Tauster'sTiles

[factoriatabletop]

to much cool stuff in this thread man!

[tauster]

Jan 20, 2019 11:47:54 GMT factoriatabletop said:

to much cool stuff in this thread man!

Glad you like it.

The large broken pieces are hotglued together. It took a bit of thinking how the broken half might have fallen to create an inclined ramp that looks realistic, but I think I got the job done, more or less.

Priming more rubble pieces. After the white has dried, they too will be drybrushed with pearlescent and then washed with dark brown/black.

The stuff in the container is a mix of construction sand with small stones, crushed casting failures and styrofoam scrap pieces. It will be mixed with PVA glue and dark brown color and then put wherever I want to hide stuff, like the seams on the pavement.

[factoriatabletop]

i think is a very nice terrain piece! or maybe you are going to use it like a display¿?
also the effect of the half broken was so realistic...
i liked so much, i saved to my personal image for future references, if you dont mind!

[Sam]

Looks great. I would put more debris around the fallen pillars. Stuff for small critters (snakes, scorpions, centipedes, spiders) to hide in, and PCs to dig thru. A couple small magnets under the lip of the upper level could hold up a removable web, piercers (if underground), bats, stirges, or owls. Just kicking ideas.

[tauster]

I got on as planned (and suggested by @sam 'the beachcomber') and added some rubble. And by 'some' I mean 'a lot'.

I haven't been doing flocking for a while now and didn't want to dig out the recipe for rubbleflocking... I just threw in the pot what looked right: Some leftover styrofoam pieces from the built, a bit of sand, some pebbles.

I put a generous blob of PVA glue on and it was pretty clear that I needed to add some water to get a good adhesive mix. Instead of water, I used some experimental ink I made a while ago and that has been uselessly sitting on my desk. Getting the stuff pre-colored can't be a mistake, right?

So in with the ink and giving the whole pot a good stir. Then the weird thing happened: The PVA began to bubble up like hell.

I had this effect several times before, when mixing acrylic paints with PVA, but never this much. Volume almost doubled (at that point I was extremely happy to have chosen a large pot!) and I quickly added some more sand - which of course couldn't soak up anything because sand isnt't very good at soaking. I ended up mixing in Natriumbicarbonate, which I used in my ice and snow terrain years ago, making a rock hard mixture. I ended up adding too much Natriumbicarbonate,...

...having to add a bit more water and PVA, until the consistency seemed right. Then I gave the areas that were to be rubbled a generous coat ov PVA because I didn't trust my weird rubble mix to adhere well to the terrain piece.

Then it got even weirder: The rubble mix had become spongy, elastic like rubber, and crumbling. What the heck?

I have no idea why that happened, but I placed the rubble wherever I thought it must be going. I had lots of rubble mix left, so I spontaneously rubbled an MDF base I had glued some acrylic crystals on...several years ago, and never touched again. After that the amount of rubble was virtually the same as before, so I distributed it on a plastic sheet and left it to dry out. Maybe the stuff can be used when hardened up for other pieces.

Some WIP close-ups:

Last week I had painted up some spare foam parts that will be stuck in between after the rubble has been paintedbut these are still waiting to be employed.

[tauster]

I hit a bit of a crafter's block on the ruin terrain tile, but I started another piece with a different theme: clockwork / brass'n iron / gear-themed terrain, and miniatures.

Background/rambling: In my campaign there's a moon called Clockwork, which is not only a litaral moon-sized clock but also home to all kinds of artificial steampunk-ish mechanic beings. I would love nothing more than to do a whole terrain set, but I'm not sure how often we'll visit this location, so instead I started to play around with colors, textures and general design principles on how I'm going to do clockwork terrain.

greenstuffworld.com offers a set of laser-cut mdf gears. I made silicone molds and then hotglue copies of those, and some other gears I had around. A flat piece of styrofoam got textured with a factory ground rolling pin.

Based the foam piece in black, then covered it with a mixture of very cheap silver and copper acrylic paints. The paints are not very covering (less than average amount pigments I guess), but combined with the black shimmering through from below, the colors look surprisingly good. I used a paper towel to take away the metallic colors in some places to get some variation.

In comparison, the hotglue pieces were directly painted, without the black primer. I didn't like it and ended up priming it with black, then painting the metallics again. Lesson learned.

The first wash of verdigris was too subtle,...

...so I washed it again, diluting the wash with less water this time and leaving a diagonal path free. Before drying, it looked like I had used too much:

But after the wash dried, it is much more subtle. That's another important lesson to learn: Most colors look different when dry, so sometimes it is hard to guesstimate the right amount. I keep forgetting this times and again, so this was a good reminder.

