- by Iain Wilson



Browsing around online a few weeks back, my eye was caught by a neat looking new release from Renedra. They have a slowly-growing range of plastic historical building kits, and had just added to it with some two-story desert houses. While these are intended for historical settings, I thought it would be fun to see how they prettied up with the addition of some Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue parts for a rustic sci-fi look. After a short and impatient wait for the post, I came up with this:











The pack I ordered includes parts for three houses. They all utilise the same floor and roof sprue, so are all the same width, just having different configurations of windows and doors, and differing overall heights. There are three sprues per building - the floor/roof sprue, and two identical wall sprues. To these, I added a Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue.









The doorways on the buildings are quite small, and have timber doors that fit into them. That wasn't going to do here, though, so I took a doorway from the Maelstrom's Edge sprue and laid it over the existing doorway, using it as a guide to trace around with my hobby knife. Then, tracing gradually deeper cuts into that guideline, I carefully cut out the hole for the new doorway.









With the new door glued in place, I covered over the window cavities and the second doorway with various bits from the terrain sprue. As with the doorway, I used the curtained window as a guide to trace around in order to enlarge the original window hole.









I left the side walls largely as is, adding just a couple of corrugated patches so they weren't identical.









The floor/roof pieces were also left alone, although I replaced the wooden trapdoor in the roof with a metal one made from two strut panels trimmed to fit.









From there, I just had to glue everthing together. I also added a little filling putty along the corner seams and around the edge of the roof to neaten everything up a little.









With a quick coat of paint, it wound up looking like this:









Now to get the other two finished off!













Why not give it a go? You can find the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprues for your own terrain re-imaginings, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge range from the webstore here.






What are you working on? We would love to see your models and terrain in the Comm Guild Facebook group!




For other building ideas, modeling tutorials, army spotlights and conversion walkthroughs, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.