Sunday 17 April 2022

Some walls and a door.

I thought I'd try printing a few walls that are a bit more "sci-fi" in appearance than much of my other scenery.  These ones come from the Novus Landing collection by Ecaroth, the Dungeon Sticks Space Port.  They're designed to fit together with little pegs.  Because they're designed for 28-32mm figures, I reduced them to 56% original size for my 15mm games.  I considered just reducing on the Z axis to make them shorter but keep the length, but they didn't look quite right because the rivet/bolt holes were all oval.  I'm wondering now whether I should have made them slightly larger, maybe 70% original size so the wall would be just above head height for a normal figure.

A short section of wall and a nice door.

Some of the wall sections with "greebles" have different designs on each side to add some variety.  I also labelled the door on one side only.  The walls were all painted in craft acrylic taupe, washed with sepia ink, then drybrushed in the basic taupe again, with some highlights of taupe + white.  The door is an old pot of GW blue-grey from the Space Marine Paint set, washed with black, drybrushed with blue-grey and given a highlight of blue-grey + white mainly in the centre.  A few GW chainmail accents were added and dulled down with black ink, and the door control panel painted in green.  The number was printed in 48 point "Microstyle Bold Extended ATT" and carefully cut out with a razor blade.  I stecilled it on using a small scrap of sponge and some Citadel Base "Mephiston Red" to give a slightly rough outline.

The other side of the door.

The walls come in 1, 2 and 3 inch sections (obviously reduced to less than 1" with mine), plus door sections, wall ends and various connectors/junctions.  The little pegs didn't fit mine without a fair bit of sanding, mainly due to the "elephant's foot" but I might not bother with them anyway.  The walls stand up pretty well without any connectors.

Component parts.

I also added a few bits of the Imperial Dungeonsticks set by gtrby117, which features extendable wall sections.

Imperial Wall sections.

This set didn't really work re-scaled, I think the walls are a bit too thin and the fit of the extendable sections isn't ideal, though that's a limitation of my printer and abilities rather than the actual design.

Components and demonstration of extendable walls.

I have noticed that one of the extendable walls has warped since being painted.  I know that if I print something flat on the build plate, the base can curve up at the edges afterwards if it's very thin, but I've never had anything warp this way before.  It certainly makes the extendable wall virtually unusable!

Warped wall!

It was an interesting experiment, and it will have cost less than £1 in materials, so it hasn't been a waste.  I'll probably print a few more bits at some stage, just to add a few interesting accents to some of my foamcore buildings.  Adobe/mud brick walls with a wall and gateway from the dungeonsticks should have a nice Star-Warsy sci-fi feel.  As mentioned above, I might make them slightly larger to completely block LOS, although the door looks OK at 56% I don't think it would look too large at 70%.


4 comments:

  1. I agree, they will look a bit better with the top of the wall at head height.
    That's definitely a weird warping. Any chance you had a (cool/cold) draft coming from one side of the print?

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    1. it’s a resin print, was completely enclosed it its case while printing, and the warping didn’t appear until 2 or 3 weeks after printing. It’s very odd!

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  2. IMHO slightly larger would look better in relation to the mini's size.

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    1. I’ll try upscaling it slightly. Thanks for the feedback!

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