Painted scenery

What a fun day today. We played two games of One Page Rules - Grimdark Future, each with 2000 point armies. Robots vs Humans. The first time using my own fully painted miniatures for the humans.

I had been rushing over the last couple of weekends to get some scenery painted and some terrain pieces finished so we have less unfinished scatter on the battle mat.

I've designed and printed some modular gothic building pieces and put together some simple foliage, based on plastic plants. 

The bulk of the plant pieces are based on faux moss. This proved difficult to work with. The structure was far too loose, I would not buy it again for terrain modelling. It took a lot of watered down PVA to give it any strength which I did not think would dry in time, but it did, just.

I'm pleased with the buildings. The inspiration comes from Notre Dame in Paris and St Vitus Cathedral in the castle in Prague. I've used OpenLOCK clips to join parts together to have different building shapes from the same component pieces.

I found it difficult to get a consistent paint effect over all the pieces, but the end result still looks good when setup on the table.

OpenLOCK

OpenLOCK clips are open-source released by Printable Scenery. As far as I can tell, the original intended use was for 3D floor plans but they also work for scenic buildings. For tabletop wargames it is inconvenient to have a step up to the ground floor level, so I have adapted the layout of clips to suit the scenery that I wanted. Mainly, this is so that there are clips to hold upper storeys together and no need for a ground floor layer. I have stuck, near enough, to imperial inch sizes and spacing.

My layouts are based on a 3" (76.2mm) square wall section. It also works down to 1" wide.

I have used 1" (25.4mm) spacing between centres horizontally but to avoid overlap of the sockets I had to use 19mm (3/4") spacing vertically. I deliberately wanted them to print without supports and without the break-off mini-pillars used in the original example files.

As the sockets are 4.2mm wide, the minimum wall thickness that I could have used is about 7mm, however, for a bit of extra strength, I've gone with 8mm thick walls.

So far, I've been able to design everything to print without supports on my FDM printer using PETG filament.

Scale Anomalies

I struggle with accepting the scale creep of miniatures. Years ago a popular size for tabletop miniatures was called 25mm and now they have crept up to 32mm. Generally referred to as 28mm. 

The following is how I rationalise it so that I can work with consistent rules.

1:56 Characters: The notional size is 28mm to a normal human's eye height, which is a top of the head height of about 32mm for say a  5'10" (178cm) tall person. To the nearest common model scale, that works out about 1:56.

1:35 Buildings and vehicles: These look too small at 1:56 scale, probably because of the exaggerated features of many of the models and that they sit on, typically, 4mm thick bases. I find a scale of 1:40 works better for most scenery. The most appropriate common model scale is 1:35. This puts the 3" tall ceiling height at about 2.7m (9') and garden walls and low hedges that look right are about 30mm to 35mm (1.25") tall.

Knowing this, helps me design models to suit.

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