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. This was the first time that I had a complete set of my own fully painted miniatures.

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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Light through the trees

I was in the right place at the right time this morning. 

Returning home on my bike ride.

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Track bumper

The Audi R8 that I received from Don for my birthday last July is an excellent car to drive.
It holds the track well and can accommodate a bit of drifting at corners without de-slotting.

It does have a slight issue. The trouble is that its rear fin is a millimeter wider than the rear body. There is one place on the track where it drifts out and the fin regularly gets knocked off. I probably superglue it back on two out of three times I drive it!

To reduce that I have added a couple of extra tyres to the edge of the track.  This is just enough to stop the fin hitting.

Unfortunately while testing I got carried away and although I was no longer able to make it make contact at that corner, it did not stop me getting carried away at another corner, which de-slotted and collided fin first in to the cliff wall. I still had to glue to fin back on!

At least now it takes driver error or obstacles on the track to cause damage!

Scenic Views

The greenery is dry, the grub is vacuumed away and the track is back down.

I've squeezed in so much track there are not many flat areas to park cars. On this corner where there is some space I've cut a couple of slots so the guides of the cars drop down and the wheels stand naturally on the ground.

I have a few more ideas for little touches to add more detail but the big work is all now done.

Shrubbery

A quick photo update of the last two evenings work.

You can see how much watered down PVA glue I'm spraying on by the white tide mark in the above photo. Amazingly, it dries clear by the following morning.

Miniature Lawn

Probably more embankments than lawns but several areas of neat grass before I've added the shrubbery.

The photos show it all.

From this...

Several layers of paint...

I have to plan my days work round the paint drying...

Lots of PVA glue and Woodland Scenics scatter grass...

To this.

The Hills

I've been working on the grassy bits of the scenery for a few weeks.

The hills are made with plaster filler over Modrock plaster of Paris bandages with floral foam as the base.

The floral foam is very easy to shape but it is too fragile on its own.

I tried using filler directly on the foam but the filler sticks to the pallet knife better than the foam. The foam is a good base for Modrock. I then used filler over the Modrock which works well.

A few more stages all with time to dry between each. Paint, scatter grass and then bushes.

With some experimentation I found I prefer to paint on the first layer of PVA glue used to secure the scatter grass. The spray glue is a bit too weak.

The Woodland Scenics tutorials show all the scenery being added in one go but I found if I tried to add bushes before the grass was set then I would mess up the grass. Much easier to wait a day for it to dry.

The last bit is to add back the crash barriers. These just push in to 6mm holes drilled in the MDF base.