Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

Inspired by the progress on the finshed rock grinder, I tackled another project that had been gathering dust ...ever since June: The modular floating rock island.

The interchangeable islands are not all finished, but I've worked on them here and there. A few are done and I could already use them as scatter terrain pieces, but some are still untouched since that pic:



Heck, I've even made some more with CDs, plus a few freeform pieces with magnets or metal on their underside, so I can put them on fly stands.

But the one thing that bugs me most is that the cone-shaped floating rock didn't get finished.  

Drabrushed grey


Highlights with a very careful white drybrush


It's not much, but this thing has not only cluttered up my craft desk but also my computer desktop, as I have all important unfinished projects as links on my desktop to remind me. Right now that makes 16 unfinished projects. It's been over 20 a while back, so I'm steadily working my way down...

Next steps:
- black/brown washing
- drilling a hole in the tip (which will be the lowest point in game)
- making a fly stand with an acrylic rod and a heavy base

[tauster]

About a month ago, flankbonus shared a great idea using industrial modular hose systems called Loc-Line (original posting). This stuff is great, but for me too expensive to use as fly stands. There must be cheaper alternatives... turns out there is, at least one.

I had some scraps of thick electric wiring left over, and this stuff is perfect for fly stands: It is strong enough not to buckle over from it's own weight but flexible enough to be bent into whatever shape you need. 



I bent the upper end as shown in the pic and hotglued a botlecap on, which is just large enough to fit a medium-sized mini in.



I also used some round wooden piecs left over from drilling out holes for the wall sockets. Just put the wires in the center hole and you're done. Of course if you bend the wire too far, it will topple over. Thats where the giant washers come into play: Simply slide enough of them over the wire so that the base is heavy enough to prevent toppling. The longer your wire, the more wahsers you'll need.



From an angle of functionality, this can't be improved much more: It is modular, can be taken apart and doesn't take up much storage space. Of course it doens't like like much. I haven't made any visual improvements so far, not even sanding down the sides of the wood wheels. I'm not sure what happens if you paint the wire, I think the paint will flake off when I bend the wire. I would use it as is on my game table next time we'll play, whenever that will be...

[DnDPaladin]

hmmm... i wonder how those could handle a dragon figure ?
but really nice idea, i'll be looking for them.

[tauster]

If you replace the wooden base with solid metal of the same size and craft some mechanism to keep the mini itself from toppling, a dragon mini should work fine. Perhaps two or three wires twined together, and some clamping mechanism (or really strong neodyms).

A dragon is probably the largest possible mini, so if that works, everything else will too. But for 99% of my minis, the solution works as is (not considering larger bases, but that should be easily be solved).

[skunkape]

Got to check out the test tube crafting article! Looks really cool!

[tauster]

WIP Update on the Instant Bones creepy-crawly...

1) I did more painting,...
2) ...plus another version of this monster.

1) Paint Job [to be updated later]



2) Skeleton version

It started months ago, when I realized that the binding of a college block (dunno if that's the correct english word; I'm not talking about the version where the wire is a spiral...) looks a bit like a spine. I textured a short bit with hotglue...and left it gathering dust for months. Fast forward to past weekend:

Another hotglue cast of the head, plus a giant washer for the base...




...hotglued together...




...and rubbleflocked (plus a skull for good measure)




Then, today, I almost ruined the whole thing during the basepainting: I used Army Painter's 'Skeleton Bone' spray paint to give the bones a bone-ish color. The tone of the color is fine, but I made the mistake of spraying far to much on, thus covering up all the fine details. *sigh* Now I gotta work with what details are left and make the best out of it...




Here's a WIP pic take during the painting (I don't take shots of every paint step)



Right now I'm painting both critters up - more pics later.

---

...and then there's this other 'Instant Bones' follow-up project:

When I acidentally discovered how to make these structures, I had used a light-weight clay that doesn't make any more texture than the one you create with your hands. It is so true to the mould that I could even see some of my fingerprints on it. Which is why this time, I took paper maché (TP & watered-down whiteglue) as a medium. Lo and behold, it works much better! Now I have ancient, cracked bones!

