Terrain building / miniature gaming DIY

[OkayRelax]

   SOo, do people here enjoy terrain building, dnd diy projects, trash bashing and scratch building type things? if so lets talk about, share ideas and techniques. id love to see it! ill post some of my builds in the morning. 

Terrain building is making miniature scenery and diorama with various craft materials or recycled stuff. typically used for model train sets or wargaming and roleplaying board games.

Trash bashing/Scratch building is making things out of trash and recycling random crap from scratch. like making space ships out of old soap containers, bottle tops, extra model kit parts and the like.

I personally love making little things and worlds to display various gaming miniatures on when playing my homebrew ttrpg with my partner and friends. what about you guys?

[Kalka]

I unfortunately lost most of my warhammer 40 000 era pictures, here's what I recall :

- Buildings & walls out of cardboard and styrofoam
- Cardboard egg boxes, often used as rocky/uneven terrain. I stapled green felt on some to make cheap hills.
- Second hand bought LEGO to make our own buildings for specific scenarios such as choke point, capture the flag or bunker holding.
- cheap plastic trees found in those cheap animals/soldiers bags for kids.
- moss for cliffs and bushes/covered terrain (jungle or forest, very useful to hide units)
- three paving bricks to use as cliffs, high terrain than couldn't be climbed or even super walls that couldn't be destroyed or pierced

We used a lot of LEGO actually, with a preference for dark colored bricks. I remember we used the Rock Raiders, Space and Blacktron parts heavily. My favorite memory is lining up three very long wide planks we had set in one friend's basement and we had a half destroyed LEGO spaceship used as a capture point. We all started from the same side of the table and the first to reach the crashed spaceship would win the game. It was super fun because we both hesitated on the strategy to follow, either rush and pray or eliminate the most dangerous units and advance slowly but steadily ! We used 500 points teams, there one one Ork, one Ultramarines and me with my Tyranids.

[sorrowshowers]

I've been meaning to get into trash bashing for so long, but I've been moving like twice a year since 2020 so I never get to collect enough stuff before I have to downsize/reorganize :( I'm filling that void with scrapbooking as the materials and product takes up less space...
In other words, I would LOVE to see your builds!! Terrain building/miniatures is such a cool area of craft.

[OkayRelax]

@sorrowshowers
This is my craft desk, my shelf for storage, and a close up of some of the old sheds I made, pretty small but its all I can do for now, working on a set of simple dungeon tiles and another building right now.

Hoping to get some XPS foam for more complicated and pretty stuff soon, need a job first im broke.

[sorrowshowers]

I love the weathering on the shed build! The (corrugated? idk the term) cardboard being used for the roof is pretty nifty. Cool craft area you have, I like the Clockwork Orange poster on the left wall :D What'd you use to make the pine trees in the second pic?

[OkayRelax]

I love the weathering on the shed build! The (corrugated? idk the term) cardboard being used for the roof is pretty nifty. Cool craft area you have, I like the Clockwork Orange poster on the left wall :D What'd you use to make the pine trees in the second pic?

thanks man, the pine trees I got form my grandma I think, pretty sure she was throwing them away or just had them in a shed and I asked if I could have em for my art and she gave em to me, their like cheap Christmas decorations from hobby lobby or something like that, still need to get around to making them look a bit better, there's a big thick wooden base on them that I wanna replace with some more realistic looking stuff.

[OkayRelax]

got to making a lil project last night and finished it today, a sort of cannon station thing with cam netting over some round storage for cover and who knows what. made the round barrel like shapes from bottle caps of various sizes and shapes. then the netting is just some extra cheese cloth I grabbed at my last kitchen job, then the missile thingies were some dollar store toy parts.

used apple barrel paints for most of the coloring, and modpodge and super glue. added some fancy metal paint and citadel nun oil to make it prettier as final touches. pretty fun build.

https://forum.melonland.net/gallery/1893-6207-IMG2275.jpeg
https://forum.melonland.net/gallery/1891-5113-IMG2276.jpeg