Having moved at the start of this year I’ve been sorting and reorganizing gaming stuff, as one does, and working on actually using some of the stockpile of stuff I’ve accumulated.
Part of the stockpile was a much wider array of greenery and model plant type material than I had thought I had. I also had a batch of sci-fi planters I had started back in January 2015, painted, and used a lot during Infinity games without ever putting greenery in.
A few minutes with the hot glue gun has finally fixed that!
Shrubbery in progress. Click for larger, see text for details!
The little trees are from Woodland Scenics; I won them as a door prize at Trumpeter Salute a couple of weeks ago. Most of the bushes are just various shades of green foliage foam also from Woodland Scenics, while the spiky looking blueish bushes are actually furnace filter material, spraypainted green, and with fine ground foliage foam sprinkled onto them. Many years ago (like, in the early 1990s…) we had a family model train layout and our background trees were made from furnace filter. The stuff I’m using is from a bag of the surviving, salvaged railroad trees, finally back in service after a couple of decades off!
Completed shrubbery, with Infinity Hassassin Bahram figures observing. Click for larger, as usual.
Looking forward to getting these onto our Infinity tables; Infinity has a bunch of cool terrain rules that are often ignored but can really make the game more interesting.
One of the goals with the spacestation terrain set was to make the whole thing look like not just a collection of tactically interesting obstacles but also a (relatively) sensible, lived-in/working facility. Right now the non-cargo bay area is a bit plain, really just the Impudent Mortal walls in my collection arranged in various ways. I did up some lockers recently to add colour and interesting cover, and now I’ve found a really simple way to do food booths or other fairly small terrain pieces.
Rough cutting guide for one booth. See text for details, and click for larger.
Start with a strip of card 3″ wide and at least 11″ long, or multiple 3″ wide pieces making up roughly the same length. I use 1/16″ mattboard, the stuff used by picture framers, but for this project you could use just about anything. There’s only one measurement in the whole thing that depends on the thickness of the material being used (the height of the front wall of the booth) and that’s easily adjustable or even avoidable if you tweak the design a bit.
You’re cutting as follows:
1″ wide for the under-floor brace/foot. Cut this piece in half again.
1 1/2″ floor
1 1/2″ roof
1 3/4″ back wall
1 9/16″ front wall (NOTE)
2″ end wall
2″ end wall
One booth’s worth of pieces. See text for details, and click for larger.
Start by gluing the two foot pieces to the underside of the floor. Centre it under the floor — exact placement isn’t important, they just exist to lift the front edge of the booth above ground level and add a bit of visual interest. Note that in the layout photo below, I forgot to allow for the foot pieces, as I’m using that scrap of 1/8″ foamed PVC plastic above the card strip instead.
While that dries a bit, cut the two end walls some more to make them interesting. They stand vertically, and you can see from the photos that I’ve cut each in a different way to add variety and provide support for the booth’s large overhead sign(s). You don’t need to get fancy, just a couple of angled cuts can do nicely, especially if you re-use the offcut pieces again as I’ve done on several of the roofs in my set.
Glue the back wall to the back of the floor, with the bottom edge of it resting on the ground. Use the end walls to make sure the back wall is vertical and square, then glue them on, again with the bottom edges resting on the ground.
Floor on it’s foot and back wall in place, side walls cut. See text for details, and click for larger.
Fit the front wall in between the end walls, again making sure it’s square and vertical. Exact placement isn’t important and will depend on how you intend to detail the front wall. I’ve recessed all my front walls and used various offcuts of card to add a few bits of detail. I figure these are automated booths using various machinery to process FoodGoop9000 (or possibly Soylent Green…) into various forms of fast “food” by adding flavour, so there’s no order window or anything specific on the thing.
Basic assembly done, front wall and roof in place. See text for details, and click for larger.
I’ll probably eventually do some graphics to add to the fronts and signs of these booths, including various fast food brands we all know and love like Ariadna Fried Chickenoid and such! They’ll get posted here to the blog when they happen!
Details on front wall and inside the sign supports on the roof, first layer of the sign in front. See text for details, and click for larger.
Glue the roof on last, and put the resulting box aside for the glue to dry a bit. Time to move on to the overhead sign.
