Entries tagged [terrainsprue]
Tutorial and Spotlight Article Roundup
Posted on Monday Apr 17, 2017 at 05:00pm in Tutorials
The full list of articles is getting a little unwieldy for a single page, so rather than keep updating an increasingly confusing list here, you can find the full collection of articles broken down by sections in the Hobby area of the Maelstrom's Edge website here!
If you've seen anything here that has lit that modeling flame, you can pick up the various plastic kits currently available in the Maelstrom's Edge range from the webstore here.
Maelstrom's Edge also has a Facebook group, known as 'the Comm Guild', where you can post any questions you have about the rules, the models, or upcoming releases, or share your modeling projects. The group can be found here. We love to see what people are working on, so whether you're a modeling veteran or a complete newcomer to the world of miniature wargaming, feel free to join in.
And in the meantime, stay tuned for the plethora of modeling content that we have still coming down the pipeline!
Tags: buildings conversion models painting terrainsprue tutorial
Terrain Tutorial: Blast Craters
Posted on Monday Apr 10, 2017 at 05:00pm in Tutorials
- by Iain Wilson
Last week, I went through some options for building a few different types of scatter terrain from components on the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue (if you missed it, you can find the article here). There is one other essential piece of scatter terrain that wasn't covered in that article, though: the humble blast crater.
Craters are a ubiquitous component of gaming tables from just about any genre (or at least any that deal with firearms of any kind) and along with those other staples of sci fi gaming - the soup-can storage tank and the spikey-polystyrene-ball cactus - you'll never be gifted the location of the secret lounge of the Terrain Builder's Guild if you don't have at least two or three in your terrain collection.
To get started, you'll want something round and flat to use as a base. Old CDs are perfect, as they're a good size without being too thick, and it saves them from going into landfill.
If you don't have any old CDs or DVDs kicking around, craftboard, cardboard or foamcore will also do the job, although cardboard or foamcore may bow slightly.
Take some air-drying clay (I'm using Jovi Air Dry Modeling Clay) and make a ring that's a little smaller in diameter than the base.
Smooth the clay down onto the base by pressing or rubbing it with your fingers, working around the ring on both the inside and outside and leaving a raised ridge. Don't make it too neat - you want a certain amount of irregularity to avoid the crater looking like a neatly-dug hole. There should be a steeper slope on the outside of the ridge than inside.
While the clay is still soft, add some chunky features. I'm using some leftover scraps from other terrain projects, from the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue. Just push them into the clay wherever seems appropriate. Longer pieces should be angled towards the outer edge, as if they've been pushed there by the explosion.
Air-drying clays aren't generally particularly adhesive, so the parts won't be held in there very firmly. The next step with stick them in place fairly comprehensively, but if you're concerned about them getting knocked around while you're working, you can add a little superglue on the part before pushing it into place.
When the clay dries, it may contract a little and lift up around the edges. You can avoid that by pressing it back down periodically as it dries, but it's not really a big problem - Once the clay has set, you can just chip off any bits that are sticking up more than a couple of millimetres and ignore the rest. The edge will be obscured by the texturing that happens next.
Take some coarse sand/fine gravel mix. I have a pot that has a mix of silversand, sandpit sand, small chips of slate, fine gravel and a little model railway ballast for good measure. You want a bit if a mix of textures for best effect, but if you don't have access to all of that just some regular sand with a little railway ballast or fine gravel mixed in will do just fine.
Into this, mix a generous dollop of PVA glue (also known as Elmer's glue or wood glue) and a little water. You want the mix to be thoroughly wet through, but not runny.
Using a large paintbrush that you're not emotionally attached to (because it's probably not coming back from this) spread a coat of the sand mix over the crater, starting from the middle and working up and over the ridge. That will naturally give you some radial detail running outwards from the blast area. You can accentuate that a little if you want by dragging a toothpick or wooden skewer gently outwards through the sand mix layer.
(If you haven't covered over the hole in the middle of the CD with clay, sticking on a small piece of masking tape before you apply the sand will take care of that.)
Don't worry if the detail looks a little soft at this point. As the glue dries, it will sink in and leave some nice, gritty texture.
Once the sand layer has completely dried, paint up in some suitable colours to match your table. Here, I've used a grey spray undercoat, a coat of Army Painter Strong Tone, and then a drybrush of Vallejo Basalt Grey, Light Grey and white, to match my urban terrain. A little brown drybrushed around in patches helps dirty things up a little, and the terrain sprue parts are painted with Vallejo Beasty Brown, drybrushed with Citadel Boltgun and then washed with Army Painter Strong Tone.
