"Making 15mm japanese terrain" Topic

After about a year with Mura Miniatures I feel that I have enough 6mm buildings to start looking at the next line to add. Naturally I thought about 15mm, and I recently started on some greens:

The troops are 6mm, just to give an idea of how ridiculously huge these buildings feel to me after modelling 6mm!

Anyway, these are just started, but I'm planning to make 3-5 buildings for the first wave. With Oshiro models already providing quite a few types of houses in 15mm, what would you want to see in a 15mm japanese terrain range? I have some ideas already, but I'm always interested in what you wargamers out there need for your tabletops. Cheers!

Konban wa, setsuko-san!

An odd request. A roadside noodle booth as was often found between way-stations on the main roads. It may be too specialized a building for actual manufacture though.

Oh, HECK YES! I'd buy a couple noodle shops in a heartbeat!

@Setsuko, great idea and a great looking start! I would like to see 1 village elders house 2-3 farmers houses, and maybe 1 very modest temple.

Cheers.

U.k.

A mill next to a streem, with a water wheel.

Just to be different, how about a drum tower. Not the pagoda type, but like the one at Shorenji. It appears to be a wood sided building with a steeple in the center of the roof. To my knowledge no one has tried one of these yet. I also borrowed(read that as stole) ideas from Turnbull's book on fortified temples. My scratch built jinaimachi now has thirteen buildings. The book has what would be an aerial view of towns showing homes and buildigs of various sizes and shapes. Good luck in this expansion of your business. TIG

Setsuko, I'd like to second Kenshin's request for a modest temple, and add a suggestion for a small shinto shrine that could be placed by a roadside or off into the trees a bit.

Thanks for a lot of solid ideas. I like the mill, and I should be able to squeeze some version of a food shop into the range. A modest temple should be possible too, but a very modest one as I'm trying to start out with some smaller buildings. I know exactly which drum tower you mean, tig, and it should be possible to recreate something like that. Again, thanks for the input, I'm off for to the drawing board!

Just another short comment. What Oshiro and Hovels did was just make the same line in a different scale. Look at what they have available and do something different. Your shops are unique as is your shrine. Be the guy that offers what no one else has, a quick way to be the best. Have a good day. TIG

Solid suggestion Tig.

Been reading a lot of samurai manga recently, and dojos feature prominently. So perhaps a dojo? I don't know if there is a preferred style for a dojo, but a building with a large enclosed interior space should work.

And another iconic Japanese building, the bath house! This could be done as a simple add-on to an existing building. One would just make a two-part enclosure depicting the hot springs area, and the gamer would place it behind a building made to accept such an attachment.

Other optional attachments could be made, allowing you, the producer, to simplify the production process, yet offer variety to the customer. One could make other craft shops by having different yards, such as a kiln and potter's wheel for a potter, reeds and baskets for basket makers, etcetera.

Maybe a tea house also.

Thanks for all the good ideas. I've been slowly working on the houses, and the first two are almost finished with a third one on the way. A lot of the time making these is spent waiting for things to cure, so I find it easiest to keep at least three things going at the same time. The grey parts are my first tries with Magic Sculpt. I'm still very much a beginner at modelling and trying out new techniques and materials. I'm happy to report that Magic Sculpt is much easier to smoothen out than Green Stuff, so I hope it will improve my results.

Front

Back

Size comparison with 15mm Essex Mongols

I'm trying for a slightly different style compared to what is available already. This is largely because I don't really find current offerings to be so close to the kind of buildings I see in my books on Japanese architectural history or the old buildings I've visited in Japan. Hopefully there'll be others out there who'll like them as well.

I thought about the dojo and bath house ideas, and I have some ideas I'll try out. Watch this space… ;)

Setsuko,
I do prefer this type of building with the thatched roofs. My Japanese games tend to require small rural villages that would feature the style of architecture depicted in the photos. If I was going to do a castle town, then the Oshiro style "post town" would probably be desireable. Even then, the thatched roof buildings would be needed on the outer edges.

These look so promising that I'm willing to put off buying more buildings until your work becomes available.
Thanks!

Wulfgar: I'm happy to hear you like them. The thatched roofs were actually seen even inside major towns up until the early 20th century. In the books on early Edo, which is vastly more urban than anything you would see in most of the Sengoku Era, you still see plenty of thatched roofed buildings. So I agree with you that they belong even in more urban settings.

Thatched roof is currently the roof style that I personally think that I pull off the best, so expect more of it even as I try to get better at boarded and tiled roofs.

Awesome Setsuko,
I'm looking forward to having these on my table!

Beautiful stuff as always, keep up the GREAT work. TIG