Thursday, February 28, 2013

Undead Assault on maths

Its time to start planning my tower... so I did a quick bit of finking and used the measurements of the minis in the picture to extrapolate rough proportions for my keep.  9x14 should do the trick, though I may adjust this for playablity... after all, my models are on 30mm bases... so they will have to have room to stand.  My cunning plan is to make the upper floor of the keep to take the bases, then work down the front wall down to the sally port, then do the front where the bridge connects.

Extrapolating lengths based on known variables.... kinda.

I have yet to get me some of those pillars, but already have the sally port and front door, so the bridge will have to be stage 2.  I am thinking about taking a mould of these and casting these in resin simply to reduce the weight and allow me to make the doors open-able for gaming.  I will go with the authentic models to start with, then explore this avenue later.


For the table, I am planning something a bit special.  Instead of digging down for the river, I am planning on building up from it.  The gaming table boards will be entirely made up of glossy, murkey green water.  The ground sections will be individual island modules that are placed ontop of the water.  I ordered a tub of magnetic responsive paint- basically enamel house paint with micro iron balls in it.  I am going to try this as a layer below the glossy water effect and see if I can get magnets to adhere to it.  That way any islands I place on will stay put!  I am planning on doing this with a dungeon board as well.

The keep, cliff face and sally port will all be one module, the bridge will connect to this with magnets.  The stone archway, mushrooms and hill will be seperate peices mounted on MDF, and these will sit on the islands.  I have already started the giant mushrooms using wire on heavy washers and magic sculpt.  The caps are shaped over citadel paint tubs.

The major change I will be making is the ground texture.  To be honest I always thought the one John used looks jarring and ugly.  After painting the Undead leader with the exact matching colors on his base... yeah... uhg.  Not really going to make me happy unless I do something more modern and natural.  I will be using a mix of mosses, flock and leaf scatter for a more natural look- keeping towards the catachan / camo greens I used to use a lot on my bases.

The stonework is a concern to me.  I will be making my keep from foamcore, so that expanded foam cell look will have to be sculpted on- perhaps with a thin layer of magic sculpt.  I may have to carve it from EPS now I think about it.  I may just modernise it a bit with pencil carved eps and give it a slightly different, more detailed look- as, even as a kid... it always looked like foam packaging to me.  Not sure yet.  What are your thoughts?


3 comments:

  1. So I've been fiddling with foam-core modeling, and I figured out a way to scribe stonework. Check out the latest post in the series here: http://mdarrow.blogspot.com/2013/02/hardcore-foamcore-ruins-iii.html

    It has a few problems, though, and I'm not sure it would be up to your standards of realism. Though one thing that I have thought of doing for larger structures is to use three layers of foam-core: one in the middle for strength, and one on either side with the outer layers of paper peeled of for carving... EPS is probably easier.

    I just don't have any. :[

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  2. Oh....I thought that you were just recreating the diorama..... This is pure madness!!! :D

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  3. Cliff Face and Sally Port. Nice people, them...

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