For some variety, use a mix of different base sizes to create different craters.
You can easily customise this basic design through using different sized bases, linking multiple craters together, or using larger or smaller rubble and terrain parts for detail.
And that's all there is to it! If you're feeling inspired, you can check out a bunch of other terrain-building articles by clicking here, or you can pick up the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue (in a handy 2-pack!) from the Maelstrom's Edge webstore here.
And as always, feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!
Tags: terrain terrainsprue tutorial
Terrain Tutorial: Scatter Terrain
Posted on Monday Apr 03, 2017 at 05:00pm in Tutorials
- by Iain Wilson
The Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue is a fantastic resource for detailing scifi buildings made from all sorts of things - You can find a bunch of different ideas and tutorials here. The terrain sprue components are also handy though for making smaller detail pieces to scatter around your gaming tables for a little extra cover. I have previously shared a tutorial for building small shipping containers from a couple of doors, some ladders and a little foamcore (you can find that tutorial here), and this week I thought I would run through a few more small scatter terrain ideas.
First up: Barricades
For this, you'll need one garage door, and two trapezoid windows.
Start by removing the door from the door frame. You can do this with a jeweller's saw or razor saw, or by running around the inside of the frame with a sharp hobby knife from both sides until the door pops out.
This gives you an open door frame that you can use on a building or ruin, and a handy detailed panel that can be cut up as below:
Throw the off-cuts into your bits box (they'll come in handy for a ruin or scrapheap down the track, and the strip of small windows is a nifty bit of detail for a building or other wall feature) and glue the trapezoid windows to the back of the lower section of the door.
Once the glue has set, you have some barriers just perfect for huddling behind and feeling all suppressed.
I've painted these up fairly plain, so that they will fit with whatever sort of table I throw them on. You can easily paint them to match your buildings, or paint on mis-matched panels for more of a ramshackle look.
Next: The Orb!
I picture this device as a 3d map tank, so the ball on top would represent either a hologram or a glass ball with a projection inside.
You will need a square hatch, a large pipe fitting, and a suitable-size marble (the one I've used is around 25mm (1") diameter).
No cutting required on this one - Simply glue the pipe fitting to the top of the square hatch, and put the marble on top. If you hold off on gluing the marble in place until you have painted the base unit, you won't need to worry about cleaning stray paint splatters off the glass.
You could also paint the marble, or use a ball bearing or small plastic ball, to make it into a planetary globe sculpture or some other artistic installation.
Next: Public Comm Unit
The little computer screen on the terrain sprue shows up all over the place on my terrain pieces. I picture it as a generic, multi-purpose unit that can be configured to display whatever information or controls are required for any given application. In this case, as a public access comm unit or data terminal.
To build this, you need the small pipe fitting, two corner braces, a computer screen, and a 5mm-long piece of 6mm (1/4") plastic tube. You also need a piece of sprue from the terrain sprue - The sprue has a thicker half and a thinner half. From the thinner sprue, cut a piece around 25mm (1") from a corner, with the corner cut off flush with the length of the sprue piece. The end result is a length of plastic rod with a rounded end that has one flat face, as pictured below.
Take the screen and cut off the wedge-shaped protuberances running along the top. Then glue the corner braces together and the screen into the middle, inside the corners and butting up against the top, so that the corner braces form a shade around the screen.
Then glue the plastic tube into the pipe fitting, and the sprue piece inside that, with the rounded end at the top. Make sure the flat face is parallel to one of the edge of the pipe fitting. Then glue the back of the screen to the flat face of the sprue piece.
Once painted up, these can be glued onto your terrain pieces for a little extra detail. They also stand quite well on their own, or you could glue them to a base for a little extra stability, and then they can be scattered around as needed - they would make handy objective markers.
And finally: Thermal Vents
No self-respecting, quasi-military terraforming base is complete without some sort of underground installation. The problem with underground installations, though, is that they need some sort of ventilation shaft, otherwise nobody has any way to sneak in!
To build some suitable clandestine access, (or just some nice, blocky, solid cover for your solo models, depending on your point of view and the specific game objectives at hand) you will need a shutter window, four corner braces and some thin plasticard - I've used .5mm sheet here.
Take the shutter window and on the rear frame, cut or file down the top edge at around a 45-degree angle, as below, leaving the raised frame at the front intact.
Cut sections of plastcard to run around the window frame. The measurements I've used are below:
Rear section - 21mm wide x 20mm tall
Front section - 21mm wide x 9mm tall
Sides - 23mm wide x 20mm/9mm, to match the front and rear sections.
