Papercraft Terrain – iKube

Previous attempts at home built terrain pieces were less than successful. Luckily some research and assistance from kind #warmongers on the Inter-tubez I came across a Spanish site (with English translations, thankfully) Toposolitario; who, amongst other projects, developed and FREELY released the iKube project. As the project has a tagline of ‘Scenery made easy’, it sounded like exactly what I was looking for.

You can download several PDF’s from the project containing full colour templates for easily, quickly and cheaply building some good looking terrain pieces. First production run:

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Considering I purchased no specialist equipment I’m delighted with the results, it’s amazing what can be produced with a standard, ageing printer and low-weight A4. I had expected the units to be somewhat flimsy, especially given the thickness of paper I had on hand with testing; but even now the units stack well and as you can see above happily support plastic minis without collapsing.

Each crate took around 5 minutes to erect once I has the process figured out.

Going forward I intend to purchase some thicker paper / thin card for strength and durability, plus consider some form of cross-brace to help support the top section, just to be sure.

As 6th ed. 40K meta is requiring an increasing amount of LoS blocking terrain, and other systems (like *cough*Infinity*cough*) are played with a higher terrain tensity this should be a nice way to begin or expand any terrain collection – especially as there is no gluing involved, allowing the templates to revert back to flat A4 for safe and minimal storage requirements.


Andrew

Starting with scenery

As my Wordbearer host is starting to grow I decided it was time to build some scenery for them to fight over. Building scenery is something I’ve never really tried to do so I’ve attempted a few different projects to figure out what works, but mostly found what doesn’t.

Progress so far:

Hills
Noone wants to fight over a flat, desolate landscape, I thought hills would be a good place to start. First attempt was to shape a block of polystyrene, base and paint. End result, it’s not exactly hill shaped (and still not fully painted:

Polystyrene hill - attempt no 1
Polystyrene hill – attempt no 1

Second attempt at hill making took my back to my childhood: Screwed up balls of newspaper provided the base, with layers of papier mache providing the finish. This is still a WIP, and not ideal but I do think it shows more promise thank the polystyrene variant, and with cheaper materials to boot.

Papier mache hill - WIP
Papier mache hill – WIP

Fortifications
As I already had my polystyrene blocks and papier mache out, I tried my hand at some basic fortifications, essentially looking for some small, bulk and cheap scenery to change the battle field between each skirmish. Basically chopped the polystyrene into strips, and papeir mached for a foundation. I still need to paint these up (black spray, grey/white drybrush) but they should definitely do the job for cheap and plentiful scenery until I can flesh my collection out with more advanced pieces.

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–Andrew