I colored several of the gears and other mechanical stuff, plus two poker chips covered with hotglue that was textured with the same rolling pin.

To avoid having the glue adhere to the pin, dip the pin in water and wait for the hotglue to cool down a bit so it isn't sticky anymore. Alternatively, dip the hot glue in cold water and roll over it immediately after. It works surprisingly well; you don't get textures as perfect as with greenstuff or milliput, but it works well enough for my purposes, is much cheaper and most important: faster and less messy than preparing a two-part mediums like greenstuff.

[tauster]

...finished!

I almost didn't expect to finish this little sidetreck so quickly, and I'm extremely happy with how it turned out! I had exactly these colors and this mood in mind: Heaps of ancient, wondrous metal works, whose looks are just that little bit beyond recognition. They might look like they're still worth something, but then again they wouldn't have been discarded, right? ...right?

I wanted to do 'arcane junkyard' terrain for several years now, and I'm collecting materials for a junkyard for at least as long. Now I have defined the color pallette to use (one of my weak points in almost any project), and I know what framing effects I want to have (the texture rolling pin will bind all terrain pieces together, acting as a common denominator). That were the last missing things I needed. I do have dozens of open projects on my desk (yes, 'dozens' as in plural) but the junkyard project will now finally see some long-deserved progress. Heck, I even have a campaign where I can use such a set!

Long story short, here's the pics.

I didn't make any more WIP pics after the previous post, but it was just finding a way to position them and then gluing them together.

And some minis added to breath some life in this wasteland of rust and verdigris:

Fors and Cale are following some kind of path through a labyrinth of ancient metal, when they meet a strange being, seemingly made itself of metal. They brace themselves for a fight as the being summons a swarm of rusty gears, spikes and pinions that explode out of the garbage and form a vaguely coherent vortex that orients in their general direction...

I painted some gears with brushes (the ones used in the piece below), but some were spraypainted with black, and a bit of gold spray. While the black worked well enough, the gold looks like crap. I'll repaint them and use them in future junkyard pieces.

[tauster]

Now that the prototype is done, it is time to scale up. So I made more junk.

This will be one of the more picture-heavy posts, so bear with me as I go through each and every step. For most of you this might be a bit boring, but I hope that someone new to the hobby will find it worthwile.

I cut strips of styrofoam on the Thermocut, 1cm high (the foam sheet I had was 2cm, so I got two terrain strips out of one sheet) and 14cm broad (because that is the maximum height the Thermocut, and the approx. length of the texture rolling pin). Imade only two strips because I wasn't sure I'd need more.

 I ripped out a few little craters on one sheet that would be filled with crackle lacquer later.

I primed the sheets with a 50/50 mix of PVA glue and black acrylic color.

The craters got a layer of verdigris that will shine through the cracks later.

After the cerdigris had dried, the craters were filled up with crackle lacquer (bronce color). In theory you could use any color of crackle lacquer, if you paint it afterwards. I got my hands on a dozen of cheap crackle stuff lately, so using bronze was only logical because that's about the color the board will have eventually.

The first cracks after 12 hours. The stuff is still soft...

...so I primed some scatter terrain in the meantime. These are casing parts of an old electric razor. I made silicone/cornstarch molds and filled them with construction foam (the best and cheapest method I know to make large castings).

Thats how the craters looked when the crackle stuff was fully cured:

The scatter terrain and the sheets got coated with mix of two cheap acrylic metallic colors, silver and copper. I didn't mix the two completely, so the colors would have more variation when stippled on. I also left lots of black shine through.

 

The verdigris got thinned down to make a wash. I can't give exact measurements how much I thinned it down, it depends on the brand of color and how much you want your metal to age. Just play around with a few small pieces before you do your main piece.

I had overlooked two pieces, so they didn't get a black priming. Later I gave them the same metal painting, stippling it right on the beige construction foam. When I got the verdigris wash on, I realized that they just didn't look right so I had to prime them again. Lesson learned...

Finished:

I absolutely love how the cracked craters look. This is something I will definitely do more often in future terrain pieces!

I decided against glueing the scatter pieces on the boards. I want to place them as required, and be able to use them in other settings as well. This leaves me with much more flexibility.

Next steps: Making more scatter terrain. I want a few heaps (again, construction foam), with small and medium-sized pieces of junk glued on. I will have to make a few more molds, so this could take a while.

