"Free terrain..." Topic

As usual one of my projects developed scope creep and as I was constructing cheap terrain for a scolling shooter inspired game:
TMP link

I ended up finding myself looking for uses for the various bits and pieces I had accumulated, wasn't using in the original project, and ended up with these buidlings.
link
link
Pictured with some brigade grav tanks and some Battlemechs I've been painting for a friend.

The buildings are largely bottle tops and paper with a few other bits to liven them up.

That works very nicely! :)

I'm figuring that en masse for mini-mech games they'll make for a visually impressive urban environment.

They look great!

Brilliant!

Way cool!!!

I actually have enough big city buildings but I think I'll be making some more like this.
Thanks for sharing.

Great stuff, might have to raid the recycling bin for bottle tops!!

I'll share the method, as I have no blog, and its usefully modular. Take your bottle top of choice (Tesco milk in my case) measure and cut strips of paper with a length equal to the circumferance. My tops are about 1cm deep so I went with height of 3cm. Create a tube and secure with a bit of tape on the inside. I've tried overlapping and gluing, but the result wasn't consistent and it can result in a flat bit around the join if the paper dosen't flex right. Taping leaves a psuedo-mold line, but dosen't look too bad. For paper, continuing with the theme of 'free', I use heavy gauge magazine paper – not the thin glossy stuff. Its not too absorbant, its stiff but not inflexable.

Put your tubes into a top with some PVA glue, I've used a box lid as tray and made up a tray full at a time. Leave to dry and then cap the other end and leave to dry again. This should leave you with a number of seperate drums that can be assembled and glued together to create your towers. I've also toyed with the idea of making spaceships out of them. While your assembling do a quick quality check as I've found that occasionally they don't always dry level, i.e. they have a slight slope to one end. Usually if its not too noticable I use those ones as the top layer or just disassemble and reuse the tops.

As for painting I've used spray and artists acrylics to give a really substantial undercoat as the type plastic the tops are made from isn't great in terms of paint adhesion.

Really great work! Commendable use of those tops.