This could be as simple as a single strip of the same 3″ wide card you’ve used for the rest of the thing, or any number of more elaborate constructions. If you want a really, really striking sign, there’s H-Archive’s awesome how-to on making “holographic” displays, which I want to follow myself sometime soon!
Extra layers of the sign being held while the glue dries a bit. See text for details, and click for larger.
The curved sign is simply three layers of light card (65lbs, I think it is) cut 1″ high and 3 1/8″ long, just slightly longer than the gap between the vertical bits of the end walls, so that it curves. I glued one strip in place, let it cure for a bit, then gently pushed the second and third strips into place and held them with clothspins until the glue dried. Pre-curving the strips by running them over the edge of my workbench helps.
All three autobooth designs together, with various Hassassin Bahram troopers posing for scale. Click for larger.
The grid on the roofs of my booths is some sort of embroidery/craft mesh stuff that I got a leftover chunk of from my girlfriend. It adds interesting texture if you can get some, or something similar like the plastic mesh used in window and door screens.
The Manned Booth
The fourth and final booth is a variant design that is actually run by a person (or humanoid robot, you never know in Infinity) with a door in one end wall and an open order window/bar in one side wall.
Manned booth assembled, roof off. Click for larger.
Design is identical to the autobooths above except I cut two of the “back walls” and instead of cutting the roof 1.5″ I cut it 1 5/8ths” wide so it would go over the top edges of the walls properly.
Manned booth, roof on. Click for larger.
The inside is outfitted with various bits of card for the bar counter, a side bar/prep table, and a whole bunch of cupboards along the walls.
The outside end walls will eventually be painted and decorated to look like drinks glasses, and there will be a sign of some sort on the roof, although of slightly different design than the autobooths because this roof actually comes off.
Any comments or suggestions please leave them below, I do read and reply to comments but due to the spam filters it might be a while before I approve your comment!
Finally have all six of the big space station wall sections basically complete and primed. All the doors are installed (several sections have sliding doors), the basic layer of surface detail is down, and one side of each is primed dark grey and the other is white.
I’ll gradually add more coloured graphics like the corner piece has, both warning and info labels and ads. There’s also going to be more paint colour on various bits eventually, but for now white and grey is enough.
The control room module has ladders on either side from Warsenal, which they listed and sold separately as recently as late last year but don’t seem to have listed for separate sale anymore. Pity, because they’re nice little lasercut acrylic pieces and dress up the control room nicely – much easier than attempting to make my own damn ladders!
I’m really please with the new corner piece. It can be used both as a corner, as in two of the photos above, and as an angled offset to create more LOS breaks in long runs of the wall modules. It’s also the same footprint (3″x3″) as the elevator tower I’ve built for this set, so the two of them can offset each other. Fewer odd little gaps in the wall setups!
The only major pieces left to do are one or two more regular corner modules and a few more pillar pieces, but with major work done on the full set of big modules I can get to the extra bits and details in a slightly more relaxed way!
Got my in-progress space station setup for Infinity games out on the table today, as one of two tables set up for a very small (four players!) local Infinity tournament.
Space station setup first outing at Everything Games. Click for larger.
Space station setup from a different corner. Click for larger.
It was well received and the other folks had some good ideas for finishing it – breaking up the line of sight down the access tunnels and making it clearer where the ladders are, for example, as well as an idea for a smaller module to offset some of the lines and make it less strongly linear, which I might incorporate.
I’ve got some grey felt that I’m probably going to cut a 4’x4′ mat out of, and I want to do a whole lot more painting and surface detailing of the big hangar wall modules. Need to get more grey spraypaint first, as my current can ran dry while I was putting a base coat on these pieces last night!
I’ve posted a test print of some printed space station walls previously but after finding a nice batch of Sintra (1/8th foamed PVC plastic board) in the offcuts bin at my useful local plastic supplier I decided to start that project with some larger, more space-consuming pieces and started building a set of six big wall modules.
These are 12″ long, 6″ high, and designed as hangar or cargo bay walls. Six of them plus a couple of pillars will allow me to section off a 2′ by 2′ area of table, run a line of wall clear across the table, or do a number of other interesting arrangements. I’ll also do a few end-cap pillars so we can have stub walls if desired.
