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Hey everyone, I'm not sure how popular this company's products are but I just found a company I can order Amera Plastics from, the web site (the combat company) got me pretty excited because the products looked really good (although unpainted) and I know i'm not the only one out there that really enjoys playing over great looking scenery, so has anyone had any of these buildings/scenery that they've bought that can tell me about the quality and ease of prepping and painting? because if they are good i've about $200 in my 'cart' ready to go

Link the site.

sorry don't know how to link a site yet but the site I found them on is www.thecombatcompany.com hope this is o.k?


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It was under sci fi terrain too if you're looking for it :-)

Here ya go, loki ( sorry, nerdfest09 ,I got bored so I thought I'd look them up)

http://www.amera.co.uk/

Looks like they do some interesting stuff

Thanks

Looks interesting stuff

I've got, well pretty much everything in their sci-fi line (future zone) and a lot in the fantasy set (fantasy realms). Everything else on their site is 15mm I believe (too small for 40k).

It's cheap vacuum mold terrain. It is very flexible, which imo makes it actually more durable than a lot of other terrain, but you can fill it with spray-foam for extra durability. Most of the simple ones look great with some paint and flock... like the craters, amphitheater, hills and barricades etc... understand though, they are not very detailed.

I personally don't like the buildings/ruins. The texture is only on one side (the outside), so depending on where you stand it will look either ok or really bad. Some folks seem to really like them though.

thanks Gunzard, that's sort of what I was after, just a bit of a review, i'll get them on that, I was going to use roughcoat on them anyway and add more debris when I painted them, but they sound like what i'm after! :-)

Vaccuum-formed terrain as a rule tends to be flimsy and poorly-detailed.

None of the stuff I've seen (including a few different pieces from the Amera range, which has been around for some time) has had me particularly excited to put it on the table.

Agreed with insaniak - and I'm sure we all remember the GW vac-formed terrain debacle, right?!?

Alpharius wrote:Agreed with insaniak - and I'm sure we all remember the GW vac-formed terrain debacle, right?!?

Well that was also a case of false advertising, and the bar for GW terrain is pretty high. You can see the quality of the Amera stuff right on their website, and the quality is quite low... that said, you can still make the simpler ones look nice with a little creativity.

i'm thinking they're quite well priced and i'm all for giving them some love once I get them, as for flimsy, should i mount each piece on some plasticard? if people can make cool terrain out of bean cans and ice cream containers having these as a starting point is going to make it easier right? regardless of the quality? :-)


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and no i'm sorry i don't know what happened with the GW vaccuum formed stuff? anyone enlighten me?

nerdfest09 wrote:i'm thinking they're quite well priced and i'm all for giving them some love once I get them, as for flimsy, should i mount each piece on some plasticard?

Mounting them on some board, and filling them with foam as mentioned before can certainly help with the flimsiness.

and no i'm sorry i don't know what happened with the GW vaccuum formed stuff? anyone enlighten me?

They released a set of 'Battlescape' terrain a while back, but advertised it using pictures of the resin masters (which were quite nicely detailed and looked rather spiffy) rather than the actual production pieces (which weren't, and didn't).

insaniak wrote:

They released a set of 'Battlescape' terrain a while back, but advertised it using pictures of the resin masters (which were quite nicely detailed and looked rather spiffy) rather than the actual production pieces (which weren't, and didn't).

Which was doubly painful because the resin masters showed how awesome the terrain COULD have been - it was VERY nice stuff!

Or, it could have been...

Vacuum formed stuff is, generally, very disappointing in reality.

Amera is a cheap and cheap looking alternative for terrain until you can afford the decent stuff.
If you have 200$ at disposal, you CAN afford better stuff.
Start with GW's City of Death buildings, the Temple of Skullsl, the Bastion and the Battlescape. Personally I also like the moonscape craters for their price.
Pegasus Hobbies ( http://www.thewarstore.com/IMEXPlatformerHexagon.html ), Ziterdes ( http://www.ziterdes.de/ziterdes/en/index.php?we_variant=en ) and Armorcast ( http://armorcast.com/store/ ) also make good affordable stuff.

I have a bunch of hills from Amera, plus a few other bits and pieces. I have PVA'd a bunch of sand to the hills. I'll try to post finished photos tomorrow.

got my plastics in the mail yesterday! so totally happy! and they're actually pretty good quality much better than what I expected, one of the ruined corner buildings is huuuge, can't wait to paint and detail them, the only thing i wish was different was the windows and edges need to be cut out but a good afternoon of modelling will fix that right up! so all i all I think it was a good buy, I got a massive ruined building, a ruined office building, six or seven barricades, a bombed building and a ruined chapel for $130.00 pretty good I think!

I think the buildings are actually pretty good quality, but some of the bunkers, and the helicopter in particular aren't that good.

Random titbit, has anyone else noticed how the models tend to be more detailed on the inside, than the outside?

Guess that's all part of the fun of vacuum forming.

Yeah I own the large tenement building and the factory.
For the price they're really good. They're big buildings and they bo together easy.
However you need to put a lot of work into them if you want awesome-looking scenery. For my tenements building I've put hours and hours of internal-walling with cardboard and spackle, I've textured the outside with textured spraypaint, I've laid plasticard flooring and added a ton of extra details both on the inside and out.

It's a cool, fun project for me so I don't mind all that much. But be warned, you're not getting CoD-style scenery at a fraction of the cost, you're getting exactly what you pay for!