I seem to have forgotten to take pics of the pieces unpainted, so here's how they look finished:

Before the washing (equal parts of Devlan Mud, Badab Black and Water)




Finished (with neodyms hotglued into the bases at an angle)





Btw, the copper-thingies in the background were experiments I did in 2014 (iirc). It is green foam snippets that were tortured textured with a hotwire saw. To test out different color schemes, I made some small versions of the giant organic pillars out of the styrofoam snippets.

I plan to make at least two or three set of the large pillars: copper & verdigris, rust-colored and maybe flesh & bone. The shaping has been done in 2014; it's ust one more delayed project that I have to finish. They will be part of an Aboleth city, which is in the far future of my campaign so there is no actual time pressure. Which isn't helping...

 

[margaret]

Your bony monster is impressive! But I really like the effect of just the hot glue over the wire, without the paint you needed to get the bone effect you were after. Going to have to find a notebook with that kind of binding and try it. Unfortunately, all my salvaged notebooks are spiral-bound.

[tauster]

For those who didn't already have enough of the flying bases, here's another simple way.

I have lots of round wooden 'cookies' left from drilling holes for wall sockets, but they are simple to make, ust use a hole drill and some scrap wood. I belt sanded them, as I did with the old rusty nails.




Stacked the wood atop each other, drove the nails through and put some large-ish neodyms on the nail's heads.




As Lady Forscale demonstrates, beer bottle caps have just the right size for standard human-sized round mini bases. For larger minis, simply use larger metallic things on the nepodyms. The ones I use are strong enough to hold a giant heavy washer (6cm diameter, 4mm strong, solid steel) off center, plus a plastic earth elemental mini on top.



For even larger minis you can use the lids of tin cans. Just remember those have sharp edges...



Simple and fast, functional, modular and can be taken apart without hassle.

So here you have a flying earth elemental and flying tentacles. Try to built an encounter around that!

[tauster]

I decided to part with the two huge sets of Dwarven Forge cavern terrain I got for less than half of its commercial price a while back (for details, see here).






The reason is that while this stuff is absolutely beautiful (I wouldn't be able to make terrain with such quality myself!), it's just not my group's style of playing. Plus, it takes up too much storage and I'll be moving to the new house soon, so I try to get rid of stuff I don't absolutely need.

I had the idea of making silicone moulds of the pieces and cast some stuff to use in my own projects, but that fizzled out after three moulds (which turned out great but I simply didn't feel like casting anymore). Right now there's a discussion about 3D printing similar terrain pieces (see here)... Depending on your chioce of material, casting them might be a bit more expensive (you can't really beat the material cost of a few grams of that stuff!), but casting is much quicker after you made the mould. You can use all sorts of clay, hotglue,  paper maché, cement or whatever material you have at hand. Heck, you could even pour chocolate in and make cavern wa---shaped gifts!

...or you use the two sets simply as is on your game table.

I got lucky and grabbed both sets for 100€. After a quick search on ebay, these sets seem to trade for 170-250$ - each. I don't want to make profit with them, just get them into the hands of someone who uses them in play. So for 100€ plus shipping, you'll get both sets.

[tauster]

I did a little reorganizing of all of my junk diverse crafting materials. Those cheapo transparent plastic containers come in extremely handy! Not only are they stackable, whats even better is that you can see whats inside without having to open them.

---

Ever wanted a balloon adventure? These downpipe filter guards are practically begging to be made into balloons!

[tauster]

My favourite setting, apart from the Forgotten Realms, is Spelljammer. Our second-oldes still-running campaign (started in 2002, on a bike trip through Ireland) began in the Realms and after some years finally crossed over into Wildspace, where the party is trying to save the planet Toril from a stray beholder artifact that can, reputedly, destroy whole worlds*

The party found an ancient and untouched Netherese grave and in it, a Wreckboat with a Minor Helm.



For a long time they used it as a means of transport and were able to travel in a relatively short time from Impiltur to the Silver Marshes and even to Halruaa. Of course when they boarded a real spelljamming ship, they took their beloved Wreckboat with them. The campaign has some mighty hickups (players moved, got demanding jobs, got married and got kids, in short: life happened), so now we're playing only once or twice a year.