[tauster]

Following up on the previous post, I made a mould of a trash heap. The base was a small hill of left over construction foam which got covered in lots and lots of random pieces of junk, cast from hotglue. I also made a few new junk moulds for more variety:

Hotglue nuts. I got a bag of cheap plastic nuts (those chinese ebay sellers, again) but decided to make moulds of them anyways. There's also a few other small technical parts in that mould, you'll spot them later in the heap.

...oh, and some vertebrae from our last soup hen. Can't ever have enough bone moulds! Remember to clean them thoroughly.

I also used some of the gear moulds I made from greenstuffworld's MDF gears, using partial castings to make them look like broken fragments of gears. And various other technical/mechanical moulds. I have accumulated quite a variety of moulds by now...

The finished heap, close up. Apoligies for the crappy lighting.

When mixing the ingredients for the mould, I used more baby oil then usual, resulting in a mass that was a joy to work with. It didn't stick to the gloves at all and I could even 'polish' the outside when done. This might be my first mould that actually looks cool from the outside. Not that this matters much - all that is relevant is that I have pressed the mass in all nooks and crannies (else I'll lose the details in the deeper cracks) and that no spikey part peaks through the mass. I'm confident of the latter, and hope for the best with the former.

[factoriatabletop]

the cracks you made just inspired to me in one of my projects!
i am going to use it for sure, very well done!

[tauster]

Mar 16, 2019 15:20:30 GMT factoriatabletop said:

the cracks you made just inspired to me in one of my projects!
i am going to use it for sure, very well done!

Glad you like it! Can't wait to see what you do with the cracks.

Here's the finished mould. I won't be able to use it today, but tomorrow will see some serious trash heap casting!

[tauster]

First casting done!

To avoid hand cramps, I decided against making a hotglue casting and filled the mould with dental plaster instead, even if this is much more expensive.

When I peeled the mould off the cast, I lost a dozen details as silicone stuck in deep crevasses ripped off the mould (the small brown crumbs on the right side of the first pic below). Those cracks and holes will be lost in future castings, sadly. But there is still enough details left to have an interesting piece of terrain.

Also, I can always add individual trash pieces on top of the heap, to avoid making identical hills. This is easier with a hotglue cast than with plaster, but plaster pieces can be 'glued on' plaster hills with ...guess what.

When I'll make a hotglue casting next, I will squeeze the hill into an oval shape while filling it with glue, so the resulting shape will be different from the round heap I have now. Thats the beauty of these silicone moulds: You can bend and squeeze them to make different casts. I'm toying with making a similar trash mould, but this time flat so I can make bases or large swathes of highly detailed ground. By bending it I could also make heaps. I used this technique for my bones terrain and it worked great.

[tauster]

Finished the second cast...

As mentioned, I used hotglue this time (I squeezed about 2 m worth of gluesticks through the gun) and squeezed the mould into a box to get a long and narrow heap instead of a round one.

Of course the squeezing results in a shape that doesn't line up with the straight ground anymore, lifting up at both ends.

These gaps have to be filled with single parts of trash. I also added more parts on the top and in other areas to make this heap different from the first one.

Primed and drying:

[factoriatabletop]

i always think after watch your pics that i would like cast something...just i dont yet what i can craft!
well done, please continue posting how the project goes!

[tauster]

Mar 18, 2019 6:14:24 GMT factoriatabletop said:

i always think after watch your pics that i would like cast something...just i dont yet what i can craft!
well done, please continue posting how the project goes!

I was hesitating too when I first found out about this stuff. But my first mould-making experience showed me that this is ridiculously easy to do, and it has become one of my most important techniques. You can cast parts of minis and recombine them into truly weird stuff (see my newest creation, the Pegacroc/Aligasus!) or make small terrain tiles that you want to copy. Black magic craft recently sculpted dungeon doors and then made moulds, and although he used commercial two-part epoxy silicone (can't remember from the top of my hat what exactly he used), these moulds can be made with cheap silicone, cornstarch, baby oil and acrylic color just as well.

Again, just start with something simple. You'll see that this mouldmaking stuff is as useful as it is addictive!

[tauster]

The new trash heaps and two old pieces of scatter terrain got their metallic base coat over the black priming. I'll let it dry for one day and continue tomorrow with the verdigris.

In other news, I started two more junkyard pieces: I call them entrances because they look like they reach deeper down into whatever lies below the surface, but they could be dwellings of inhabitants/monsters just as well.

I used two part epoxy plumbers putty to cover the cardstock rolls,...

...then textured them with one of greenstuffworld's texture rolling pins ('factory grounds'), the same texture that the ground (styrofoam) is textured with.

The putty was rock hard after one or two hours, so I quickly cast some more mechanical parts and filled out the tiles.

