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Sunday 6 September 2020

Scratchbuilt terrain from egg cartons, plant containers & diy silicon gaming mats

Hello again all ,
been some time since I posted.

I'm a firm believer in recycling, as most of you know by now. ( see my posts on sprue )

I strongly believe that we are the sole saviours of this planet of ours. I fear that with the easily available
home 3D printers we will produce more & more plastic. The positive thing is that we gamers usually 
tend to horde stuff & not throw it away , so please reduce, reuse , recycle.

Here are Scratchbuilt terrain from plant containers 15 to 28mm & diy silicon gaming mats

The guy who we buy plants from had these trays used for putting pots in, seedlings etc.
Obviously as soon as I saw them I thought that they'd be great for terrain. The pics are top
and bottom. As you can see the shapes are excellent for buildings etc.

These are my thoughts.
1) Fill them with plaster & cast but these would be too heavy.
2) Fill them with expanding foam but I have to make a contraform otherwise the
foam will force them out of shape. The pieces can be cut into individual parts.
great for variety. There are corridor like shapes also.
3) The square shapes can have card roofs glued to them , then cut into individual parts & fitted into each other for superb storage. I may glue magnets on the inside so that walls , door, vents etc can be easily removed and will add to endless variation.

The diy silicon gaming mats is not my idea but by a great Australian guy. It's a great idea not to share.

on this link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5W4FKqRbSs&list=PLvPfu-FaNiXdSZByp7kUGAwXWdbIgNxD3&index=103&t=0s











and here are some 15/18mm buildings using plastic egg cartons. I found out that this stuff is actually very thin polystyrene, i.e. the same stuff used for plastic kits and so can be glued with the normal glue.
It is thin and very brittle but can yield great results. It can also be easily melted to make goo... as explained in another post ... I think I will be filling them with a little expanding foam to make them sturdier then fix them to a card base.







Enjoy
Thanks for your comments. 
 Z

3 comments:

  1. They look great Zruny!

    I've often thought that seedling trays would make good terrain pieces, but never bothered to research all the different ones available. I think I better look more, they'd be super cheap too!

    As far as the casting/reinforcing of them? I've played a bit with that myself. I agree, plaster is cheap and strong, but too heavy. I've used air drying foam clay in the past, that's pretty good actually. Only problem is is that it can be quite expensive in some parts of the world. When I was living overseas it cost me next to nothing, I think it came from Japan. But the stuff available in Aus is pretty expensive, considering how much you'd need to use for terrain building. I think it's mostly to do with excessive markup from the top brands getting hold of it.

    If you're interested in getting some, and if it's too expensive in your neck of the woods then drop me a message and I'll do some more digging for you ;)

    Great post again mate :)

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  2. Also, rotocasting resin might be a good way to reinforce them. I haven't used it myself, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't do the job.

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  3. Interesting points Mr.P.
    Air drying clay like Das is affordable here, so that is an option. Resin will unfortunately deform them as it produces heat whilst curing.
    A possibility may be using packinging card mulch, pressed inside the buildings whilst wet. Mixing white glue in the mix or some of that extra strong glue( found in dried form & mixed with water).

    Must experiment more...
    Sigh so much stuff to do...

    Z

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