulled out the ol d hot wire foam cutter and started breaking them down in the manner to which I am accustomed, and cut a few landforms as tests. This might have some more mileage, and at least is a good way to waste a little time after a rough week.
Again aiming for small games with a little modularity. These tiles admittedly aren’t going to be quite as compact but the bones are good. Once I did some Terrainmaker hexes from GHQ only to find well into the project that they were all skewed and didn’t line up properly, which was quite the bummer. However the techniques there seem to be analogous to what I’m doing here. And of course, these squares, being uniformly pressed and angle cut, may suit the modular requirement better, and will give me a square edge like my obsessive mind craves.I also found some black craft paper which I may use to edge the tiles and give them a little bit of toughness along the corners. Although I also think I have some foam coat somewhere, have to go looking – that would toughen them up as well.
Well I now have a nice stack of 10cm square, 15mm thick foam blocks and am putting together some land forms. I also am trying this: in my garage I found a roll of mass-loaded neoprene foam, which is used to line toolboxes. It gives a little heft to the tiles annd gives them a little bit of slip resistance, although not much since they’re so lightweight to begin with. It also raises them about 1/16” so I would only use them on the base layer tiles, not the stacking ones. I’m mulling it over – it certainly is a clean look.
So I found another pack of foam at my office – I bought too much way back when, and as it turns out, it came from different sources. And this second pack is, shall we say, “slightly irregular.” The blocks are smaller than the other ones, have dinged edges and a lot of marring from pressure. I was worried it would just be more waste – back in the closet for another five years until I have to build another 1/16″ scale model and ship it to another country – but then, another item from the old days came to hand, the “Hex Terrain Toolkit,” which I bought into some years back but then never really managed to figure out. The biggest problem for me then was that you had to punch holes through the hexes to align the jig, which was messy, time-consuming, and left me with crumbly holes in my terrain plates. However, I am finding that the irregular blocks are just right to cut hexes out of them, and so far at least flat enough on one side to align the hex jig by hand. With a little care, I have been able to make this:
And this is most satisfactory as an evolution of my thinking here, not to speak of a decent way to salvage some foam that was not working otherwise. I have yet to determine if I will recut my other square blocks as hexes now – the foam is slightly different in consistency – this stuff is slightly softer. Either way it’s a fun exploration – and it harkens back to my TerrainMaker project, with the difference being that these hexes actually align with each other quite neatly! It will be fun to try to make this work.Cut up the whole stack of foam, and here’s a keen side effect: they fit perfectly on a puzzle board I have. Very acceptable so far!
I took a stab at using the hex kit for carving some slopes and almost immediately broke one of the pieces. What a pain. Those considering it, be aware that it’s built way too tight and as a result needs a ton of “working” to go together, during aging time parts are most likely to get broken.
Regardless, I am finding I like the results of freehanded slopes, anyway. This is after all an alien planet I’m modeling, so some rougher terrain suits me. So far it “feels” right.
This was a good Sunday’s work!I’ll have to give that a try!
For now, this is what my land forms are looking like – talus and dunes mostly.
OK, so I have a decent modular setup pretty much down. I have been playing a little with special forms like buttes, but I’m not there yet – they look suitably “alien” but I’m not quite sure they’re what I want to depict on this battlefield so I’m still experimenting. Stacked rock formations were interesting but not what I was after – that goes in the box for later. And I’m attempting to seal these hexes with Mod Podge, which I’ve never tried but word has gotten back from those who have that it’s what I want for a basic liquid coating that doesn’t require any special mixing or activators. So I think it’s time to get technical about what parts I want in my basic set and what I need to complete it, and so I did a quick spreadsheet:
The “blocks” are 4x4x2 craft foam blocks I had, and they have been easy to cut and pretty reliably cut up into three final tiles for each block. And luckily, between what I have left and what I have already made, this is very attainable with material on hand (I think – I might need to break down and source some more, but not until I totally exhaust my supply). So for starters I am going to fill in this list, seal it, flock and paint it, and see what kind of battlefield I have at the end of that. If I need more, I will then adjust the list. The quantities are based in part on the old Geo-Hex box sets, two of which I have and love, but which are definitely too large for 3mm scale use – forms and shapes are too far apart. But as a basic kit of parts, I think it’ll suit. I altered the quantities a little just eyeballing it, so I don’t yet know if it’ll really be enough of one or the other part in practice, but you have to start somewhere!
For my expansion, down the line, I’ll have three-level slopes and escarpments (I’m not sure if I will need that, but maybe), and then rivers/wadi hexes, and then I’ll probably do some moveable hexes of forest or jungle as hex toppers. A big unknown is also how I’ll handle roads. My mind’s eye sees each of the flat hexes as reversible, with road on one side and blank on the other, but I’m not 100% sure I can pull that off. It’ll depend on how well the sealer works and what’s left to work with after that, whether I want to make the roads an actual rutted surface or if I’ll just model it with a special paint job.
Selected a color palette for this one. I went with an ochrey desert and got some cheap sample pots from the hardware store.
Also found that Mod Podge will likely be exactly what I’m after. It’s not like sealing in plastic as some people have said but it is a nice, consistent finish, and above all it stiffens the edges of the foam very effectively, giving the tiles a nice, durable edge, which is always the first part to accumulate damage. The alternative I tried was Foam Coat, which is super dense but has to be mixed up from a powder, is a colossal mess, and is more of a paste than a liquid, which adds more body to the hexes than I want. I want to keep the edges nice and tight.
Have to go overseas this week, yet again, but I feel like this is getting on track.
And this is my final test hex. I’m very satisfied with the look. It’s got a very good weight with all the sand and paint on it, and all it needs is one top coat of matte sealer. The ochre desert is exactly the color I’ve been looking for, and it’s mottled with the other browns and highlights to keep it from being too uniform.
So I had a lot of nervous energy to work off after last week so I branched this project off in a second direction. While waiting for a batch of 10cm hexes to dry, I decided to try some 4cm hexes as well, for a truly “travel sized” experience. The outcome has been pretty excellent so far. These will each have a little strip of magnetic printer paper under them, which is enough to hold them firmly to a sheet of stainless steel. The battlefield is thus 12” x 12”.
The mottled color leans more heavily on the yellow ochre than the base brown which I think is a better look.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
