"Using building 'facades'?" Topic

Bit of a random one this….

I'm drawn to a couple of projects at the moment which would require a decent amount of 28mm urban terrain. As I don't know if these projects will last I'm not interested in spending lots on buildings, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to store them.

So it got me thinking, has anyone experimented with just using building facades. I'm thinking of some kind of stand up building frontages that could just be set up to mark buildings (which won't be entered so the inside doesn't matter) and have the added convenience of just needing to be stored flat. Sort of like pictures of old film sets.

I guess I could just use existing cardstock building sets and just print the outside walls, but I wondered if anyone else has thought about using this 'rough and ready' approach to buildings in situations where how your terrain looks to onlookers is less important?

Have a look at this method.

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For a side project, I would go card stock. They are cheap, easy to assemble (mostly just boxes after all) and you can print as many as you need. If you have the skill you can also import them into a graphics editor and change them a bit to get variety.

With a little ingenuity I'm betting many could be constructed to fold flat for storage.

There is a TMP thread to a kickstarter

TMP link

hits on this subject

I second Extra Crispy. The easiest thing would be to get the Stoetzel's Structures Modular Urban Kit from Wargames Vault for $7.50 USD. It has multiple brick colors and window designs to give you a lot of variety.

You can see them in action here: link

For a recent moderns game I didn't want to make buildings for I used black 1/4" foamcore and cut the building footprint for each building and just used that. Streets, trees, cars, and fences were 3d but the buildings were not except for the target structure.

To make sure they weren't just rectangles front and back porches were smaller or larger than the main structure and bay windows were added for some cover. Each building then had a printed address number to make them look better.

Also, take a look at model railroad sites. They often have townscapes that are just facades…

Card stock are among my favorite form of terrain, but they are not inexpensive to print on inkjet printers! They consume large quantities of very expensive inks! I recently bought a color laser printer, due to ink costs. I am now printing on regular, 20# multi-purpose paper, then I use a glue stick to mount them to 2mm-thick backboard (heavy cardboard, thicker than a cereal box). The laser printer uses less expensive toner (roughly 1/2 the cost of ink), and with gluing the paper to backboard, I get far stronger buildings, for less money (the backboard is not terribly expensive, and it can be cut with a heavy scissors, to any custom size, or shape). Food for thought. Cheers!

Facades and shallow buildings. Trouble maker. You've given me ideas.

Thanks for all th advice, chaps! Lots for me to think about!