Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Alright, so pics are going to come up later when I make some stuff for expamles this week, so be patient lol.

First off you're going to need:
Razor, scaple, or long knife (i use fishing knife, long blade not to think)
Green dry foam (used for holding plants)
paper clip, or poker tool (something with small fine tip)
Fine and heavy duty sand paper
white glue or tacky glue
metal teethed brushes or anything prefered for applying textures.

AND if you have access to it, one of those machining tools thats wire and heats up to cut styrofoam for engineering prototypes. (forget name ha..)

Second, we take the dry foam, comes in long square bricks.
Next, determine what kind of scenery you are going to make. If you're planning for rocks, or dragons teeth, crystals, or craters divide the brick long wise to give you more foam to work with.

* when cutting make sure to have one piece be your decided bottom, and top. Cut to make sure one side is the size base you want, and it has the max. height of it, unless you are adding trees ect.

If you're making landsacpe, or walls, barracades, cut it long wise.

Then this is where you need to get creative with it, because all you're looking at is a strip of foam going WTF..? So we'll go down the list and break it down till the pics come up.

Craters:
once you cut your piece to the base size you would like and max. height of the model. Now's the messy part, like really messy. You're going to want to do this inside of a box. Take your sand paper (grit depending on how much work you gotta do) and start sanding away. Remember if you want jagged edges, explosion marks ect. Just wait, everything great takes time. Now that you've shaped your land scape, get the poker tool. Use your thumb or finger and press into it (like you would if you were making a playdoh crater) to give it that round effect. *make sure its ON the tabel and not in your hands so you dont snap it.) With that being said, when its on a hard surface don't think its going to expolde because you push too hard. Shape that crater!!

Next take your poker tool and start giving the out side edges of it, and insides those nice jagged edges and "blown up look". Then take your metal brush or paper clip and start poking GENTILY to apply a texture, or bullet holes/other blast marks.
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y242/icecreamman9/get-attachment-21aspx.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y242/icecreamman9/get-attachment-22aspx.jpg ( note small crater piece in bottom corner.)

NEXT! Very important!

So. Unless you want that nice heavy metal Dreadnaught squishing your poor crater like a human, youre going to want to take some clearcoat acryllic paint, or watered down white glue and paint the crater. If you use clearcoat it does not add texture or color when dries, not sure about the glue and water. Doing this makes your foam crater into something that feels like plasic. Not too easy to break so no worries. Applying the coat also gives paint a better hold on the foam with out it seeping into it.

Rocks/Crystals/Dragons Teeth:
Same steps, cut foam to size.
Rocks: I do 5x5 inch squars and then slice and dice and then use the cut pieces to form rocks. Seeing how nothing in nature is perfect why should cutting them up be?
Crystals: Still, it is in nature, so it does not have to be perfect. But you want ot make sure you keep the form of what ever crystal youre trying to make.

Use knife and sand paper to shape major lines or textures on either, then go over with paper clip to define texture. Apply shell coating as before.

Bunkers/hills/land pieces.
This is a quite complex process. Can be quite annoying because you're designing it. Again, use the sand paper to shape the layout of how you want the piece to look. Dont worry about doing anything major yet. Next take a marker (i guess you can do this for other pieces, other are not too complex though.) and put lines where your planning to cut in from the top for the bunker, and put lines on all the sides that are going to define the heights you want to start from. Take your knife and sand paper and start to cut away big portions of what you need. If you're not too steady with your hands don't try to go all the way to the lines or too much can go wrong. (take into effect how long the knife is, and where the blade is going to cut when you start performing surgery too.)

Next take your sand paper and start shaping again. If your going to have walls, rubble piles, start making the shape of where it will be ect.

IF your making a entrenchment you're going to want to start forming the floor of it( making the floor the depth needed).
Next to the texturizing:
For sand bags, start with a marker and it helps if you can look at other scenery sandbags to see how they sand on top of one another, but start the outline of the edges. Next take your poker and follow them, carving in a couple Cms to give it that shape. If there is bends (sand bag is un level) determine where the bend is, and go across the top forming the bend line. If you look at the GW bunker that comes with barracades and barrels, they have metal plates every where and wooden boards. If you want to apply this technique, use a popsicle stick to carve your lines with. You get nice thick lines and they are straight (aslong as your line is ha.)

Then use your poker, and fingers to apply proper blast marks and bullet holes across the piece. That's basically it. Again, heres a few pics of some I have at my house, (most at my brothers.) and I'll have a WIP pic coming soon.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y242/icecreamman9/get-attachment-22aspx.jpg

Sorry for limited pics, need batteries XD.

Hills is pretty self explanitory. I guess you can do buildings, but I would use plasticcard or something along that lines. This is a great use for base pieces or if you did game table sections (size being a problem.) The foam is always straight and level, and once you apply the shell coating it will not warp over time.

So let your imagination drive you when using this stuff, you dont have to define EVERYTHING you want on the piece, adding anything is always easy . If youre going to stick something in ( flag banners, or swords do it before shell coating.} But IMHO, I love working with this stuff granted it can get everywhere, its worth it in the end. You really just have to put your time into it, as you do with all great things. If you get frustrated, take a break, re think, come back.

Cheers, hope people find this useful,

will have a tutural for following soon:
Bunkers
Hill
rocks/crystals
barracades
swamps/craters
flag in rubble stand.

** Also, if you save all your scraps you can make what ever out of those. Comes in handy for filler pieces to give it that real life touch. And if you break it down to dust (id do it in a zip lock bag) and mix with white glue, you get a soft playdoh like foam that would resemble greenstuff for scenery. Seeing how its free (being a bi product) and you only need glue it works great. Just mix it in, make sure it stays a little tacky so when you apply it it stays when drys.

I use for filling my pieces i make to my game board, gaps, or to cover up a mistake when making the piece.

Looks like a good tutorial but it would probably benefit from a few more pics. Also, embedding the pics rather than linking would be much better too.

ok, I was not sure if I should of embedded them or not. And yeah, im going to add pics on how to make everything once i go to michaels later this week and get more green foam. So with that said, in the next week or so there will be plenty of pics showing how to do everything properly.

I would just use img tags

[img]
[/img]

Yeah that's a good idea - either way, look forward to the redux version!

looks nice, but for the craters: why dont you just buy them at amera? they are only like 3 pounds for 3 craters

off topic: their website is http://www.amera.co.uk/index.php go to the futuristic stuff for warhammer 40k scenery, there are some craters there, and they also got ruins that look almost as good as gw ones, but cost only 8 pounds, etc (please dont treat this as spam, im just trying to help people here, i dont own amera, i dont know the guy who does, so it doesnt help me at all if more people buy there)

Looks like a good tutorial but it would probably benefit from a few more pics. Also, embedding the pics rather than linking would be much better too.

Good tutorial but it'd be more benefical if we could see pics.