More Templating, Corner Sections and Fitting

This dungeon diorama project is turning into an exciting puzzle.  One by one all the pieces are falling into place as one idea builds on to another.  For now I am just working on a generic dungeon design in which all the walls and flooring will be the same.

My latest addition to the set I have been working on is a corner piece.  This section can be used to help form a room and a corner for the intersection of a corridor.  

Just like the room wall section, I had to do another set of templates so that the arch would embellish the corner.  

Instead of mitering two wall sections, like a picture frame, I decided to cut one wall shorter so they could fit the corner of the floor tile.  As usual more carving is required to detail this section and that is half the fun.  

Here is the corner piece with the walls glued down to the floor section.  I had to wait for sections to cure before I could attach the archway pieces.  

And here it is with everything in place. I did my best to line everything up and for the most part the block lines came close.

Although I am ok with the flooring being slightly warped and flat, I am not satisfied with the seams between the walls.  I know its modular, however, I think I can find a way to hide it with some more material.

Archways, Burning blunders, and Details

I was happy with the way the dungeon wall turned out, design wise.  I took the hot wire engraver and carved the lines in the foam to simulate the stonework pattern.  This archway design proved to be the right size to incorporate a dungeon door as well.








The first order of business with the dungeon door wall segment was to cut out the opening for the doorway.  Using the hot wire 3d scrolling table made it a simple task to remove the desired section, marked off with the template.  

Now I needed to do a dungeon wall that has a doorway within it.  I rigged my hot wire router tool to ease in cutting an indentation for the door to lean against on the room side of the dungeon wall.

As careful as I am sometimes I get burned with the hot wire tool.  Luckily, the burns were minor enough that no additional treatment was needed.

The wall pictured on the right was my first attempt to cut out the indent for the door side of the dungeon wall.  Frustrating as it was, I started over and prepped another foam piece with an archway cut out.  On the second try I was a bit more careful and successfully cut out the indent on the left side of the photo.

After carving the lines in the foam this is how the dungeon wall with a door looks on the corridor side.

Here I detailed the cut out indent on the dungeon wall.  This room side view of the wall will receive a foam core archway face just like the regular dungeon wall.

Dungeon Walls, Archways, and Designs

After cutting out the templates I was ready to start working on the Dungeon walls.

The use of a square and a circle template came in very handy.









As I mentioned in a previous post I wanted additional parts for the walls for texture, reinforcement of the section, and design.


Pictured left is the main wall and the foam core archway, which will be glued on after the carving is done.







What I came up with was an archway that would take away from the straight block pattern and give it more depth.  The archway will serve only to be seen on the inner wall of a room of the dungeon.  I have not decided about what to do with the corridor side of the wall.







When it came to designing a doorway on a wall section I first thought of the opening to be an archway.  The inner part for the door to go against was going to be square cut and the door as well.

This is the side of the wall that would face the corridor of a dungeon as the door would swing inside when opened.

This is what the square cut indent would look from the inside of a dungeon room.  The square cut was designed to aid in making a simple straight door.

After comparing the square cut look with the archway for a regular wall, I realized that the two shapes would not look good together.

The square cut template will have to be used for another part of the dungeon, possibly a corridor entry with no door or maybe a grate.

Fortunately, I was able to use the other template to create an additional archway to cut into the wall for the door to go in place.

The archway on the left is only rough cut yet you can see how the shapes will not clash with the final details.

Dungeon Walls, Templates, and Materials

With the skull dungeon entrance circling my mind I had to embrace my new ideas of a modular dungeon tile system that can be used in a diorama.  I am happy with the flooring I have come up with so far and started thinking about the walls.

Of course I plan to detail the flooring more.  I am just happy how it has started out so far.

After a long while I got out my dusty hot wire 3d scrolling table and started to use it again.  I found some scrap pieces of expanded polystyrene and cut them to size for wall segments.  The floor tiles are  simple 4 x 4 inch squares and I don't plan to make them any larger, unless an effect on the tile will suffer in that small design.  

The foam pieces are 3/4 of an inch thick and I like that for a robust thickness of a dungeon wall.  The walls will span the length of the floor tiles and stand at 3 inches tall.  For a 28 mm figure that is a very tall and imposing wall.








After some careful thinking I decided I wanted to add some foam core sections to the room side parts of the walls for decorative reasons and to help reinforce the expanded foam.  What I came up with is a simple archway that will add texture and strengthen the wall as mentioned earlier.


In order to ease the task of measuring and cutting all these wall additions I started working on a template that I can use to trace around on to the foam core.  I am using cereal box cardboard for the template, since it is so easy to work with and cut out.

My old dungeon system that was basically made out of just expanded polystyrene with reduced walls.  That project is pretty much abandoned at this point and I look back on it as a good experience with foam.

It is available for viewing on my website:

https://www.strongholdcrafter.com






You can find my project and tutorial videos on my YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/StrongholdCrafterKev

Crafting Sewer Tiles, Cleaning, and Dealing with Scrap

After getting through a major project my work space is not the same.  I have a set order of things and then somehow the items get shifted and things get piled up and I lose track of where things were sometimes.  Granted, I am not talking about tools.  I can usually find my tools that I use mostly in their designated place.  It's the bits of things that end up on the edges of the cutting mat, scraps that have a purpose, just not at that moment.


I usually save off cuts of things, just in case I have a use for them later.  Foam bits always can be used as rubble or combined with other pieces to make a wall.  Skewer sticks and toothpicks get cut down and still have a use for some other stick application.  Wire ties can be used for junk or debris as well.  During my cleaning up I found this old stack of foam core the I can use for more dungeon tiles.  That will save me some time for cranking out more of them.



