Fiddling with foam

[Cory]

I've been wanting to expand my old west town for a few months, and decided to experiment with foam to duplicate the brick and stone buildings so common in 19th century architecture. So over the holidays I put together two new buildings.


The tan building on the right was my first try. I used 1/4" thick walls cut from 2" blue foam with a hot wire and pieced them together. Big note - this doesn't work. I couldn't keep the thickness even and the walls lacked strength. Still it was easy to score the pattern and I was encouraged.

The brick building was try #2. I used 1/2" pink foam for the end walls and a high density 5mm hobby foam for the sides. The 1/2" thickness of the pink foam created some problems with clean cuts as I have forgone the hot wire, but the cuts were straighter. The pink foam also was much easier to scribe, but I wanted to detail the interior so I picked up the hobby foam for the side walls to give me more room.

The hobby foam was definitely a little harder and took half again as long to scribe. Additionally it didn't hold the PVA glue as well, prompting me to scratch finishing the interior for now (well that and there wasn't enough room).

I also tried another experiment on the roof of the brick building by making it out of some scrap magnetic sheet. This allows the sloped roofs to still be used in games.


I need to detail both buildings, but overall I feel that the methods will work. I intend to put together at least 2 blocks worth of such buildings, most of which will double for pulp and gangster era games as well.

[The_Wisecrack]

nice very nice. are they sturdy. if you dropped them or kicked them by accident would they stand it?

[Cory]

OK, I tried it.

Both easily handle a fall from 4 feet. The detachable roofs come off of course and while the magnetic roof holds up it looks like I may want to reinforce it.

The second building would probably withstand a kick, not so sure about the first one. However as dex was my real life dump stat I won't try as I'm sure I would instead miss, stumble and fall on the subject.

[grubman]

OK, I know nothing about this...so how do you get the brick pattern in the sides of the walls?

[Evilcartoonist]

Grubman, I'm not sure how Cory did his, but to get a brick pattern into foam, I use a ballpoint pen and literally draw the pattern on the foam while pressing down to actually get the indentation.
The  foam will hold the grooves pretty well. Don't press too hard or you'll "crack" the foam (unless you want that effect.) You can do brick, cobblestone and most other masonry.

Try it out on a scrap piece of blue foam.

[Skrapwelder]

That looks really good. I especially like the level of detail in the tan buildings side wall.

[Chairface]

Extremely impressive!

[Cory]

I did the brick just like evilcartoonist said, except I used a pencil to get a finer pattern than I could with the pen. Actual time to scribe the pattern was about an hour or so per building, spread out over several nights of watching TV.

[grubman]

Interesting, you learn new things all the time.

This might be handy for doing up a cobblestone path on a game table

[Mr. White]

A pretty good example of this in use was shown in a thread over in the Fantasy forum.

http://forum.backofbeyond.de/viewtopic.php?t=3542

[Terrible Tim]

You guys are lucky that you can get blue or pink foam. There is none to be had in my town!  :x

[Cory]

I added a blacksmith's shop over the week.



and from above



The roof is waiting for some printed paper shingles from a friend's old color ink jet as the ones I've done with my color laser printers come out too glossy.

I'm really liking the pink foam to work with, and would have to recomend this method.

The next thing to tackle is doing something with windows beyond just holes. For my next building I need nearly thirty and I want them cheap and easy. Additionally I want them transparent so no painting them on, actual fenestrations with plastic panes. Any one have ideas?

[Braxandur]

How about using packaging material (blisters) for the glass?
Works also quite well for making broken windows and most people have excess of that stuff lying around anyhow..

[Cory]

Braxandur, that's along the lines I was thinking for the glass. In fact I salvaged several pieces of extra thick clear plastic on Christmas morning for the project.

It's the sashes and frames that are trickier and fairly noticeable on brick buildings as they are normally painted white or another high contrast color.