If you're using thicker or thinner plasticard, you will need to tweak the width of the front and rear sections by a matching amount. You can also change the angle of the window frame by making the side pieces longer or shorter.
Check your plasticard sections for fit, and then glue them in place around the window frame.
The corner braces are then glued around the base.
As with the barricades back at the start, you can paint these up to match whatever buildings you have, or put them in more generic colours to scatter around multiple tables.
That's the lot for this week - although it's just scratching the surface of what you can do with the terrain sprue components. If you like what you have seen here and want to try building some scatter pieces of your own, you can pick up the terrain sprue in a pack of two from the Maelstrom's Edge webstore here.
We love seeing what people create with the sprues, so as always, please feel free to share your work on the Comm Guild Facebook page!
Terrain Tutorial: Plastic Storage Tray Buildings
Posted on Monday Feb 06, 2017 at 05:00pm in Tutorials
- by Iain Wilson
The Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue contains a slew of assorted plastic bits and pieces that can be used to pretty up your home-made scifi terrain, including a bunch of essential elements like doors, windows and pipe fittings. A few months ago I posted a tutorial on using cardboard gift boxes to create quick and easy buildings, which you can still find here. This time around, I'm using plastic modular storage trays to create buildings like this:
These trays can be found at most hardware stores, or anywhere online that sells plastic storage - you can find a few different examples on Amazon, and they're generally pretty inexpensive and available in a bunch of different sizes.
Here's a glimpse of what we're going to do to it:
Before getting started, a quick note on glue.
Obviously, versatility for making wargaming terrain isn't a prime design consideration for the people making these trays, and so the plastics used for them can be a little variable to work with. Plastic (polystyrene) cement won't work on them, but for the most part I've found that superglue works just fine. If they have a waxy feel to the plastic, or if you try the superglue and it doesn't hold particularly well, there are specific glues out there for dealing with recalcitrant plastics that look something like this:
This is a two-part system that uses a primer to help the glue stick. Just apply the primer, then apply the glue, push the parts together, and they'll never come apart again. I don't use it all the time simply because it's more bother than a single tube of glue, but for those trickier jobs it works a treat.
Edit: It can also help when gluing this sort of shiny plastic product to give it a sand with some fine sandpaper. This breaks up the glossy surface, giving the glue a better purchase.
SO, onto the building!
There are a few parts on the terrain sprue that are designed to be inset into a wall. If you're using any of these, I recommend cutting the holes for them as the first job, to avoid accidentally popping glued parts off when the plastic flexes while you're trying to cut it.
I'm starting here with the trapezoid windows, which will go into the front sides of the tray. This adds a nice little detail at what will be the front of the building, and also serves in this case to get rid of some imprinted text on the sides of the tray. I vary the orientation of these depending on the exact shape of the tray that I use, as different trays will have different angles at the front. Go with whatever looks best with the trays you use - for this one, I'm putting the long edges vertical.
To cut out the hole for them, hold the window against the side of the tray and trace lightly around it with a sharp knife.
You can then drop the window and carefully cut along the traced lines. If you have a Dremel-style rotary tool with a saw or small router bit, that might save some effort here, but otherwise just going slowly and carefully with the knife and not trying to cut right through in one go does the job.
Once you have all for sides cut through, check the window for fit and neaten up as necessary. The mould line on the window serves as a handy guide to get the windows on both sides of the building pushed through their respective walls an even amount.
There is generally a small lip of plastic at the back of these trays that is used for clipping them onto racking. If you're feeling lazy you can just leave it there and work around it, but I find it looks better to remove it. A decent pair of clippers will get rid of the bulk of it and then you can just clean up with the knife.
The reinforcing strips off the terrain sprue are the real heroes of this build, as they do such a great job of making otherwise bare plastic look like a manufactured structure. They can be used intact where there is room, like this:
Alternatively, you can chop them up along the edges of the panels to fit them around the moulded shapes on the tray.
There will sometimes be writing imprinted onto the sides of the tray.
This can be removed by cutting it out and replacing with detail parts, as with the trapezoid windows back at the start, or the shutter windows on this building:
Alternatively, you can cover it over with a little cardboard, plasticard or foamcore cut to an appropriate shape. Here, I've used a small piece of thin cardboard to cover the bulk of the text, with a rectangle cut in the middle for a shutter window. These are designed so that they can be inset into the wall, but they look fine just stuck directly onto the surface as well, and that saves cutting more holes in the plastic.
