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It's occurred to me that i haven't actually seen a real lot of halo stuff done. If I've seen anything, I've seen the iconic stuff, but it occurred to me, never in my life had I seen anyone do a Hard Light Bridge for tabletop wargaming. So I created 3, and this is really the best of the 3 trials.

Materials:
saw blade
hard plastic packaging
cloth/napkin
white/blue paint
pliers


Instructions
Step 1: cut out a bit of plastic to desired length, and wider than what you intend to have. Hobby knife and straight edge is best
Step 2: take the saw-blade and drag it perpendicularly along the face of the plastic.
Step 3. Flip the plastic, and on the opposite face, drag the saw blade in a perpendicular grain to the previous one.
Repeat steps 2-3 as necessary.
Step 4. Repeat dragging the saw-blade again, but focus excursively on the edges of the plastic.
Step 5: using pliers, fold in both edges completey. Then fold the edges again at roughly 45* bend to the flat of the surface.
Step 6: grab some blue/white paint. Barely any of it. Literaly, barely any of it, but a bright color. Water it down at a 20:1 ratio. maybe more.
Step 7: apply paint liberally across entire surface. Allow to sit for a few moments before attacking it with the cloth to wipe of the excess. We only want to stain it a bright color.

Let dry, and feel free to add a layer of varnish if that's your thing. It's probably not the best, but, hey, I got it done. Someone more inventive than I may find some way of incorporating LEDs into it to give it the real effect, or fiber optics.

Frosted acrylic (Perspex, Plexi-glass...) with LED side lighting?

The acrylic already has properties which are comparable in many ways to fiber optics - so with LEDs located at either end of the bridge it should glow quite nicely.
____________

Looks like it should work well enough:




Automatically Appended Next Post:
BTW - Although I haven't done a hard light bridge, which looks like it should be easy enough to do, I have used acrylic for a lot of other lit terrain effects.

If you engrave acrylic...either mechanically or with a laser...you can then apply a light to the edge and the engraving will light up. The clear/polished portion of the acrylic will not show the light, except at the edges - but the engraving will be bright. So - you go through and you engrave a map or other design on the acrylic and then embed it in a frame that conceals the edges. The end result looks like one of those neat holographic command displays you always see in the movies.

I was about to make a remark about the patterning when you mentioned the engraving.

Will have to do more digging. Tis was spilled out on a whim, and the effect actually improves when stacking two sheets treated the same way one onto the other, it gives it a better epsilon of depth, but at the same time adds strength to the flimsy plastic....

Will have to do some digging on your stuff. The only thing at bothers me is the lighting up to be honest, I don't like the use of electricity in anything I make, though I'm entirely capable of appreciating the effort, I just wouldn't do it on anything I make, not even for scenery. I'm still willing to look into it though, as I may have developed a hankering for creating a halo themed scene


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Bah, forgot to mention, advantage of my method is that it's cheap, doable pretty quickly and makes use of things if you don't want to throw them out....

LEDs will do the job of lighting it up.
There are low voltage DC kits (if you know how to solder) to do this - or you could just use a string of xmas lights (LED) for the same purpose - and they are run from batteries.

You don't have to go anywhere near mains level electricity - and the 3-6v DC at bugger-all current will not pose any harm to you - in regards to electrocution.

 poda_t wrote:
Bah, forgot to mention, advantage of my method is that it's cheap, doable pretty quickly and makes use of things if you don't want to throw them out....

I agree - cheap and readily available are two very handy traits when you look at terrain ideas, I was just tossing out an idea which would meet your follow up thought.

BTW - Frosted acrylic is cheap and readily available too, or rather acrylic is. You can often get small scraps and cut offs for free or nearly so from glass shops and hardware stores who cut replacement glass to fit. Frosting it can be done with a few minutes time with a random orbit sander and some 600 grit sandpaper.

If you want to avoid electricity (which isn't too difficult to deal with) you can by using flourescent inks which are light reactive. Smother your object and then wipe it off. The remaining ink or paint will stick in the crevasses and grooves. Under regular light it is bright - but for display purposes you can add a full spectrum bulb or a secondary black light which causes it to glow (even more noticeable if you turn off or dim the lights for photos).