Next steps (you'll guess it - sorry if I bore you to death!)

- black priming

- metallic basecoat stippled over everything

- metallic green wash for verdigris effect.

- finished.

I'm tempted to add another few steps: I could go over some individual junk parts with a dark silver, then add an orange drybrush for rust. This would add another metal to the mix, making the whole heap more visually interesting. I might also some chipped/faded paint to some parts, but I think I should try that on a test piece first.

[tauster]

...finished! These tiles took less time to finish than I feared. Since the painting is very simple (basecoat, cover in gold paint, wash) with no details at all to take care of, you can always find a small window of time for each step. I did each of the painting steps just before going to bed, and it took about 15-30 min each time. Let it dry over night, continue next evening - and you're done done in less than a week.

Black priming.

Stipple a 50/50 mix of silver and copper on the tiles, take care to not make it too evenly. You want areas where the black shines more through than in other places, and spots where the metal it stippled on really thick.

Lesson learned: black underneath golden tones realy help the gold to shine. For my purpose (trash heap with corroded metal), no matter what gold color I'd chose, without the black it just wouldn't work.

Wash on the verdigris

Lesson learned: Getting the mixture of water and greenish color right takes a bit of practice. You just have to play around with the ratio, and with how much wash you apply. Better too little than too much - you can always add one more layer. However if your wash was too much and/or too strong, you can correct that with a drybrush layer of gold in the places that look too green. This works better than I had expected.

And that's where I stand. I have two long strips of terrain that can be used as dungeon corridors, several decorated pieces with ground, two large trash hills and enough scatter terrain to give my players interesting tactical choices. I'll probably do a few more terrain strips. They're quick and easy to do, so I can make many at once.

I also might add mroe colors to the set by painting individual details differently (rusted iron, metallic black, deep metallic purple, etc) and add a layer of brown/black wash for dirt and grime, but that's not yet decided.

Some eye candy:

[Credo DM]

Amazing skills. I really like those amorphous flesh blobs. I may have to add those to my list of crafts. I'm running a Campaign that eventually goes full Dante on the players, and these would be a great fit for Hell as wandering monsters or environmental hazards.

[tauster]

Greensutffworld's texture rolling pins are great, I am a huge fan of them and love each of the dozen different types I have. Some do see more use than others, but the majority of the has one big limitation when it comes to making really large terrain pieces: their length. Standard size is approx. 13 cm, so you can make strips of styrofoam that are as long as you wish but not wider  than that - making several large pieces to cover your game table is awkward if you are limited to that width. However they offer two 'megarolls' that are 32 cm long, so your terrain strips would be more managable.

I have the pavement model and wanted to use it to make me a stack of 30-ish cm wide wide terrain strips, but realized that this width gives me different headaches: If I buy a sheet styrofoam, it is thicker than I want to use, so I wanted to cut it on my Proxxon Thermocut into thinner sheets. The problem: The bow/frame which holds the hot wire is only 14cm above the base, making it impossible to cut strips wider than those 14 cm.

I needed a longer bow...

Long story short, here's how I made one.

I bought 3 aluminum flat bars, 20x10x1000mm and filed both ends down to 18x8mm with an angle grinder to fit the dimensions of the original frame. A bit of careful bending the bar into a U-shape, drilling two holes in the end that goes into the case ...and that's it, basically. The grinding was a bit of a pain in the neck, but overall it wasn't a complicated build.

I couldn't try it because I need to widen one of the holes a bit more, but need to get a drill of the right size first, which is why I can't attach the power cable to the bar, so I can't tell you today if the whole thing worked out or not. I hope to make a first test tomorrow.

[sgtslag]

The only hitch I can see, is if the Power Supply can handle the extra resistance of the longer nichrome wire. As the resistance increases, the current flowing through the wire, decreases. You will definitely have to turn up the heat. Question is, will it go high enough, to cut at the speed you desire? Honestly, I suspect it will.

Love my Proxxon.  Wish I could use it more.  It made my modular rock and ice caverns project a reality.  I initially made my modular pieces cutting the forms with a bandsaw.  This approach required me to add texture using a very time-consuming method, which was very labor intensive.  Those pieces have been gladly re-purposed for my modular ice caverns.  The Proxxon allows me to cut better rock cavern walls and dividers (smoother, water-carved), very quickly, and very differently textured (on the Proxxon!) than the ice cavern pieces.  The speed is much faster, the labor a mere fraction of what the ice caverns are (they have a chiseled, carved surface texture).  The time saved, and the quality achieved, make the investment in the Proxxon, worth every penny.  Cheers!