"Material to make (flat) terrain areas for games like DBA?" Topic
11 Posts
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YogiBearMinis | 07 Sep 2017 4:28 a.m. PST |
What material do you recommend to make areas of rough, swamp, bog, marsh, base areas for woods, etc.? I would want it to be thinner not thick, so I think of something like plasticard, but many people I know seem to have something more like rigid felt or such. |
advocate | 07 Sep 2017 4:53 a.m. PST |
I use 2mm MDF as the base for terrain pieces like that. Ideally pre-cut in an irregular shape – unfortunately I tend to pick mine up at shows, so can't suggest a supplier. |
timurilank | 07 Sep 2017 4:59 a.m. PST |
I would recommend vinyl floor covering. This can be bought off a roll, but for your needs look in the scrap or leftover bin. From the material I constructed roads, rivers, hills and templates for all the BAD and ROUGH going features listed and game mats. This weekend I will post eight pages with photos covering all the terrain pieces for each of the DBA terrain categories and useful scatter material. Cheers, Robert |
Schogun | 07 Sep 2017 5:03 a.m. PST |
I use vinyl floor tiles. Available at Home Depot, Lowes, etc. Very thin. Rigid. Will flex but not warp. Cheap, like 80 cents (or less) for a 12x12 inch tile. They will be textured, but this disappears once you cover it with sand or whatever and flock. |
Saber6 | 07 Sep 2017 6:20 a.m. PST |
broad cloth. lays flat and can be cut to any shape. cheap too |
Nick Bowler | 07 Sep 2017 12:54 p.m. PST |
Brown felt is easy buy and bends with contours. Then paint it with cheap brown housepaint and flock it -- it will stiffen and looks good. 2 or 3mm MDF is great too. You need a saw to cut out irregular shapes. Again, then paint and flock. For roads, I use 2 or 3 mm MDF, cut into straight strips or gentle curves. For modern roads paint grey. For older roads cover with brown silicone sealer. Use fingers to 'paint' the sealer all over the wood base. Then a thin wash (I use whatever gunk is in my paint cleaning cup) to bring out the texture. |
Yellow Admiral | 07 Sep 2017 3:03 p.m. PST |
I made patches of rough ground out of sheet metal. I don't recommend it. :-) It's thin, flat, and extremely durable, but cutting it to shape and deburring the edges is difficult and time consuming. I've made bogs out of acetate. Paint the underside in reverse order (dark center first, lighter bands of color toward the "shallows" at the banks), then decorate the edges of the shiny side and a few "islands" in the middle with tall weeds. The shiny acetate reflects just like still water, and the acetate is cheap, light, and thin. To represent woods, I put a blob of forest floor on the table and then decorate it with trees; when the troops move through, the trees move out of the way, when they leave the trees come back (sort of an overliteral interpretation of "the forest closing in"). Originally I made all my woods areas out of shapes of felt, which seemed too plain. Later I decorated them with dirt and forest floor detritus, but I have yet to find a way to glue this mix together in a way that holds well (my forest floors are constantly leaking bits of dirt and leaves all over everything). A friend of mine cut blobs of forest floor out of LeMax mats (which are currently on sale at Michael's in the Halloween section); these still leak crumbly bits, but they're less crumbly than my homemade ones. - Ix |
miniMo | 19 Sep 2017 1:34 p.m. PST |
I use felt, and spray it with Krylon stone-textured spray paints, and some light spritzes of regular spraypaint for evenmore variegation. |
Elenderil | 20 Sep 2017 1:05 p.m. PST |
I'm in the UK and here the large hobby stores (Hobbycraft etc) sell a craft material that is similar to a rubber or foam sheet. About 1.5 – 2mm thick and flexible. It comes in A4 sheets in various colours. That forms a base for woodlands with flock glued to it to create the foliage canopy. Under that I use a felt out line to show where it's footprint is. The same type of felt is the base for fields with PVA glue and flock or the footprint of villages. It works for me. |
UshCha | 21 Sep 2017 2:21 a.m. PST |
Angel hiar available from ebay. The brown stoff under the trees. link Its available in a wide range of colours so a bright green for swamps, blue for water. whaterver your imagination can concoct and its cheap and will conform to some extent over hills if you don't paint it. |
Tigerjlm | 21 Sep 2017 12:25 p.m. PST |
Spread out irregular patterns of silicon caulk over plastic wrap with putty knife. Can use brown silicon and then no need to paint you can just flock it. for water type pieces use clear and paint underside blue-green to brown for ponds/lakes. They will lay over any terrain you put them on. You can inset with objects too before it dries like rocks, tree, standing foliage. |
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