There is also usually a small nub on the bottom of the tray (which is forming the building's roof) from the moulding process used to manufacture the tray. I like the cover these over with the large pipe fitting from the terrain sprue:
This can then have some plastic rod added to create a chimney, or a fan blade cut from a circle of cardboard to make an exhaust fan.
The exact layout of parts on the sides of the building is driven by the shape of the moulding, and by how detailed you want your building to be.
With the outside all detailed up, it's time to seal in the front. I generally use foamcore for this for ease of cutting and strength, but plasticard or cardboard would also do the job, as does corrugated plastic sign board. There can be a little trial and error getting a piece cut to fit just right with the shape of the tray - I start by fitting to the bottom of the tray (the widest part), pushing the cut piece into the tray up to the narrower point which is usually about halfway in, marking the foamcore with a pencil using the interior of the tray as a guide, and then cutting to match.
If you're making up a bunch of these buildings using identical trays, it's a big time-saver to make a template out of a piece of cardboard or plasticard and use that to mark out your wall pieces.
You can then trace around whichever door you are using.
Cut out the door hole and glue the door in (remember not to apply superglue directly to the foam interior of the foamcore, as it will melt). Once the door, control panel, and anything else you're putting on the wall is attached, just slide the wall into the tray and glue it in place.
On this building, I added a service counter using a trimmed down lintel piece.
As an alternative to the small doors, some trays fit the garage door quite well, although sometimes with a little trimming to shape required.
Alternatively, some trays are sized just right to glue the garage door directly to the outside front of the tray, which creates an interesting angled front, although loses you the nice little awning for models to hide in.
Once you have the building all detailed up, all that's left is to paint it.
These are a perfect canvas for weathering effects - I'll be looking to cover some different techniques for that in coming tutorials.
As with the glue, painting can be a slightly variable experience, depending on the specific plastic used. You can use an etching primer if you want to make sure it will stick, but I've been getting by with regular spray paint and sealer.
Unsealed, the paint can scratch off, although just how easily will depend on the plastic and the quality of your paint. If you're planning on using a rigorous weathering technique like salt weathering, I recommend applying a light coat of sealer over the base coat to make it a little more durable.
When you're done, a good spray of matte sealer over the top should keep everything where it belongs.
For a break from solid buildings, you can create ruins by chopping out the bottoms of the trays and applying suitably damaged terrain parts.
Or for something a little more ambitious, the modular nature of these trays makes it relatively easy to stack them up and make multi-story units. This one below will eventually have a little balcony off the front of the upper level, perfect for hiding sneaky sniper units.
You can quickly and easily assemble a table-full of modular terrain units using a bunch of identical trays, or mix-and-match different size or brand trays for more of a ramshackle, cobbled-together settlement, just perfect for a stellar refugee camp or a temporary staging base, and buildings can be easily customised to fit different roles in the settlement.
If this has inspired you to create your own modular settlement, grab yourself some terrain sprues from the Maelstrom Edge online store here, and as always be sure to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!
Tags: buildings terrain terrainsprue tutorial
Terrain Thursday - Sgt. Oddball's Terrain
Posted on Thursday Nov 03, 2016 at 05:00pm in The Epirian Foundation
Today we share this nice compound by Sgt Oddball over on Dakka. The metals are weathered very nicely and the simple flocking at the base of the building and stencilling on the face of the building really pull the whole model together nicely.
Tags: buildings epirian terrain terrainsprue
Terrain Thursday - Ruined Hab Block
Posted on Thursday Oct 27, 2016 at 05:00pm in General
From our studio collection is this nice piece which shows a building that has been destroyed and is being reclaimed by the ground. Similar to our other hab block buildings, this building serves as a nice reminder that ruins work very nicely in wargames, and not every building needs to have four walls and a roof!
Tags: buildings ruins terrain terrainsprue
Giftbox Terrain Video
Posted on Thursday Oct 20, 2016 at 05:00pm in General
We thought today we'd highlight the timelapse video above which shows the construction of a building from scratch using the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue, previously covered in step by step photos in a previous blog post here at The Comm Guild.
Tags: buildings terrain terrainsprue video
Gift Box Building with the Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue
Posted on Thursday Oct 06, 2016 at 05:00pm in Models
- by Iain Wilson
The Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue is a fantastic resource for enhancing your games. Packed as it is with different bits and pieces for crafting buildings and scifi accessories, it serves as a handy base to combine with foamcore, cardboard, plastic containers, the cat*, foam packaging inserts, plumbing supplies, or anything else you can think of to create distinctive and personalised battlefield terrain.
*Don't glue things to the cat. Seriously.
