Final structure with broken walls

FINALLY!!! Now that we have a finalized idea for our Flagstone, we can start building buildings and other terrain features to fill the blocks for the table.

So far the first building has turned out well, although I built it completely backwards. For starters I glued the entire house together before cutting out the windows, or “breaking” the walls, which just made it more time consuming then if I had cut them out when the walls were still flat.

Currently the house is very clean looking and still missing many details, I plan to add more trimwork around the walls, and I have already started making the the floor look like wood planks, as well as trimming the corner pieces slightly so they dont look so perfect (which will be seen in the next post).

The Bottom Floor of the building

Floor for the second level

Floor installed into slit of second floor

Full second floor

Both floors resting on cobblestone

Setting up the second floor

Both floors (unassembled)

Basic house stucture w/ windows

Side view of house w/ windows

In the following picture you can see where the door will be eventually, I havnt removed it yet to keep the walls sturdy while I worked on the rest of it.

Final structure with broken walls

Close up of broken floor and model for scale

So here is our first 2 story house on one of our 6×6 blocks. I will take more pictures of the progress and post them up soon!

No more foam!

We knew the first couple terrain blocks would mostly be practice blocks, so it’s not surprise that things have already gone wrong with both the well and the meteor. We spent too much time just tossing things together without enough planning, and we had to essentially scrap the well piece. We also made a mistake with the meteor that we MIGHT be able to fix. Since most of the time you only ever see the great successes of terrain and not the many failed attempts on the way, I decided to post the failure here so that people can learn from our errors.

First, the well piece was looking good, but the attempt at creating cobblestone from the talus didn’t work quite how we expected. It just looked like a pile of gravel, not cobblestone, and it wasn’t flat enough for a playing surface. We had to think up a new way to do the cobblestone. While we did eventually find something that we think is going to work (look for a new post in the near future with the new cobblestone attempt) we had to try and remove the talus. There simply was no way to clear the block, so we had to scrap it (well, break it up and keep it for testing stuff on later anyway). We’re keeping the well itself to put in a new piece with working cobblestone.

It just wasn't flat enough... and it didn't look much like cobblestone.

No more foam!

Testing out some painting techniques.

The other problem we had was with the meteor piece. Everything was going great with that one… except for one small detail. We forgot to test the effects of the resin on the foam. Apparently the resin will eat through the foam (and possibly the texture spray as well). So, the water puddles that we put in not only messed up the meteor trail a bit, but also ate through to where some blue foam is showing underneath. I’m not sure how we’re going to fix this yet, or if we can even fix this block. We may need to scrap this one and cut another 6″x18″ piece to use. Here are some pics of the resin damage.

Bits of blue foam showing under the water.

More resin damage.

We may have lost these pieces but we have learned a lot in the process so it hasn’t been a total loss. We now know that we need to find a way to prevent the resin from eating through the foam. We also figured out a better way to do cobblestone that I think can save us some time and money in the long run. As soon as we get some more pictures and work out the last few details of the new cobblestone method I’ll put up a full post with pictures AND a short “how-to” guide.

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• The Well

Meteor

We tested out some stuff with the Well and the meteor blocks. We added some cobblestone to the well, and some water to both the well and the meteor. I am not too happy with how the cobblestone turned out, but I think the meteor looks really cool. Check out the pics below, and comment to let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions!

Meteor trail with water

Water in the meteor

Meteor

Side view of well

Top view of the well

I think the meteor is starting to look really cool. The cobblestone for the well didn’t turn out so well, however. It’s pretty uneven and I’m not sure it would even be playable. We have some ideas on how to fix this. My favorite so far is creating a cobblestone “stamp” for imprinting the foam, and then painting over it. We are definitely going to need to do some experimentation, though.

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• The start of terrain building...

Quick! Hide in the well!

The well is coming along nicely. We got the idea for the well when we found a small wooden cylinder that was drilled from a door to make a hole for a doorknob. The cylinder was a little larger than we wanted so we decided to simply cut a hole in the foam base and set it inside. This made it just about the right height that we were looking for.

We used the spray texture to paint the well.

We had to cut a hole in the base so the well wasn't too large.

Size comparison of the well to a human model.

Size comparison after the well is set into the base.

Quick! Hide in the well!

This will look better once we add the cobblestone around the well so the base and the well are not the same texture. We are also going to add some other features for looks… a bucket with rope, some debris nearby, etc. I’m happy with how our first piece of terrain is coming along. This is a sort of practice run for how we are going to base most of the tiles. We have some talus from Woodland Scenics that we are going to attempt to use for cobblestone roads. Hopefully it turns out how we are expecting.

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• Everyone makes mistakes...