Everyone makes mistakes…
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.
Tags: failure, meteor, Small Block, Terrain, well
I really like the new cobblestone. The older one looked sort of like gravel, but this looks really good. Although, it’s not terribly deep, which could become a problem as you paint it.
Yeah, the stuff up there was just a practice piece. We’re hoping to be able to get the imprint a little deeper, but we’re working out how to do that exactly. After we paint up a piece to how we want it, I’ll post up full screenshots all about the cobblestone.
PVA glue will usually seal materials against the effects of water resin or spray paint, give a liberal coating of that a try!
What sort of water effects were used? The woodland scenics I used doesn’t do that to foam.
It was the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water stuff.