For now, I'd like to focus on one particular way to use the sprue, by crafting a basic building using a cardboard gift box.
These are fairly readily available all over the place, are generally made of a fairly sturdy cardboard, and are (best of all) cheap. You can also get them with all sorts of pretty patterns on them, but you'll probably want to paint them, so that’s less important, really.
Here’s a quick video showing the build process:
You will need: a giftbox, the terrain sprue, some glue (superglue for gluing the plastic parts on, PVA/wood glue for gluing the box lid on) clippers, a pencil, a sharp knife, and a ruler can be useful for marking out parts.
I want a building with a walled roof, as that gives some nice line of sight-blocking terrain while giving troops somewhere elevated to stand. So the box will be turned upside down, and the lid will eventually be glued on top, also upside down.
First step is to cut the parts you want to use off the sprue and clean up any mould lines.
I'm using the long support pieces vertically on the walls of the building, so they need to be trimmed down to the height of the box. That's simply a case of taking the lid off, holding one of the supports against the box to mark where to cut it, and then cutting them all off at that point.
Put the leftover pieces aside - they'll come in handy for other projects.
Next, measure out where the supports will go on the building. I tend to use them slightly in from the corners of my buildings, rather than as corner bracing - this looks neater, as they don't meet in a flush corner if you butt them up against each other right on the edge.
You can put them wherever you like, so long as it's consistently spaced around the building. Here, I've used a corner brace to mark out the spacing, by placing it up against the corner and marking against the side of it. Repeat top and bottom on both sides of each wall.
Next, work out where you want to put your door. Hold it in place against the building wall and draw around the back of the door frame with a pencil.
Do the same for the windows - I've gone for one on each end of the building.
Then take your knife and carefully cut out the door and window holes. Note that the windows don't actually have to be inset into the walls - the box frame design means that they actually look pretty good just glued on the outside. So you can save yourself some cutting if you're in a hurry. I do prefer to inset them, though, as it looks a little more polished.
Once the holes are cut out, check that the parts fit in securely - trim up if necessary.
Then it's time to glue everything in place. Apply a small amount of glue around the door and window frames and push them into place. You can 'hide' the glue behind the protruding frame on the sides and bottom of the windows, so that you get less overflow onto the cardboard.
Run a line of glue down the back of the supports, and press them into place against your pencil marks on each wall.
Next, grab your box lid, and on the inside mark out where you want the roof hatch to go. Once again I've used the corner brace to mark out an even distance from the sides of the box lid. Then glue the hatch in place.
Now we can glue the roof on. Spread some PVA glue liberally over the top side of the building, press the lid on upside down, and sit something heavy on top to hold it snugly in place while the glue sets.
You could use superglue for this if you don't have any PVA or if you're in a hurry, but the PVA glue gives a better bond if there are irregularities in the cardboard that stop the two pieces from meeting perfectly flush.
While the roof is setting, we can hack the sprue a little to add some extra detail to the back of the building. Cut a corner piece off the narrower side of the sprue, as below. This will become the pipe for a small chimney or air vent.
Clean off the extra tabs and the mould line, and grab the small pipe fitting off the sprue.
A handy feature of this part of the sprue is that it fits perfectly into a 1/4"(7mm) plasticard tube, which in turn fits snugly into the small pipe fitting. So cut yourself two short segments of tubing - one for each end of the 'pipe'. If you don't have any plasticard, you can also use a strip of thin cardboard (cereal packet or the like) wrapped around the sprue instead.
Glue the tubing (or cardboard strips) onto the 'pipe', glue the curved end into the pipe fitting, and check the fit against the back wall of the building. You can trim up the protruding sprue support as necessary to make sure the chimney sits vertically and the pipe fitting is flush against the wall. Then glue in place.
I have also added one of the small vent pieces that was trimmed off the wall supports right at the start, just for a little extra detail, and glued a comm panel onto the front wall beside the door.
So the finished building looks something like this:
This can then be decorated however you like. I would recommend a good spray paint for the basecoat, particularly if the boxes you are using have a glossy finish. The building below was basecoated with black spray, and then given a spray coat of a medium grey, and a final highlight with a light grey spray from above, to leave the darker colour in the recesses and undercuts.
The 'chimney' pipe was painted in copper with a light drybrush of green to dirty it up, and some details like the comm panel screen and the light above the door picked out for a little extra colour. You could also add on building numbers, posters, warning signs, or anything else that you might find on a real building - we'll be covering some different ways to pretty up your battlefield terrain in a later article.
Pick up the terrain sprue from the Maelstrom's Edge online store here and give it a go! You can share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge