Opening doors to new experiences

A quite evident issue about building the sci-fi mining town is that you need it to look like an actual place to live. Not necessarily to live decently (this is a Rogue Trader-WH40K kind of project after all!), but at least to have something more than mere square boxes and line of sight blockers. A part of it, of course, is to add some doors to the boxes, so they upgrade to houses :P

Remember, this pic says it all for me. This is what I am aiming for

Back in the day I got some of the Trash Bash sci-fi doors by RoeBeast, but I used all of them. I tried to look if I could get a few more, but I wasn't able. Besides, I was thinking I would need quite a lot! So what could I do?

The solution came in the form of card and foamboard...

The Ikea approach

Right, the only reasonable way was to make my own doors!

I wasn't sure of how to get the right design. In the end I think they look too much Tatooine-like, but I think subconscious references cannot be underestimated!

If this doesn't scream sci-fi in desert, I don't know what will do

I added rivets. You can never go wrong with an excess of rivets

I can hear you. 'So, your solution is to make dozens of doors, one by one'. Though that sounds like me indeed, I currently lack both time and motivation to do so. What I would need here is the way to cast these. I've been interested in learning resin casting for ages, but it always looked overwhelming for my puny skills. But a few weeks ago I discovered this acrylic resin for dummies, by Green Stuff World. The 'dummies' is mine, but it's an accurate description, trust me. Make a mould, mix the powder with water and ta-da, it's done. Witchcraft!

So there we go! I press moulded the doors:

Ooops! Unexpected setbacks

The oyumaru mould was good, but the original doors were ruined when I put them out of it. So well, apparently I have a single shot to discover if I'm doing this right...

This is all you need. Oh, and water, sure

Drum roll...

About half an hour later...

It works! IT WORKS! Mwahahahahaha!!

I'm happy with the result; the frame finally got the adobe like texture, the control pad looks reasonably good and the door itself will work. Of course this is but my first experiment, but I hope I'll get better with practice.

In fact I've done this third, simple door

And I'm about to experiment with control pads and an junction box

Well, but for the moment, after a lot of half hours... :P

I hope I have enough doors for a few buildings!!

Well, let's see how they fit in the town! I had to blend them in with some das putty and I had to fix some minor texture and filling issues:

Now this looks more like a thriving neighbourhood

I also remembered I had a few MDF doors by MadMechaGuy. I got them ages ago and totally forgot about them until the other day. I hope the mix works in the end.

Doors! Doors everywhere!

Ehm. Yes, right. There's a door leading to nowhere up there. Not that I just needed to fill that empty surface. Let me elaborate. I'm also making this:

A comm array? A void shield control pad? Who knows!

Still in progress, I want to add some details

So the thing is that I cut a tiny gap just under the frame of the door, allowing me to place the walkway this way:

It's a precautionary measure about storage to avoid unnecesary damages

It's not the only weird door I have...

Yeah, I should really call for a professional architect

I guess I'll have to properly texture and paint the wall before I add all the stuff I'm planning, but you get an idea

This is all I have right now. I'm quite happy with the discovery of the resin, it's super easy to handle and opens a whole world of possibilities. Of course the doors are not perfect, but they work fine at tabletop distance, so I cannot ask for more.

More stuff coming soon!

Multi-purpose flying skiffs

I got this kit from MadMechaGuy long time ago, but I had never got to the assembling phase (which generally is step 1 of all this!). Well, about time! It's a flying skiff that immediately remembered me those from Jabba in the Return of the Jedi movie. I loved it that much that I even got two of them! Well, let's see what am I talking about...

Not seeing it? Don't worry, tends to happen

When you turn it upside down it looks better

Weeeeell, this is the rough main shape. Job done

It's really intuitive to assembly (I didn't have any instructions, but the final pics from the web were enough) and the basic design is cool, but oh, you can certainly expect this is not the lousy end of this post. As I got two of them, I pretended to do two totally different skiffs.

The first one would be a recreation barge, more in the Jabba style, but WH40K oriented. So it would need some extra work to set an awning and stuff:

Now we're getting closer

The finished product would look like this:

Red flying luxury barge

The awning itself is but a piece of cloth, the rest are some random 40K bits or so. Some close-ups:

Ahhh, the grandeur

I should add armchairs there, or a table with a bottle of wine

Comfy for your wild parties off town

But I said I got two... I took a totally opposite approach for the other one. It's an industrial cargo barge:

The simplest configuration possible

Fodinae Corporatio or 'Mining Guild' in proper WH40K Gothic

It certainly covers all your needings. Buy one now!

The kit is pretty simple to assemble and, though the basic shape may look kind of raw in the beginning, it's full of possibilities. Had I devoted some more time to them, I could have added more details, but I'm happy with the results as this is just the work of this weekend, so the efficiency rate is fine for my standards :)

Already working on more stuff... ;)

Staying afloat

Back to my posponed urban scenery project, which seemed to have fallen into oblivion. I had this kit rolling over my workbench for quite a while. It's a river barge by MadMechaGuy, who produce quite interesting MDF stuff.

No, not Ikea. MadMechaGuy I said

Pretty straightforward kit, assembling wise, and larger than expected!

In its rough shape

You can see I took the easy road. Just grey spray over black priming and black spray over it around the hatches, to show its industrial nature. Maybe the barge carries coal, strange ore or some dirty smuggling, who knows.

This was more or less what you get from the kit itself:

Still had to add the protecting tires on both sides

I had a look at the bit box and tried to find some rubbish I could throw over the deck. What kind of stuff could you find on a barge like this? Some ropes, strange tools, a funny shaped piece of plastic (from some clothes, I recall?) I could use as bollard, an old piece of gauze (I had previously used as camouflage net back in the day) that looked dirty enough as a... fishing net? industrial net? Whatever. It all looked nice and helped to fill in the barge, so it didn't look so empty.

Still playable

This is how it looks on the board:

Another regular day at the docks

You can get an idea of its size on this pic:

Damn, I'm gonna need a larger board

I really wanted to have the barge finished. I've been neglecting my urban board for too long, but I have so many projects open at the time! I still have some kits at home (and many civilians!), I hope they'll see some paint anytime soon!

Metro line inauguration

Well, this is finally coming to an end :) After some deliberation, the monorail is finished.

You'll see that the paintjob is quite rough this time. I really wanted to get this ready and move along to more pending projects. This is going to be a piece of scenery (though quite a significant one!), so won't get as much attention as the characters. So the gritty appearance doesn't bother me this time.

I finally used the servitor head for the driver:

Anyway, the coach will need some further touches

Cut some blisters for the windows and that was pretty much all it needed!

Ready to depart

Ready for some oldschool train robbery

Next thing to think about was the railway and the pillars. Easy thing, just spray all over and that's all!! I added some posters and signs to add some colour.

Urban jungle

Really shouldn't do this on the sill...

Well! Time to see how this fits on the board!!

Enough for two railways and I still have three pillars left. Damn, this is big

I'll add some more stuff so you get an idea of the real size of this (the board is 120x120 cm, 4x4').

OK, it's official. I need a bigger board.

If I deploy all my buildings and minis, won't have a game. I'll have a protest

Well, at least it gives the impression of an overcrowded hive, I guess that was the purpose!

Jokes apart, I'm happy with the whole monorail structure, it gives another dimension to the board, the 3D approach is usually underrepresented, as is the interaction with moving objects. I think this can be a funny element for quite a number of games!

Slow Metro progress

A very quick update today. A couple of weeks ago I talked about the elevated monorail station. I've begun the train itself, but I'm afraid my progress is desperately slow (as I'm also greenstuffing wasteland mutants at the same time!). I can show you this WIP of the metro car:

Way too clean!!

I just sprayed it all over in dark grey and then made some of the bigger sections using a rather crude brush. Still a long way ahead, you can see. At first I was slightly disappointed of the car not having seats, but on a second thought, it's much better this way; otherwise it wouldn't be playable at all .

For the diver's cabin I'll be needing, well, a driver. Of course it's going to be a servitor, nothing else would fit into the ambientation better than a genetic bred anthropomorphic production, programmed for basic functions. I'm still working on the shape. It will be just a torso attached to a bar fixed to the floor. Most probably he won't also have arms, but mechadendrites, and I have narrowed it into two head options:

Wobblehead

Boring regular servitor head

The first head has the appealing of being totally over the top, if that can be considered any virtue. The assymetric lenses and stuff make the driver look kinda unsettling. The second head, apart from the obvious better sculpting, serves its purpose as well, but makes him look more 'generic servitor'. I'm still undecided. I like the second better, but in the end the guy's going to be just inside the cabin and will be scarcely seen, so the first head will do as well. Hmmm...

I've also painted (well, primed!) the elevated railway pillars, but I have no pics. I'll amend that (hopefully) soon...

Waiting for the train

I'm still greenstuffing muties. Desperately long and slow process. In the meanwhile, when the greenstuff is curing, I can take some other projects back. One of them is a big box full of MDF kits I got ages ago. MadMechaGuy makes some really sexy scenery (15 and 28 mm) and quite reasonably priced too. I got a number of kits and I hadn't even begun with any of them.

I decided to start with a different, iconic piece. The elevated monorail station. I fell in love with it when I first saw the piece. I thought it would fit in my urban setting.

Ehhm. You may need better pics

Unfortunately I didn't take any WIP pics. That is because of a reason. The kit is sweet, but I'm afraid the assembly process is not the most intuitive one (I'm being polite). The fact is that you don't get any instructions and your only reference are a couple of partial pics on his web. I mean, I'm no new to the MDF kits world, and I've spent some time assembling some pieces of scenery from a number of manufacturers. But man, it took me some time to make this work. So sorry, I didn't take pics as I was just trying to guess what was where.

The painting was ultra easy. Green spray all over, and grey for the floor. That's it. For the weathering I recurred to my old trick. Lacking an airbrush, I used primer spray of different colours. That made it look dirty, as you can see above!

Then it was time to customise it a bit. The kit is a great main body (despite the assembly problems) but it needed my personal touch to make it fit in my ambientation.

 

Station props made of card

I added some rust effects and additional weathering and it begun to look like this:

The station is really big!

The access ramp is too steep, I'm afraid

I added a sign at the entrance with the name of the station, using MDF spare parts.

The ticket validator is an old stormbolter magazine from the Leman Russ kit

The final touch was adding some signs and posters, from the collection I have already used (still uncredited, if you happen to know the source, I'll be glad to edit the post):

Why are we waiting for the train? We don't even have a railway!

There is some space for ads I could use here...

The main kit is complete with these two shelters. The first one is for the ticket vending machines:

One works, the second one has an error blue screen, the third is out of order. Usual stuff

More signs on the rear part

The other one is just a bus stop/plain shelter/whatever. I simply glued some signs front and back. Here you have both of them:



The moment I'm taking the pic I'm realizing...

...I glued all the signs upside down on one of the shelters. F$#@&

So this is the main part of the train project. I still have to put stuff together for the railway and the train itself. You know, I'll be jumping from this to any other of my open projects randomly. I hope it doesn't take too long!