* The module is called SJA1 Wildspace, if you're interested. Just be warned that it is written badly and thus a DM's nightmare. Other than that, it has a cool story and does some neat things that I haven't seen in adventures elsewhere.

Long story short: I finally got around making a Wreckboat. It's not finished, but there's not very much to do, so I might, just might, be able to get it done this coming weekend.

I cut the core out of pink foam with a hotwire cutter.
 

I cut some small wooden strips roughly to size. I want the whole thing to look rough, so a few longer or shorter planks are not only OK but wanted.



Glued on a door and made a removable trapdoor for the top.


Nexts steps: Smooth out the front shield, add railing and find/make a large x-bow for the top deck. Then painting the wood black (my players blackened the Wreckboat for camouflage when flying through Wildspace) and the windshield in some silvery color to simulate glass.

Still a bit unsure regarding the sled...

[jennifer]

Nov 22, 2014 10:58:33 GMT tauster said:

YEEEEHA!

...sorry, I simply had to get that out of the way.
Didn't help though - I'm still endorphine-flooded.
*does a little happy giddy dance*

The reason: Mouldmaking done the rouseau-way seems to have worked perfectly. Here's a couple of pics.




Lesson learned: The 'silicone-starch-acrylic dough' gets surprisingly strong, so take something for stirring that's really strong. That wooden stick broke after half of the session, even though it was pretty strong.


All the moulds I made yesterday evening:




It seems like the silicone mass is able to pick up very fine details. Now what's important is that my clay will perform similarly well.




Some statues I'll use for ruin terrain.




I always wanted a lot of these pieces on the table. Purchasing them by the dozen is a) financially out of the question and b) not very creative. I had tried to replicate them with oyumaru (a japanese mass that gets dipped into boiled water to become flexible and gets rubbery hard when cooling down), but I did only a small number of pieces...




This one will become a staple on the table (sorry for the rhyme, couldn't resist). I'll make several copies and break them in different places, so they don't look identical.




The medaillons:



I pressed them into the mould mass rather deep, so the silicone mass went through the holes. I guess I'll have to clip some of these stems a bit shorter, especially on the first piece. However I strongly suspect that clay will be far too brittle to survive breaking it out when cured, so I might have to use greenstuff (expensive, ugh...) or find a cheaper but stronger alternative.

  


You can easily cut the cured mass with an xcato knife. Take care though- they're not only sharp but also pointy... *sucks at cut thumb*




These floor tiles will look absolutely great, I'm quite sure of that! I got the 12 tiles for 1 euro, together with a whole box of gypsum-cast stuff. Now I can make whole halls with them. *broad smile*
They work for dwarven terrain as well as scifi/alien terrain.

     


That's the rest of the silicone. I'tt become some sort of snake I guess...

Wow this is really darn amazing! Oh my!  Great detail!  I am gonna do this ASAP with my dungeon tile I sculpted in BLender and printed on my 3D printer.

[jennifer]

Nov 30, 2014 19:09:51 GMT tauster said:

I don't want to ruin any of my moulds, so I dabbed a bit of hotglue on one of the pieces I had whittled down from a mould.
And what can I say - as soon as it was cold, I could peel the hotglue off without any problems!

So I filled the rat's head completely and put something around it to keep it the cuts closed. At this moment it is cooling down, and I can't wait to see the result!!!



Guys, if this really works,... Making moulds opens already up so many possibilities, but using hotglue as a medium would be another quantum leap!
Not only is it much more convenient and time-saving (you don't have to let the clay harden and dry for one or several days), but it would also make possible very delicate moulds - the kind of stuff that would have crumbled when you only as much as looked weirdly in it's direction.

I am thinking about making a mold for a 1/8" thick hot glue base I can apply to the bottom of my 2 x 2 dungeon tile for ultimate grip!

[tauster]

A while ago, I found structured rolling pins for making terrain. They're quite expensive (12.50 € apiece), but that's totally worth it because they really shorten the time you'd need sculpting those textures yourself.

I got a cobble stone variant ...



...and bricks:

 

The seller, greenstuffworld, has several variants of these rolling pins. I just got my new ones ('frozen' and 'runes') and can't wait to try them out!





btw: they also got those tiny transparent resin crystals in different colors. And loads of other cool stuff, so brows their shoop at your own (wallet's) peril! Don't say I haven't warned you.

