Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Necromunda scenery sessions started & How to get surface structure onto your floors!

Hi all!

In the last weekends my friend and me started with building Necromunda scenery. In total we spend 3 evenings, the first mainly discussing what we want to do how, e.g., usage of a common height for the different levels (3 inch) and that we wanted to have some cover on each level. In addition, we plan to build barricade-like terrain pieces to add cover in various places for each individual game and get more variation possibilities. The same with bridges, we want to have many bridges to connect buildings in lots of different possible ways. So the buildings have to be open enough, also such that we could reach inside miniatures easily with our big hands! ;-)
In general, the idea was to encourage usage and battles on different levels during the games, in particular we want to avoid that everything is just happening on the ground-floor. This was my friend's experience with his Mortheim sessions many years ago...

So you see there is a lot to think about when building scenery for tabletop! I would be curious to hear of your experience and opinions about these issues, so let us know! ;-)

Anyway, during quite some time already, I was collecting lots of stuff, trash, everything that could be taken away and be used for cool scenery. Then finally we started, here are the first 2 buildings each of us has done. They are unpainted yet. Therefore you can see what material we have used...





And now 2 tricks to do surface patterns or structure on your floors of cardboard, wood or styrofoam or whatever:

1. As you can see on the picture above, I wanted to have a typical industrial floor, namely stud plates (?, in German: Tränenblech). Anyway, you can see how it looks like. Now, these plates can be bought ready to use in any good architecture shop (for the cute model houses they are building), but they are freaking expensive!!! 20* 30 cm for 20 Euro. That is too much for a poor student like me! ;-) Therefore I found this trick on a modelers homepage (sorry I forgot where exactly): You buy one small piece of this architecture plates and use aluminium foil. You imprint the pattern into the foil either with a press (as described on that homepage) or you use your finger nails! ;-) As I did below, and scratch into the 2 different directions of this structure...


Then you just need some glue to fill the pattern as well as possible:
 And voila! That is it, 24 hours later you have a nice industrial floor! ;-) Of course, there is one big drawback (as always): it is only thin alu foil, so it is quite easy to get stains and dents into it. But hey, it is supposed to look very old and used, no?!

 Here you can see, the 2 buildings we have done (if you can look closely enough to actually spot them in this chaos! ;-))

And here comes the trick my friend "invented", so all credits to him! Out of scurity, his name will remain secret! ;-)

This one is really easy, much faster and with a sturdier result: when we bought potatos for dinner (as Germans usually eat! ;-)) we got them in a yellow plasitc net. So the trick: Just take this net, cut it to the right size and glue it with, e.g., Ponal onto the surface. And voiila!



Ah, ja and here the second buildings...


Can't wait to fight in this scenery (or better my gang)!!!

What tricks do you use to get fast and cool scenery in an affordable way?

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