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In the past I've posted images of terrain pieces I've made from paper. Well, I am at it again. This time I'm making an entire battle board. It will be 4' by 6' and be completely modular. It is made of individual hexagonal tiles that are 6" from edge to edge.

Here's a shot with 80% of the tiles created:



Here is a "model view" shot with some figures for reference:




Here is a bird's eye view with most of the tiles complete (only two tiles remain to be made):



As stated, I still have two tiles to make and fit. Then I will need to examine each tile to make sure they align evenly with respect to height. Once that's done, I'm planning to paint them, using a fairly simple paint scheme.

The board will be completely modular. The tiles can be lain down in any configuration.

This looks nice, and I'm looking forward to seeing it completed. That being said, I'm pretty sure the Showcase is only meant to be used for finished work, not WIP.

Whoops. Yeah, I wasn't where I thought I was. I've contacted someone to hopefully get this moved over.

Looks good, but is it a pain to put together since it's so many pieces?

EDC

Looks rather good in the raw state... What's your process for making these tiles, presume you have a flat base tile and then have applied the texture on top? Will you / do you have partial tiles to fill the gaps on the edges as well?

 evildrcheese wrote:
Looks good, but is it a pain to put together since it's so many pieces?

EDC

I wouldn't think so. It's entirely modular. The most "complicated" thing to it are the multi-part craters. There is one crater with seven tiles and another crater with three. It's pretty obvious which tile piece goes with which. For the seven tile crater, the order in which the tiles are put down doesn't matter, so long as the six rim sections surround a seventh tile and form a circle. Mixing and matching tile pieces between two different craters of the same type doesn't matter, again due to the modularity of the whole thing.

To lay down the board for game play, you would basically start by deciding where on the board you want the craters to go and put them down. After that, you would start on an edge and begin laying down the flat pieces. As you get to a crater piece, you would just need to adjust it's position and angel slightly to incorporate it into the tile pattern.

My original plan was to add magnets along two axis to give the board cohesion - make it more resistant to being bumped. I am likely still going to do that, but I am a little daunted by the work.


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 Ruglud wrote:
Looks rather good in the raw state... What's your process for making these tiles, presume you have a flat base tile and then have applied the texture on top? Will you / do you have partial tiles to fill the gaps on the edges as well?

The tiles are made from paper clay. When cured they have the rigidity and strength of particle board. I am using a technique similar to something called "Carton Pierre." I started by sculpting individual tile pieces from normal modelling clay, like so:



From there I made silicone molds, and then formed the individual tiles in paper clay from the molds. There are 16 distinct tile forms. To make the full board, it takes 104 tiles. Some of the tiles are flat-ish, so that they can be grouped and other terrain pieces (ruins and such) can be placed on top of them. Eventually my plan is to create additional modular features, like small hills. That is an effort for another day, however.

Gah!

So bloody good!

Very jealous!

I have no words, it is totaly amasing!

This is soooo freakin cool!!!!

Finally done. Took forever, but that's mostly because I got distracted. This is a fully modular 6' by 4' lunar landscape battle board. There are 104 tiles. Each tile has 4 magnets that are intended to encourage cohesion with its neighbors. The magnets are tiny, and aren't strong enough to really force cohesion.


This is of the full board:




This is a detail shot, showing one of the big craters in detail:




This is a "Flier view" shot of some figures on the board:




And this is a "Troop level view" of the same figures on the board:

This is awesome. Reminds me of the display board for the original Land Raider prototype.

Originally, this thread got moved here by the mods. I'd started posting here again after a long hiatus, and hadn't noticed the format change. Anyway, long story tedious, my initial plan was just to show progress on my lunar landscape. Since this got turned into a blog, figured I should be treating it like a blog. So, quick name change and voilà, here we are.

So, I thought I'd share some of my other projects. This is something I'm working on for some friends. They have Shadowrun characters and I'm creating specialty figures for them. This one is for Harvard, the party's Hermetic mage:

 Stormwall wrote:
This is awesome. Reminds me of the display board for the original Land Raider prototype.

Thanks!

Another work in progress. This will eventually be a terrain piece (a statue).

Cool stuff. How long does it take to lay a 6x4 area with the tiles.

Really cool stuff, your sculpting is very impressive.

EDC

First, ...

 evildrcheese wrote:
Really cool stuff, your sculpting is very impressive.

Thanks. I try. Personally, I think of my skill as being somewhere between "sucks" and "almost able to accomplish what's in my head." I seem to slide up and down that scale, depending on mood, phases of the moon and the sex life of some random butterfly 10,000 miles away.

 evildrcheese wrote:
Cool stuff. How long does it take to lay a 6x4 area with the tiles.

EDC

Starting with the tiles in a jumble, coming straight from the box, it took me 23 minutes to assemble the exact configuration shown. That's because I numbered the tiles on their backs to match that exact configuration. The breakdown of the time consisted of 7 minutes sorting the tiles into columns, and then 16 minutes laying down the columns in their respective order. Once the tiles are down, it is a relatively simple task to move features around to conform to some other configuration.