PROJECT - Terrain - Hexagon Construction Set Part III

Alright I'm closing up the project on the Pegasus Hobbies Hexagon Construction Set.  As I've said this has been a really cool kit to work with, and over all I'm really  pleased with how the project has turned out.  Remember folks this was the "small" kit and it's a pretty big terrain piece.  I'm definitely going to get my hands on the "large" kit.

I also did a couple of quick pieces with some "egg" crate packing foam I picked up at work so I thought I'd throw them in today's post as well.  Nothing like recycling CD's and CD/DVD spool protectors for some simple war-gaming terrain.

So without further adieu how about some pics huh?

And FINALLY!

Plans are to add some resin "mud" to the hexagon piece as while my base coat for the ground was drying it looked pretty cool as mud.  So I've still got to paint the border black, seal it with matte, then add the resin "puddles".

More pics coming once I'm finally complete!

PROJECT: Terrain - Hexagon Construction Set - Part II

Well moving along with the Hexagon Construction Set.  Not much done other than finishing off adding texture to the base and then getting the thing primed.  Let me tell you this was a major pain to prime.  I ran out of Krylon Charcoal Gray while trying to spray this beast and knew I wasn't going to hit Wal-Mart anytime soon and wanted to get this piece further along so I can go back to finishing up some commission work that is getting close to the deadline.  Yes Brian and Bill I WILL be done soon.  ;-)


So to recap.

1. The base for the kit is a piece of laminate flooring I used my jigsaw on to create a nice shape.
2. The kit was assembled (it's a snap-to-fit kit) without superglue at first.
3. Kit was mounted to the base about halfway through full construction at which point I started to apply superglue (brush out Krazy-Glue ROCKS!) to the joints for stability and strength, then construction was completed.
4. Basing material added along with some sculpy rock formations I pulled from another project I scrapped.
5. Primed using Krylon Charcoal Gray and when I ran out, brush on mixture of black craft paint and the dark gray GW Foundation Charadon Granite paint...mental note, need to buy more of this now.
6. It's ready for paint!

So here we go...

 

I may go back and add some GW bits (eagles, seals, tabbards or perhaps some orky stuff) to make it more 40kish, but for the most part I'm happy.  The little pyramid in the top corner may get a gun turret added just for fun, but I'm not sure on that yet.

More once it's got paint on it!

Anyone else use these kits before?  Send me some shots of what you did with it so I can post it up and see what you did different.

-BJC

   

REVIEW and PROJECT: Terrain - Hexagon Construction Set

  Well continuing my review of the Pegasus Hobbies Hexagon Construction Set.  Got it all put together, or at least how I envisioned it, and it only took me a couple of hours to get the pieces separated and then start assembly.  For the most part this kit assembles pretty easily.  Everything snaps together!  Though by the end of the day today my fingers hurt from pressing the pieces together.  This is truly a modular kit, but since I decided I was going to mount the structure on a piece of floor tile I went ahead and glued the majority of the structure together for added strength.

I really enjoyed putting this together, and it really was pretty easy. The kit has 4 different types of connectors for the various panels and pieces so one does need to take care in  what one you use.  I had to go back and disassemble (whoah just had a Short Circuit moment?  "No Disassemble Johnny 5!") because I found I needed something I used someplace else...

So as usual, I started assembly and totally forgot to shoot any "construction" shots.  Typical, must be getting old or something like that.  Well below are the shots of the fully assembled kit.  Like I said, it's pretty easy to do, and if one took the time to really study the pieces and the connectors you could go crazy in the build-out and be far more creative than I was.  Mine built out pretty close to the box cover though I did find that somewhere in the base construction I used some pieces that were needed more towards the top, and seeing as how I had glued those pieces down when I mounted the structure to the base half way through construction I was pretty much stuck with getting creative.

Here's the completed assembly, pre-primer, pre-finished based, pre-paint.  In other words, not finished.

Now for scale comparison:

And this was the "small" kit...

Over all this is a great kit and addition to any sci-fi gamers table.  Can't wait to get started on the Platformer kit once I finish up a couple client projects.  May just have to order the "large" kit and see what I can come up with.

Next step is to finish the base, prime, then slap some paint on it.  Will post up the finals when I finish.

-BJC

Project - Terrain

So I thought I'd spend some time talking about terrain today.  I'm REALLY not good at making terrain.  I've made more than a couple of attempts to make my own game board for the house only to have something go wrong with it and end up trashing a lot of wasted materials.  Really nice terrain or a really nice game board are while not essential to our hobby certainly important to the look and feel.

When the kids and I break out our 1" warriors we typically use pots, pans, the water cups we're drinking from during our gaming time as terrain.  This was getting pretty boring for us and that led me to look a little closer at getting some decent terrain for our Thursday night Dad vs. Kids sessions.  Why?  Well for starters, it's difficult to play some scenarios without terrain.  When looking for example at some of the Kill Zone scenarios you need to fill your game zone with typically 25-50% terrain.  Lets face it, you can only do so much with a couple of pots, a sugar container, and some water cups.

So back to getting creative...

Below are some pieces that I threw together, you see it finally dawned on me that I don't have to have a slick looking game "board" but I needed some decent looking terrain pieces to use on my 4x8 dining room table.  Our table is WAY  more than big enough for any number of sized games so what was truly missing is just some decent terrain pieces, pieces that are fairly simple to create with all of the totally awesome tutorials out there.  Not to mention, there are some great companies making terrain pieces out there that can easily be modified or added to to create some great pieces for your board.  So the next few posts will be on terrain.

Here are a couple of pieces I've put together.

 
First up is a ruined building.  It's basically some plasti-card cut into the two walls.  Now it's not cut as jaggedly as I would have liked, but it works for what I was looking for.  Then I just scattered some cork board around and created the concrete rubble.  The blast crater is a resin piece that I can't remember where I ordered from, but it came in a set of 5 so needless to say those will become additions.  Everything is mounted on a laminate floor tile I had left over from re-doing my floors so I cut up a piece into the basic shape I wanted and there you go.

Coloring is pretty straight forward, primed in gray then just worked the colors the way I wanted and for the most part I'm pretty happy with how this piece turned out.  Need to figure out adding more texture to the walls themselves, but there plenty of ideas sitting out on the net concerning adding the rough texture to the walls.  I may try the mixing sand with watered down PVA glue next time or maybe some textured paint.

The next piece is an objective marker I made.  It's based on one of the clear protectors that come at the bottom of a CD/DVD spindle.  From there I think I threw on some broken bases, plasti-card, and cork board pieces.  PVA glue and sand.  The "objective" part of the piece is a shrine made from some Space Marine bits and a cross that came from an old Reaper mini that never got painted.  Added in a teleport homer as well lets face it the piece works for any deepstrike scenario as well.  Nothing like making a piece multifunctional. 

Look for a new article coming up on reviewing some terrain pieces from a Pegasus Hobbies!

-BJC