The design incorporates an “access tunnel” across the top of each wall that is 30mm wide and 30mm deep; there will be hatchways on each wall module to access it. I wanted to provide alternate ways of getting around the table and give players options for moving through the walls aside from the doors. Similarly, each module except the one with one single huge 6″x4″ door has at least two doors in it. Doors are always going to be chokepoints in scenery like this, there’s no avoiding that, but at least with multiple doors and hatchways per module that effect is somewhat limited.
Basic construction is done on five of the six modules; the sixth is going to be a variant of the very first, with a huge 6″x4″ door in it. All of the large doorways will have built-in sliding doors installed, and I’m planning some freestanding doors on small stands for the human-sized doors. After that it’ll be on to the more human-scaled portions of the space station terrain, but this is a good start!
I picked up a pack of Impudent Mortal’s Near Future Elevator Set, as mentioned in a previous post, and thought I’d put a few pictures up and do a bit of a review.
First, I have to say that Walt, the man behind Impudent Mortal, is awesome to deal with. He’s incredibly quick to reply to emails, worked with me to figure out the best way to ship his stuff to Canada (the US Postal Service having recently cranked it’s foreign rates to moderately silly levels) and I look forward to doing more business with him and his company in the future!
So on to the elevators. They’re laser cut from a mix of 3mm MDF and 1/16th cardboard (greyboard), which gives them some nice details and makes them slightly finer-grained than some of the scenery out there that just uses MDF. The base, walls, and door frames are MDF, while the doors are layered cardboard and card is used for details on the interior walls and floor as well as around the door frame.
Each elevator — you get two in the pack — is 3.75″ wide across the doors, 3.5″ long, and 2 1/8″ tall. There’s 11 pieces of MDF total and about 28 total pieces of greyboard, that count being inflated by the fact that the grilles that detail the floor are all separate pieces, 16 of them.
There are also eight small control panels of laser cut acrylic, which go in the openings on either side of the doors. They’re not visible in any of my photos because I haven’t installed them yet; they’ll go in dead last after I’m finished all painting and weathering.
Everything fits together with the ease we’ve come to expect from laser cut scenery, and while most pieces are pretty obvious in their placement and function, dry-fitting and testing as you go (before applying glue!) is always advised.
The doors slide in and out of the door frames vertically and fit very well, loose enough to actually move but snug enough not to fall out while transporting or handling the piece. Each door is three pieces of cardboard, so it has details on both the inside and outside and they’re reversible, which is nice.
One thing I couldn’t initially find on the IM site is the actual instructions for these elevators; turns out they’re tucked into the ITS and Paradiso Scatter Terrain Instructions PDF as that was the set they were originally part of.
I’ll post more pictures on a future post once I’ve gotten some paint on my elevators. Two is probably enough for any single tabletop so I’m not sure I’ll order more, but I’m very pleased with them; they’re unique cover items for an Infinity table and provide more options and opportunity than the classic packing crate or cargo container. They’ll look great as scatter on the space station terrain I’ve been working on!
If IM ever decide to do more of this style of terrain, the sort of thing you might find in a space station or cargo facility, I’d be very interested.
I’ve been kicking around ideas for an interior table setup for Infinity for several months now – that is, a table that instead of being buildings and regular terrain, is entirely or mostly the interior of some large structure. A big starship or space station setup was an obvious choice, especially as the faction I run in Infinity, Haqqislam, is described as the premiere merchant marine power with a very strong space presence throughout the Human Sphere.
I had already planned on doing the station walls & bulkheads in mattboard, my usual building material, but finding those textures and realizing how easy they would be to modify and change has actually prompted me to get started in GIMP on creating wall panels and other graphics.
First panel, a 6″ wide by 3″ high bulkhead, with two Haqqislam troopers propping it up. Click for larger, as usual.
I’ve created a multi-layer GIMP image that should make it easy to create lots of variations and slightly different wall layouts for different areas of the space station. The basic module above is 6″ long and 3″ wide; I’m going to use a 3″x3″ module as standard, expanded to a 3x3x3 cube if required, with 6″ and 12″ long wall segments for the most part, with some 9″ and 3″ long pieces just to break things up a bit. These are the same dimensions as the Objective Room I built for Infinity earlier this year, which wound up with a total footprint of 9″x9″ and 3″ tall.
