My first 2.5d project - Jade Regent terrain

[pedrodevaca]

Hey folks,

This is my first post and I wanted to show a few pics of my first crafting project that I put together using ideas from this forum, DMcraft youtube channel, DMGinfo channel, and others. . The goal is to build all the major encounters for the first book of the Jade Regent AP for the Pathfinder RPG and in the process try my hand at crafting and experiment with different techniques and ideas. So far I completed Walthus' swamp house and the Licktoad goblin village (for those familiar with the JR AP). I only have handheld photos currently but I think you can get a good sense of the pieces despite the poor photo quality. I'm hoping to do some HD photos soon if I can procure a buddy's camera =)
Thanks for all the great info and ideas guys!

Out of play photo of the Licktoad goblin village with 2.5d tiles and 3d tops and featuring raised walkway v1.0. The doors I built don't stand up well with the 3d tops in place, so I wasn’t able to achieve the full effect I was going for. I began retro-fitting all 18 doorways with magnets (the doors in the main hut on the left of the frame is equipped with shiny new strip magnets) but my PCs laid waste to the goblins as of last night, and I need to get working on the next board =)


Licktoad village in play with some of the building tops removed, goblins, PCs, 1 door in place, and featuring raised walkways v2.0.   During the encounter, the PC's left flank struggled to kill the waves of goblins quickly enough, but two well placed and well timed sleep spells gave the team enough breathing room to regain the advantage. Just as victory seemed certain, a goblin alchemist snuck onto one of the rooftops and rained alchemist bombs down on the group. 2 of his 3 bombs struck true and he KO'd two PCs nearly killing one outright. He laughed and screeched excitedly while jumping up and down and giving himself high-fives before fleeing into the swamp a hero in his own mind.


Walthus Proudstump's Swamp House - this is the the bottom level of a 2.75d() concept for a 2 story 3d house with fully playable interiors. What is shown is the bottom level, the roof and upper level have been removed, revealing playable interiors with 2.5d interior walls and doors (whoops forgot the doors) and partially 3d exterior walls. I need more photos to show the upper level in place with just the roof removed and with the roof in place as a fully assembled 3d piece.


Thanks for looking!

-Pedro

[thedmg]

Excellent work.

[gnomezrule]

Wow that is great stuff. You put in some time and love on that. I know your group must have loved that.

[monkeywithtacos]

Seriously..a lot of excellent work on that.... Love it!!

[earlteagrey]

REALLY AWESOME! You're a pro already!

[Andevel]

Just amazing!!! Great work!!! ^_^

[bloodchoke]

Really nice work sir! Great 3d buildings. What did you use for the roofs? Also, if you don't mind explaining, how did you make building in the last tile? I'm really interested to know what the walls and floor are made from.

[DMScotty]

What a great encounter space. If you had bought all that stuff you would have been out like 500 bucks! Found materials rock!

[DMNate]

I love it! I particularly love your fences. Great work. Keep posting your crafts.

[sgtslag]

Agree with DM Scotty: commercial terrain like that would have cost a fortune! If you have no need of it after the game, you could probably unload it on e-Bay for a hefty profit... Cheers!

[grym247]

Absolutely awesome right there

[pedrodevaca]

Dec 18, 2013 4:02:15 GMT bloodchoke said:

Really nice work sir! Great 3d buildings. What did you use for the roofs? Also, if you don't mind explaining, how did you make building in the last tile? I'm really interested to know what the walls and floor are made from.

Thanks for the kudo's guys.  I can't begin to recount all the various pieces, projects, ideas, vids, etc produced by yall that inspired various elements of the project.  I even got to dust off a few techniques I learned as a kid when I used to build 1/72nd scale WW2 armor dioramas.

bloodchoke, sorry for the wall of text.  This is probably much more detail than you wanted.  Apparently you asked a question I wanted to answer >_>

Licktoad village bits
Building bottom tiles - DMScotty's 2.5d bottom tiles with wood pegs glued underneath to create raised stilts.  Wood flooring texture is hijacked and edited from a Terrainlinx kit I bought years ago.  I used Gimp to extract, edit and export all my textures.  Printed them out on card stock and mounted them to the cardboard tiles.

