Looking at pictures is dangerous when you have the terrain bug

[Cacique Caribe]

Guys

This picture is absolutely inspiring (in terrain terms)!



Now, how can I get that effect on the gaming table?  How can I build a river bed that looks depressed into the ground?  In other words, do you have any suggestions that do not involve laying the river bed on top of your gaming surface?

Dan

[Burgundavia]

You're going to have to go terrain tiles of some kind for this - either terraformers or 3D printed like I (and many many others) have done, or foam like Wyloch/RP Archive.

[Cacique Caribe]

Thanks.  I’ve been giving a lot of thought to foam lately.  Mainly because I have several 8’ x 4’ sheets in the garage gathering dust and screaming to be used in some way. 

Dan

[Constable Bertrand]

Low part of the riverbed would be the base board, and foam ontop would be the raised surface, extra foam would be hills. Just a matter of having layers and building it up enough so you can go down. Other option is to run tiles that you raise up on blocks and have a low river section run through it straight on the gaming table.

Check jimbibblys Mars terrain, silent invaders boer board and captain bloods 100year war terrain.

[FifteensAway]

Well, I think the terrain part is the easy bit.  Getting that cattle herd - and the herders - right is going to take some real effort - going to need a lot of longhorns with their horns bent upwards. 

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! 

Seriously, having such a piece of terrain would be useful in so many ways and in very many places. 

[snitcythedog]

Getting that cattle herd - and the herders - right is going to take some real effort

This was my thought because a river of cows would be spectacular!  As would a tunnel of goats.

[lethallee61]

Or a herd of Wildebeest - but then you’d need a model of a little male lion cub as well. 

[Mad Gadgeteer]

Take a look through these pages.  You might find something that will help.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090628112528/http://zeitcom.com/majgen/

[Daeothar]

I've recently scrapped my desert table with inbuilt terrain features, because while it looks absolutely amazing, it's quite limiting when it comes to placing additional terrain. Buildings (based or not) will not fit on it flat, placement is limited by the location of the terrain, etc.

So I removed the foam base from the table modules (mine are 120x60cm, or approximately 2"x 4") retaining just the MDF base boards and enforced 3cm high edges. I am planning to put in flat foam sheets back in, textured and flocked just like the original table, and making the terrain modular.

So pieces of hill, probably sloping on one end and having a cliff side on the other. So I can create a cliff wall across the table, or a ravine or wadi much like in your picture.

I made (and will make) my terrain as follows: foam base (probably based on 4mm MDF), with dental plaster casts in Woodland Scenics rock moulds for the cliffs. These will then be smoothed into the foam hills with wall filler or sculptamould. The surfaces are painted a washed out raw umber and the cliffs painted with a sand-yellow, orangy brown and black in the leopard-spot technique. The brown areas of the table are then covered with baked builder's sand mixed with tile grout and pigment powder onto thinned PVA and allowed to completely dry.

The above is then fixed onto the table with a mix of PVA, water and matting compound after the surface is first soaked with isopropyl alcohol. Turns it rock hard and durable.

[Cacique Caribe]

Wow, that first, fourth and fifth pictures look fantastic.  Very close to what I was thinking.

Very exciting!

Dan

[FifteensAway]

Daeothar makes excellent points about three dimensional terrain which is why I use 'modular' terrain bits that sit on a flat surface. 

If I were tackling what CC is trying to do, I'd build it as a piece that rests on top of the flat terrain surface but with sloping sides.  Or, as an alternative, I might build a piece that would descend from the side of a table and probably use C-clamps hidden under terrain to keep it in place.  And a third option is to combine the second one just listed and make it so it would sit in between two sets of tables (as a matter of fact, I've had that as a concept to build someday for a while now - for my Old West, a railroad crossing a bridge over an arroyo or canyon).  The third option could have fairly thin 'wings' that rest on the tables.  I did something like that for my giant pirate game back in 2012 - but only to widen the tables from 5' to 6', worked just fine, rather than including a sub-level bit of terrain.

[Pattus Magnus]

I haven’t tried it yet, so I might be talking nonsense, but I have had a scheme for years to try something that might give that kind of effect.

The idea is to make a base surface that looks like water (or could be dry land for wadis, arroyos, etc), which is ‘level zero’. Then on top of that goes modular layers that can be set up leaving a strip of level zero showing in a gap. The modular sections would be square on at least 2 sides and have 1-2 sides sculpted to look like slopes/ river banks. Additional topography could be stacked in layers, or buildings, trees, or whatever scenics are appropriate. The ‘layer 1’ pieces could even be in a couple of thicknesses, to allow for rivers where one bank is higher than the other.

One drawback (and I am sure there are others) is that it would take a heck of a lot of modules to fill most of the table while leaving the stream course uncovered.

[Red Orc]

If I understand you right, it might not require that many.

If you have 6' x 4' (or 1.8m x 1.2m) table you could divide it into 6 2' x 2' (60cm x 60cm) tiles... if the base is all blue, and you 'break' the edges, say taking 4" off the edge... you could set up the tiles to have a river valley, or run them with the 'land' sides together and you have a long spit. Of course, if you have a few more tiles, you could tile it however you like.

Hope I'm making sense here... I did a quick schematic just in case I'm not, where I've taken one tile and replicated it (because it's easier when making the diagram). It would be very easy to make very different tiles of course, as long as the shoreline matches up at (say) 20" (50cm) on each side. And it wouldn't matter I don't think if you had a blue base or a muddy brown one.

You might want to make a bridge, though.

EDIT: now I want to do this, and get/build a bridge a foot long...

[Pattus Magnus]

Yes, that’s the gist of what I was describing! When I first started playing around with the idea I had some modular hills based on 1foot edges and based my assumptions on that. 2 foot makes more sense, though.

[Red Orc]

24 1' square tiles would I suspect be much more of a headache than 6 2' square ones!

I'm just wondering about the height now. You don't need 12 matching tile edges, you need 12x however many tiles you need for the thickness. I'm not sure how many that would be. The cork tiles I'm thinking of you'd need at least 6 I think for any kind of decent slope. And then there's the angle to consider - of those (conceptual) 6, maybe you want two coming in at 20&1/2", 20 at 20" and two at 19&1/2"... (or 21", 20" and 19" - but not both...) - it's tricky, because suddenly it's gluing 36 tiles together in a particular order so that 72 edges match.

If my guess is right and you need 6 tiles for the height (and if the tiles come in 2' squares - if they're only 1' squares you're looking at 24 x6 and that's loads!)