I’ll also do some 6″ high units, especially for very large cargo doors and the walls of cargo areas, hangars, and similar large spaces. Most of them will likely have catwalks partway up the walls, just to add a bit more of the 3rd dimension back into the playable parts of the scenery.
More as this project progresses, and eventually I’ll figure out how to share some of my images, although the working GIMP file is already 7.8Mb and growing!
Simple dugout for the goblin-themed Blood Bowl pitch-side set I’m doing; there will be another dugout similar to this for the other team, and the turn- and reroll-trackers will be done up to look like spectator terraces/stands.
Coffee stir sticks, mostly, over a plastic base. Click for full size, as usual.
The basic structure is coffee stir sticks over a plastic sheet base; the hoarding along the back will have ads on both sides, similar to the ones used on the scoreboard and some others I’ve been working on.
More soon, although I’m packing up all the gaming stuff before the end of the year to move into a new apartment with my girlfriend, so that will (among other things!) disrupt the finishing of this set of scenery. Also, Christmas, New Years, all that holiday stuff. Still, updates will appear here when I can!
The base of the new Blood Bowl scoreboard is now covered in sand, painted, and flocked. I might still add some additional foliage or other details to the base, but it’s perfectly usable as is and I’m willing to declare it finished and move on!
Base finished on the scoreboard. Click for larger.
Instead of puttying around the strip of plexi in the centre of the base I used matchstick-sized wood strips and made it look like rough timber foundations. I also put a wooden boardwalk across the front; I figure that’ll be a good hangout for markers or sideline figures for the stuff like cheerleaders, apothecaries, wizards, or other BB sideline addons.
I’m still brainstorming how to do team dugouts and turn- and reroll-tracks to match this scoreboard, but I should the details figured out by this weekend and then they, like this scoreboard, should be fairly quick and simple builds. After that, the more involved project is going to be doing a new fabric pitch, probably on the back of the current lizard-themed fabric pitch I made last winter.
Decided that my Blood Bowl Goblin team, currently glorying in the name of T.U.R.D. (what that stands for changes every single game they play…) needed a scoreboard, to use as substitute to my existing Lizardman temple BB setup.
Goblins have an reputation for being clever but not smart, and for lunatic behaviour at the best of times. This presumably explains why they attempt to play Blood Bowl at all, and excuses all sorts of things like really shoddy carpentry. With that in mind, I broke out the craft wood and set to work!
Goblin BB scoreboard in progress. Three billboards for colour, and the actual scoreboard part two-thirds of the way up. Weather indicator will go between the two score placards. Click for larger.
The main structure is coffee stir sticks, with basswood strips for the big vertical beams. The eventual plan is to have small rare earth magnets behind the scoreboard, embedded in a wood beam, to hold magnetic strip score number placards in place, and to have a smaller weather placard in between the two scores. There’s still some details to add, like “US” and “THEM” labels above the two score areas, and possibly a small announcers stand right at the top of the whole thing, some sort of rickety crowsnest with a raving goblin announcer howling away.
The base has a strip of scrap acrylic with two holes drilled in it to support two bits of wire that go up into holes in the bottoms of the legs, holding everything solidly, and then some scrap plastic to expand the footprint a bit more. I’ll putty along the edge of the acrylic to blend everything together and strengthen things further.
Three trolls and the scoreboard. You can see the rickety walkway in front of the actual scoreboard part here.
The second image has all three of my trolls, all still very much works in progress. Left and centre troll are the same figure, with some fairly extensive arm surgery on the left hand troll to give him a different pose than the stock centre troll. All three are Reaper Bones plastic figures, which are awesome for Blood Bowl conversions! You can see the narrow walkway in front of the score panels nicely in this shot, which might get a gobbo scorekeeper perched on it eventually.
More soon; I’m currently out of rare earth magnets and need to restock before I can finish this project the way I’m planning it. That should take place this weekend and then it’ll be fairly simple to finish the rest of the thing!