So, I decided to reorganize my work area, since it is hindering my space to do stuff and its cluttering my mind that I cannot see the whole work desk.  I don't plan to spend hours on end to accomplish this.  I just have to start straightening out things that got out of place and sort through other things that need a new home.

This photo from a previous blog is evident that my cutting mat is too cluttered.


Why am I rambling so much about this sense of organization?  Because my work has outgrown its space and I have to creatively designate where things go in the future.  I am thinking that I now need a paint rack for my acrylic paints, even though I don't use all of them.  My shelving is overloaded with crafting supplies and some of them have been transformed into usable scraps for later.  I have new Halloween decor that I plan to modify into cool miniature builds.  If that is not enough, I have figures and small toys that I plan to mashup into better gaming accessories.



It can be challenging and relaxing to straighten out areas that get cluttered. What I did not expect was how I could use some scrap foam for sewer tiles that had been sitting in a box.  I had this box of scrap cuts that I kept after cutting some cylinder pieces of foam for practice with my hot wire cutter.  It would have been easy to throw them out of course.  And now I am so glad I didn't, since their rounded edges will give an interesting shape for sewer corridors.  

Skull Spire Project becomes Skull Dungeon Entrance

Well, there are times when you are trying to visualize something to build and it is not quite coming together. Previously, I was planning to take my skull decoration and make a skull spire of rock.

I did a rough sketch and at first I thought it was decent for a starting point, the sketch on the right of the paper.  The spire of rock was going to have a spiraling staircase from the top to the bottom of the rock.

Then to the left I sketched a tower with the skull near the top of the structure.  Just for fun of course and I trashed the tower idea.

I was stacking some foam together with my skull decoration, pictured to the left, for a visual of a skull spire before carving.  As I mentioned earlier a stair well would spiral from the top to the base.  After looking at my 28 mm miniature for scale and the stack, which was not nearly high enough, it was evident I needed more material for this to work.



I realized that this spire was going to be enormous.  It was probably going to be three feet tall when I was done.  When you are going to sculpt extruded polystyrene or colored insulation foam, that is a lot of foam to go through with scraps left over.

So, after some careful thought I did not scrap the project totally.  Instead, I decided to make the skull decoration as part of a dungeon entrance, carved into a hillside.

Dungeon tiles and Hot glue

When I had to take a break of working on my Skull Dungeon Entrance, I decided to do an experiment with a different kind of modular dungeon tile.  I have seen dungeon tiles made out of cardboard, insulation foam, foam core or a combination of the three.

I am not talking about the ones that are made with a 3D printer or cast from a mold.



I am talking about a hybrid dungeon tile that can be used as a playable game tile or be used in a diorama.  After doing some research on size, materials and building methods, I decided to use a combination of cardboard, foam core, and insulation foam.  These materials are fairly inexpensive and readily available where I live.

I previously built a dungeon tile set out of expanded polystyrene and realized that it was not as durable as I wanted it to be and abandoned the idea of doing more with it.

Pictured to the left is a room tile, a straight corridor tile and an elbow corridor tile.  Only the rooms had walls, which were reduced in height for easy game play.






I decided on using cardboard for the base, foam core for the flooring and expanded foam for the walls.  Cardboard is good for a sturdy base and only warps if it gets wet.  Foam core is thin and very flexible for carving floor designs.  Expanded foam has a texture of stone, which makes it very suitable for dungeon walls and collapsed wall sections.

With my materials at hand my experiment commenced.  I began work with a simple four inch square tile, consisting of a cardboard base and a two ply flooring of foam core.  Two layers of foam core were used to prevent any warping of the material with a thicker construction.  I decided to use hot glue to bond everything together.  I wasn't sure if the hot glue would work well with the foam core, yet I knew it would not affect the cardboard.


I  had a bad experience with hot glue in which the glue was so hot that it melted the expanded foam on contact.

The backer paper was peeled off and I applied the hot glue to the cardboard and carefully pressed it against the first layer of foam core to ensure they were bonded well as the glue cooled.  To my surprise the foam core held up and did not melt.  The bond between the two materials was strong and my hands suffered no burns in the process.

The second layer application was a mess to deal with, since my glue stick ran out before I had enough hot glue on the surface.  All was not lost as I waited for the glue to cool and carefully peeled off the glue and started over.

The foam core was damaged minimally and I was still able to use the piece.





With the glue gun reloaded with another hot glue stick everything went well the second time around.

I used a pen to simply carve lines into the foam core flooring and simulate floor tiles.

And this is how it looked with a 28 mm figure for scale.

A Skull Dungeon Entrance Awaits

After finishing the Wizard Keep Project, it was time to start another one.  More photos of the Wizard Keep pictured above can be found on my facebook page.


At this time of the year the Halloween Decor is starting to come out and that is like Christmas for miniature builders and crafters of such.  They always have little spooky things that I can use for something Gothic or Fantasy related.


I got this skull decoration at the Dollar store and thought of various things to use it for in a build.  At first I thought of using the skull in a spire rock formation.  Of course after doing some sketching and sizing it up on the table I realized it was going to take a lot of foam material and would not be worth it.
 

This is how it looks after being removed from its base and the lower mandible detached.

I have always wanted to do a small hill with some unique part to it, so I have decided to incorporate the skull with an entrance into the hill.  Better yet, it will be a dungeon entrance for 28 mm scale figures.  This will prove to be a new challenge in blending the skull with the terrain and such.