Building tops - cardboard construction with card stock trim and endcaps.  The thicker trim (like around the bottom of the big building on the left) are pieces of pressed cardboard I recovered from sprues of DnD dungeon tile sets.  I think these sprues came from the Witchlight Fens set of DnD tiles.  The thickness and width of the sprues is appropriately scaled for large flat timbers.  I built a couple of the buildings from just the sprue material but they are at the back of the village and you don't get a good shot of them in the pics.  The sprue built buildings are the best looking structures, in my opinion, but are not as sturdy as the cardboard pieces.

Roofs - are cardboard, trimmed with card stock strips wide enough to leave a small overlap creating a lip.  The roof is then filled with obscene amounts of glue and textured with the tip of the glue gun.  The roof of the big building on the left took 14 mini sticks I believe.  I was going for a thatched roof look, which I didn't achieve, but I actually like the end result quite a bit.  I rationalize the look by claiming the Licktoad goblins use odd, local vines and plants for their thatching.  The 'tower' in the front (and one other building in the back) is supposed to have a makeshift roof made from an oiled tarp.  I used glue soaked tissue to model the tarp.

Walkways - v1.0 is the Terrainlinx wood flooring .pdf texture glued to cardboard with sticks glued to the bottom.  V2.0 is a balsa wood base with coffee stirrers cut to length and individually carved to create rough hewn look, glued to the base.

Ladders and Palisade - recovered fall pruning material sorted by size, mostly grape vine. 


Walthus' 3D House
Construction - single ply and double ply cardboard (two single ply glued perpendicular to each other) with a hodge podge of hijacked textures.  I used some textures from the Terrainlinx kit I mentioned previously and other textures from various free paper craft buildings I have collected off of the internet over the years.  I haven't built any paper craft kits, free or otherwise, so it was kinda funny I decided to do a custom design, much much more complex than the papercraft kits, as my first attempt at building a cardboard/paper house....

Interior 2.5d walls are single ply cardboard glued on edge.  After assembling the Licktoad village, I prefer interior walls to be on edge to help convey the interior walls are thinner.  In addition, it limits model bloat where the size of your model begins to grow compared to the original 2 dimensional layout to account for the thickness of your 2.5d walls.  Obviously model bloat doesn't matter when building custom layouts but since I was trying to model published layouts, I found the wall thickness was problematic.  I also found that on edge, cut perpendicular to the corrugation, the cardboard bends very easily, so you can cut a long strip of cardboard, lay it on edge and bend it to your layout, minimizing the amount of cuts you need to make and allowing the 2.5d elements to be glued in place very quickly.  Lastly, you end up with only 1 edge of revealed corrugation resulting in less card stock trim work, which can be very time consuming.

Lastly, I trimmed all of the exposed corrugation with strips of 6-pack container card stock emptied during the hours of previous work.  I found myself needing to run to the store to buy another six pack so I had more card stock to finish the house.  Oh darn!  I then folded and glued in place little card stock pillars or boxes around the ends and corners of my 2.5d elements.  I really like the overall effect of this, it adds fit and finish and suggests that the building is built well and relatively civilized.  In a rough dungeon or cavern system I would leave those pillars off.

Stairs were modeled using paint chips.  I have no issue shamelessly grabbing up 10, 20, 100 paint chips from Home Depot and walk out the front door without spending a dime.  It's a great, thin card stock material that can be used for lots of stuff (I also use them to make AoE spell templates in various colors).  I put down layers of paint chips, each layer trimmed to be slightly shorter than the previous to create thin, flat stairs that actually ascend or descend, but mere franctions of an inch across the entire span because the paint chip card stock is so thin (I think you can actually see this in the photo).  Paint, wash and some dry brushing enhances the 3d effect. 

This project was mostly an experiment in mixing 2.5d and 3d elements. I wanted the PCs to walk up and see the entire building, the various exterior second story features and possible access points (incidentally the party ninja immediately made use of the 10' exterior wall and second story windows to gain access). I also wanted the interior to be playable without completely losing some of the 3d elements that I went through the trouble of building. As you might expect (although i didn't expect it because I'm a noob) combining 2.5d and 3d is much more complicated then simply doing one or the other.....


