Friday, July 10, 2015

Castable Building Masters Using Pressed Foam Board




I've been wanting to upgrade the terrain on my Bolt Action table for a while in order to create a village in normandy. One of the things I need to do is scale down the buildings so they fit better on the table. At the moment the buildings are quite large. What I am going for is blocks of row houses, and corner houses. To to do this I need to create some master parts which I can mold and customize. One of the things holding me back was the tedium of creating windows and window pane glass. Micro mark solved that problem for me with one of their 1:48 scale packs of architectural details. My intention now is to keep windows, signs, and doorways separate and add them to the modal as needed . This will also allow me to model the buildings with slightly different window designs, and shutters open or closed. Key towards doing this casting job, was creating masters that had brick and stone detail. The idea is that once the basic parts are made, the exposed brick areas can be puttied over as desired to make houses in various states of repair. I had planned to use actual scale bricks to do this work, but that proved tedious. Instead I took a foam core poster board and removed the paper from one side. Once that was done I cannibalized the ferrule (metal part that holds bristles) from a brush and made it sort of brick shaped. Then I was able to just press the brick tool into the exposed soft foam and create bricks. The last step is creating a silicon mold of each side of the house so I can case the main sections. Once that is done I should be able to make any number of houses, and damage them individually. I plan to create roof sections as well as flooring. I might even make the 2nd story removable. I am just not sure it is that important for the game.

3 comments:

  1. 2nd story might be useful for a particular narrative game, like a sniper in a bell tower!

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  2. Interested in casting myself - so interested to see how you go about it :)

    W

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    Replies
    1. That is coming. I just made some masters to cast.

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