Relenzo's Somewhat Competent Terrain

[Relenzo2]

A long time ago...a frighteningly long time ago, now...I had a thread called "Relenzo's Misadventures in Modeling". I had very little to work with apart from enthusiasm for Heroscape terrain, but I managed to hack together a couple things.

This new thread is being created several weeks into the teaser season for Heroscape's reboot--2022's Age of Annihilation. Because of the announcement, I have enthusiasm again after all these years! I also have a little more experience. That's why I'm calling this "Relenzo's Somewhat Competent Terrain".

I have a feeling that the Heroscape community of the 2020's will create some incredible things, of which I will play only an insignificant part. We have resources that never existed in the 2000's. Back when 'Scape was last "a thing", tabletop roleplaying was nowhere near as popular as it is today--and neither was tabletop terrain. And the whole idea of YouTube communities was nascent. Here in the 2020's, there are so many channels and videos about creating custom miniatures terrain. There are so many sophisticated techniques, so many ideas, and so much inspiration. I have learned so much. What I'm saying is, it's a very exciting time to be into Heroscape--and not just because the game is getting a reboot.

I'm going to start posting the bits and bobs I've been working on since being energized by the Age of Annihilation announcement. And then--we'll see how long this bout of enthusiasm lasts.

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This post will eventually contain an easy-to-browse archive of everything I post in this thread, if the thread gets longer than a page.

[Relenzo2]

Let's start with my most ambitious project to date--something I created start to finish this weekend in a manic fit of free time.

One of the terrain pieces from the ancient thread was a set of log rafts made out of popsicle sticks. Time has not been kind to them:



As you can see, the bigger one has lost a chunk. The boards were only held together by the cross-beams underneath, so it wasn't sturdy enough. But even when whole, they didn't live up to my vision. I did all sorts of things wrong. I glued the popsicle sticks together before cutting them, and they were so strong then I had to cut them with a jigsaw--with very messy results. The moss was made out of green paint and moon sand; that fell off pretty quick. And finally, the ill-considered bits sticking up off the sides actually made it pretty hard for many figures to stand on them.

So I made new ones!

I made a prototype, and then four more copies. I'm going to show photos from the second round of production, because everything's a bit clearer.

The whole basis of the structure, I decided, would be different this time around. I would have a solid piece of material at the center of the raft, and everything would be attached to that center, rather than having cross-ways sticks being a load bearing element of the construction. Chipboard probably would have been good. But I have a scrap piece of foamcore I wanted to use up (not "XPS foam", just the regular dollar tree stuff you make science fair posters out of). I measured out a shape that was basically what you got if you traced around a pair of glyphs sitting on adjacent Heroscape tiles. This gave you a shape that would be bigger than the figures standing on it, but smaller than the spaces the raft itself would sit on:



My next improvement: Instead of popsicle sticks, I used coffee stirring sticks, which are similar, but smaller and easier to cut. This is one of those neat tricks YouTube has been teaching me. I know YouTube also says you should paint over your wood, but I don't listen. I still liked the idea of coloring the sticks with wood stainer. I managed to borrow some more wood stain, and instead of the mahogany stain from last time I got a maple stain, whose color I liked approximately 100x more:



I left the paper on my foamcore cutouts so that I could brush down both sides with brown craft paint. The idea was that if you saw betwen the cracks in the boards, you wouldn't see white--you would see a much darker version of the wood color, so it would just kind of look like shadow and not draw attention to itself. This actually worked out exactly as planned. I just painted a single layer since people wouldn't be seeing much of it:



Then I measured and cut the sticks with a box cutter, and used regular white glue to glue them to the top of the foam. Heroscape using hexagons poses many unique challenges for terrain crafting--you can see that when you get to the side of the hexagons, the boards become very short, kind of forcing the viewer to suspend their disbelief about the fiction of a coherent raft. Originally I was going to cut the raft short and chop off the parts of the foam where the boards couldn't go all the way across the raft. But I didn't like how it looked. Halfway through the first prototype I decided it would look best if I filled out the whole hexagon:



I made some cuts into the foam with an Xacto so that it looked (a little bit) like the boards went all the way through:



In the prototype, I started off painting the sides of the foam with the same dark brown craft paint. But halfway through I thought--what if I just painted more wood stain directly onto the foam?? The colors of the top and sides would match! I tried it, and it didn't eat the foam! So I stuck with it. It didn't adhere super-well of course, but I just globbed on some more until it was good enough.

