Monday, August 25, 2008

BattleCloth Terrain Prototype

I saw a few examples on TMP where someone put down some hills on a table and then spread a sheet of heavy carpet underlay sort of stuff down, and then spread a spraypainted sheet over the top. Then they added trees and buildings and roads and such. It looked awesome => http://www.fusiliers.net/wargaming16.htm.



So I went out and searched for heavy underlay or similar and found some rubber grippy type sheets at Bunnings that have holes in them thereby allowing you to form them around hills and such without creating hollow buckle lines all over. They are sold as things you place in the bottom of your drawers to stop items moving around.



I also found some mosaic tile sections I thought might work well to "weigh" down the contours of hills and I added them to the tops of the largest hills.



I ran the rubber sheets over the top. I got 4 of these 2m lengths and ran them across the table with the foam hills underneath. Some even ran over the top of another.



Then I found a massive roll of the same dark green grippy stuff used above that was 1.4m wide. I got 2.5m of it and used it as the final sealing stable layer on top of all the hills.



Then I went to Spotlight for heavy material that could stretch and contract to an uneven table but still sit heavy on top. I got a 2 x 2.25m lengths of earth brown felt. I spray painted it green and yellow and threw it on top. It looks okay.





Then I added terrain bits and threw some troops on it for a few pics.









Tell me what do you think?

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Looks Great david

Phil

Frostydog said...

Looks great, are trying the same myself. Stop by and have a look. I think it needs more yellow spray.

Can you remember what the stuuf from Bunnings is called or what section you found it in?

Cheers

Mark

Anonymous said...

Thanks guys. I actually got the cream coloured lengths from Bunnings near the tile section. And the large roll of the dark green stuff was called Magik something from Clarks Rubber.

Anonymous said...

Looks great to me.

I much prefer cloth type terrain like this to simulate rolling hills. Terrain boards usually suffer from awful gaps which would look even worse with 6mm than they do with 28mm.

Anonymous said...

Hi David,

HarryInk from Melbourne here. A great site you've got going. Kudos to you. :)

I was 'specially interested in your reference to using 'Campaigner' for use in Napoleonic campaigns. The latter is of particular interest to me at the moment and I'm looking for tools. For the life of me, I can't see why I'd want to do the umpiring with masses of charts etc. etc. if there is a computerised product available that will do the movement and scouting reports and so forth for me. From the quick look at the running spider site\campaigner, it looks like I can even import .bmp files of historical maps to work from, which I very much like the sound of.

What do you think of the system, such that you've seen of it? My email is harryink@gmail.com If you don't receive a reply in a hurry it's because I'm away from the end of this week til Feb.

btw, enjoyed your comments on the terrain underlay too.

Anonymous said...

Hi HarryInk

I was looking at Campaigner for a while but it will be too much to configure for historical stuff.

For Napoleonic campaigns on the computer where you can transfer to the tabletop and then back again check out the game Empires In Arms. You can upload a results file of your tabletop battles and run with a campaign on the PC. Works very well.

David