Overall Cost and Time of the Project
Hard to say exactly, because I had almost no paint, tools, or materials before I started this.  I would estimate it cost me about ~$80 to build everything but I have tons of paint, glue, materials and other stuff left over so I'm not certain exactly how much I spent.  There are also a bunch of little detail bits I modeled that are not shown which are included in that gross price.  Also, I am not including the $40.00 I spent on the Terrainlinx .pdf's since I bought that 3+ years ago.

I worked on the project, on and off, for about 6 weeks.  The 3D house took me 20+ hours.  The 3D tops for the licktoad village took me 20+ hours.  The walkways v2.0 took me about 12 hours.  I suck at doors apparently, 18 doors took me nearly 9 hours.  Everything else was easy and relatively quick.


Here are a couple more photos I just got from another player.  Same stuff, different angles.

Next Project
I just started on the Brinestump Caverns, a medium sized cavern system, occupied by some critters but also haunted by undead.  I wanted to plug the project and solicit ideas from yall.

I want the finished board to be relatively cheap to build, relatively close to the published layout, be very playable, while retaining enough 3d features to draw the players into the environment and give a good visual sense and feel of the cave and chambers (i.e. like the Walthus house).

Crafting-wise my goals are to design, build and complete a medium-sized board (2'x3'); use and experiment with foam for the first time; experiment with different bread knife and foam finishing techniques; experiment with ready patch and sculptamold; and experiment with some advanced water techniques that I saw on Terran Scapes and Terrainaholic youtube channels.

So to achieve those goals, my design has a plywood base with static 3d foam cavern walls to delineate the cavern layout along the 'back' of the board with 2.5d plywood elements delineating the cavern layout throughout the 'middle' and 'front' of the board, similar to what I tried to do with Walthus' house.  Additional foam cavern walls and terrain features will be modular.  The pieces will have a simple square peg and square hole fitment and fit on top of the underlying plywood 2.5d elements, 'locking' in place with strip magnets.  The idea is to have these pieces in place when the players first come into a cavern or chamber to help paint the picture and create the feel of the cavern and then the pieces can be easily removed for playability and access to minis.

I'll definitely put up some WIP pics when I get myself organized enough to actually capture and report my work.  But I'd love to hear any ideas or suggestions folks have regarding this new project!!!  =)    Has anyone tried building something like this?

[bloodchoke]

Cool man, thanks for taking the time to type all that out. The time and attention you paid to details really shows. Everything looks really clean and well made. Again, incredible work.

[algardunraven]

Very very cool! I like your attention to detail. I really like the fences and the roofs. Excellent job. Keep up the good work and keep sending us updates as you can.

[gnomezrule]

Vote for Pedro!

With the caverns I really loved working with soft couch cushions. I ran into issues with it soaking up paint and like most foams the spray paint propellant causes some minor eating of the foam. But it can take a lot of abuse. Its soft so gluing it into place is easier than hard foam and you are able curve easier. My biggest headaches with it was how much paint it took. So use the cheap stuff. Also I suggest painting the walls and finishing them before you glue them down. Work your base and the walls separate and then glue them in place and touch up if necessary.

Things that made it really easy. 90% of the shaping of the foam was accomplished in one pass with the bread knife. I just traced the walls on the foam and cut it out. The softness of the foam made it really east to manipulate and the variations the knife left in the foam made for great random walls. And the mess was easier to clean than Styrofoam.

[gallant]

That's exceptional work!

[sgtslag]

Someone on here used toilet paper, soaked in PVA/White Glue, as a 'skin' over the open foam cells. Once the TP+Glue hardens, it takes paint without absorbing it. It will not be as flexible, nor as durable to abuse, but it should survive most game handling. Have not tried it yet, as the open cells sucking up paint drove me to using extruded foam insulation sheet, cut to size and shape (band saw with a shop vacuum attached...). Cheers!

[skunkape]

Wow, great looking buildings there!

[dmdubbledee]

That is awe-inspiring work. Your players are going to have a blast playing in such an environment!

[The Brave]

Really good.