By this point, I was almost done. But I wanted a decoration that really sold the idea of "river raft". I got some butcher's twine, which normally I use for roasting chicken, but which actually looks like a coarse, Indiana-Jones style rope on the 28mm scale, to create rope bindings going across the top and bottom of the raft.

Now, the first thing I tried doing was wrapping the string around the top of the raft and gluing it on the bottom. That was a mess. Then I tried actually tying a knot on the bottom. That stayed in place, but it resulted in elevating the raft a good quarter-inch higher off the table. And I was already pushing the height of this thing because of the foamcore. I wanted the raft, when sitting on a water tile, not to come much higher than the 1-height banks of ground tiles around it. Because in game, the raft would be treated as having a height of 1. So I had to find a way to keep the twine off the bottom of the raft, or it would have to go.

The solution that finally worked was a bit mad: staples!



The metal staple doesn't look very good, of course, but slapping lots of brown craft paint onto them made a good compromise. Once they weren't shiny, they didn't stand out anymore, and that was good enough.

Now I've got a whole little fleet to drift down the rivers of Valhalla on!

[Relenzo2]

Next up: Papercraft Giant Lillypads!

I wasn't expecting this thread to have a theme. But, uh, I do really like things that go in water!

I have been really impressed by some of the papercraft terrain that's been created on this site over the years. Especially AliasQTips huts and sandbag bunkers, of course! After putting a few of these together, and seeing how they worked, it was a matter of time before I thought: Hey, maybe I could use papercraft to design my own terrain!

These lillypads are pretty simple from an engineering standpoint, but I do like having lillypads.

The basic plan was to be simple: I would scrap Google for pictures of lillypads, and use clippings to create a hexagonal base and six small raised edges, just like giant lillypads have. This was the first take:



Assembly is pretty simple. The bottom side is smaller than the top side, so that they fit together. I scored the bases of all the flaps with an Xacto knife. Then, I folded the flaps "inwards" on the top piece, and taped each flap to its two neighbors with very small pieces of masking tape.

That's a bit obnoxious, admittedly. But the scale here is tiny--it was the only thing that worked. Using paper flaps and glue to keep those side flaps attached to each other (and hence vertical) just wasn't working out. But the tape, once I became accustomed to cutting out small strips of it with a scissors, worked perfectly. Then I just had to attach the bottom piece on with white glue!

My journey wasn't done, however. Once assembled out of cardstock it held together well physically, but it still didn't look as great as I envisioned. I tried cutting out a wedge-shaped slice so that it would look more "lillypad-ish" but it just wasn't quite there:



I think we can do just a little bit better.

Eventually, I determined that the issue was that I was being too literal-minded. I had clipped the image for the top from, as you might guess, actual pictures of giant lillypads. The kind that kids are actually able to sit on in real life. However, giant lillypads look a little different form most lillypads. They have this dark green, veined surface which is different from the "stereotypical lillypad" look.

Eventually I decided that the "stereotypical lillypad" look is exactly what I needed. I needed to get this to read as a lillypad, and that meant leaning into imagery that people were already familiar with. There's an archetypical idea of what a lillypad's surface looks like--and by scanning images of smaller, ordinary-size lillypads, I was able to find it and apply it to my template:



It's much more obvious what this is supposed to be! Well, the template looks a bit funny, but the weird part is the result of some image mirroring, and it's in the section we're going to cut out anyway. Assembled, it looks like this:



As you can see, I added flowers to half of them for even more recognizable imagery!

I'm really happy with these now. Small figures can walk on them, so I can create little bridges across rivers and other water features!