[jennifer]

Feb 4, 2014 9:52:17 GMT tauster said:

I absolutely loved Scotty's ice walls (beginning 7:30 in the video),

WOw I hadn't seen this video before.  Those are some nice modular walls he crafted.  Your's look awesome too.  I am thnking the TP walls like he did with stalagmite details brushed on with modeling paste and sculpted iwth pencil.

[teazia]

Tauster, I noticed you are having a house built in the UK (based on your posts). Given what I know about your country, that would suggest you are an independently wealthy person who is also quite frugal with your crafting budget. Cheers to that!

[tauster]

I'm building a house, yes. But I live in Germany, not the UK. I have no idea about construction prices in the UK, so I can't judge about that. Sure it's not cheap in Germany, but building yourself your own home never was. Due to the low interest rates, everybody and their brothers seems to build at the moment - golden times for handicraft businesses but bad times for builders! I have done as much work as I could by myself, with help from my family, so I could save some money.

[tauster]

jackmatt asked about Town, City or Village maps, so here's what I started some years ago (but never finished)...

During that time (I don't remember the exact year but I guess it was around 2005-2010) I was much more invested in Spelljammer than today; I modified and expanded a writeup of a large asteroid town that orbits Toril (similar to the Rock of Bral, for anyone interested). The original writer dissagreed with my modifications; add to that some large time constraints imposed by real life - resulting in me discontinuing working on both adding new content (which had to be done in German, for my gaming group, AND English for the forum) and the 3D map model of the whole asteroid town. It still sits in my shelf near the computer, and I can see it there, gathering dust and inducing a slight urge to FINALLY FINISH THIS SUCKER.

Long story short, here's what I did, and how I wanted to finish it.

The asteroid is about 10 miles (or was it km?) long and covered with the city, plus enough greenery (fields and wood) on both sides to renew the air envelope without magical help. It is relatively flat, so I simply layerd cardboard and blended the corrugation in with paper maché.






The model is about 60 cm long. Which means that a 3D representation of a house 10cm long would be less than 1mm. I realized early on that I probably wouldn't be able to make little 3D buildings and would have to paint on 2D cartographic representations (that would still be oversized, but that would be OK).

One of my original ideas was to go hunting on googlemaps for satellite pictures of villages and rural areas, print them out and glue them on, but they would have to be too much out of scale to make sense, so that idea died - at least for houses and streets. It might stioll work for natural features like wood and streams, and also for large roads. I had stopped the texturing process earl on; below is the last thing I had worked on: Adding lakes and waterways.






The alternative is to use drawn symbols for mapmaking. No decision made yet...

[jackmatt]

Tauster, thankyou for sharing this has given me some inspiration, light bulb moment.?

[pacarat]

Feb 7, 2016 14:38:51 GMT tauster said:

I decided to part with the two huge sets of Dwarven Forge cavern terrain I got for less than half of its commercial price a while back (for details, see here).






The reason is that while this stuff is absolutely beautiful (I wouldn't be able to make terrain with such quality myself!), it's just not my group's style of playing. Plus, it takes up too much storage and I'll be moving to the new house soon, so I try to get rid of stuff I don't absolutely need.

I had the idea of making silicone moulds of the pieces and cast some stuff to use in my own projects, but that fizzled out after three moulds (which turned out great but I simply didn't feel like casting anymore). Right now there's a discussion about 3D printing similar terrain pieces (see here)... Depending on your chioce of material, casting them might be a bit more expensive (you can't really beat the material cost of a few grams of that stuff!), but casting is much quicker after you made the mould. You can use all sorts of clay, hotglue,  paper maché, cement or whatever material you have at hand. Heck, you could even pour chocolate in and make cavern wa---shaped gifts!

...or you use the two sets simply as is on your game table.

I got lucky and grabbed both sets for 100€. After a quick search on ebay, these sets seem to trade for 170-250$ - each. I don't want to make profit with them, just get them into the hands of someone who uses them in play. So for 100€ plus shipping, you'll get both sets.

pm sent...