Well done sir. I love doing terrain and would love to learn your step by step process, I want to do more buildings but "blasted out ruined half buildings" are so passe.

I like the idéa of putting a garden inside an house, or maybe an entire park (though not inside an house...).

If you put the garden in the house, make shure the walls are so low so that (the players) can easily look inside, either to appriciate it or to, if you are making it a big one, putting units inside.

And with the fountain: the Water caste doesn't really have anything to do with water, it's just the Imperial designation for the Por caste. Not that you shouldn't have a fountain, that is a good idéa, but you shouldn't add one for that reason.

You could easily make troughs using Cavalary bases, that way you can create modular 'parkland' features and remove them as you please.

The camouflage on that HH is incredible!! How did you do such a great pattern?

Allright! So, it's finally time to start working on my landing pad that I was talking about earlier. I'm going to post in progress pictures as I go to show you guys my very straight forward technique. I have a picture in my mind, although not complete, on how this baby is gonna look, but exactly what shape it will have or what details I'll throw in there will be determined by the process. That is not always how I go about it, but this time I'll just get right in there.

First up, these are the tools I use. Not very complicated. A modelling knife for cutting out all the piesces, regular pen, sandpaper, a circle maker thing (?), glue and filler. Oh yeah, I use the citadel modelling tool to draw out the texure on the building once the shape is done, forgot to include that one in the picture.


Ok, here's a picture of the material I use, it's just regular pink foam or whatever it's called.


So I first draw out the shapes, right now it is just regular circles, and then cut them out. I'm not very thorough at all at this point because all the shaping will be done with sandpaper once I have all the pieces.


The next thing is just to get the glue on


Once that is done, BOOM! We have a very nice foam pie. I'll leave it alone for a few days to make it dry real good, and then I'll go on to shape it. D-fish is there for scale purposes.


Thats it for now! I'll get back to you with updates as the project goes on. Don't know beforehand how frequently that will be though, my schedule is usually pretty packed.

Have a good one!

Thanks for the work in progress; I will be keeping a close eye on this.

Second that, and wow.. serious PVA fumes in that room I'm sure.

Having this thread pop up on the radar made me realise we had not shifted it to the Modelling forum!

Great stuff Juam,

I've tried my hand at making nice things out of pink foam in the past but never met with this kind of success! I suppose patience is the key.

That being said I wish you happy progress as you continue and show us your process.

Happy terrain-ing!

modelglue

Ok, moving on. I now have material to work with. I'm gonna go for kind of a saucer shaped pad as I think it'll look pretty Tau. So the tool I start of with is just a pice of sandpaper.


As you can see, scraping away with sandpaper can get pretty messy, although if you kick ass with the vacuum cleaner it's not that bad.


Getting the right shape takes time and I constantly check my progress just to be sure that I don't scrape off too much. It's a real pain if you do, you'll get a smaller shape than what you really want, so then to fix it you kinda have to expand the shape again with filler.


If you can save time, do it.


So after going nuts with sandpaper for a while it started to come out as I imagined it. It doesn't look very nice yet but we're getting there.


No point in having a landing pad if you can't get up there. It needed a ramp. I wasn't too sure about what I wanted, so I started out by cutting out three blocks of foam. I made sure they were wide enough so that I could cut into the shape if I wanted to, and also long enough so that the slope wouldn't be too steep in the end so that models would fall over.


First I had a go at it with sandpaper. I know, it's beautiful.


As you can understand, I was not to happy with the looks of this. But whatever, some idea was sure to come up, so in the meantime I turned to the pad to draw out the texture.


I just start with a pen to mark where I want the lines to go. I go with 90 degree angles all the way.


The next step is to cut the lines out with a knife.


Lastly I widen the scores with a modeling tool. If I don't I wont be able to see them when I have applied the filler.


And then it hit me what I wanted to do with the ramp. I wanted it to kind of arc upwards into the landing pad, it was just sooo Tau. So I went nuts with sandpaper again. I gotta say, it looks pretty good. If it looks good at this stage, when you only have the shape and nothing else, no filler or color yet, you can pretty much be sure that the end result will be decent. I will erase the gap between the ramp and the platform with filler at a later stage.


Thats it for now, have a good one!

Wow! That ramp looks sooo good! And whole pad looks so Tau even now.

Subscribed & waiting for next step!

For the line details, how deep do you cut with the knife?

I cut scores about 2-3 mm deep. I try not to make them too deep, because during painting, I use a shade color in them. If they are cut too deep you wont get your brush in there. It's also very important to widen them after they are cut. I want a clearly visible score, not to shallow, not too deep.

I can't wait to see what you do for the filler. I have had my hand at creating shapes with pink insulation foam, and I can never figure out how to give it a smooth finish without it being prone to chipping. Plaster chips. Bondo is expensive (also need to first seal with glue.). I found This stuff, but I need money to buy it. Seems to be perfect though. Are you using the spackel shown in your pics to finish it?

Edit: I also heard this stuff is really awesome. The number is the minutes it takes to dry. Fast Set 40 dries in 40 min, for example. I was also told its cheaper than spackle, and it is pretty much the same thing only better.

Very inspiring,

I've been busy (out of hobby) for a spell; your log has inspired me to dig out my cadre and start painting.

Thank you, and I would love to see more W.I.P.

Azmond