Thinking about building a river: show me your favourites, or share yours!

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

I'm thinking about building a river for SAGA games. So it needs to be at least 4' long, and preferably in sections so I can add or remove fords and bridges if needed. I'd also really like if it could have separate 'banks' so I could use one bank as a coastline if needed, and I'd prefer MDF or some other kind of solid material for the base.
What I'm thinking is some kind of separate 'water' and 'bank' sections so I can slot the river into the bank. Then, if I want, I can replace the water section with a wider river section. Or maybe that's over engineering it, and I'd be better off just making a separate river and coastline in different projects. Anyway, show me your favourite river pieces, or your own, and share with me what worked, what didn't, what your favourite techniques were and what looked good and what didn't?

[Dr. Zombie]

I am following this thread closely. As I would very much like to do something similar. But am lacking on the inspiration front to.. 

[jon_1066]

The best set up is surely a water board below with various terrain boards on top.  The edges of the top terrain boards become the river banks or coast or islands or whatever you want.  This has the benefit that the river is actually lower than the surrounding terrain so looks more natural.  It is obviously a bigger investment and requires more mods to your current set up.

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

The best set up is surely a water board below with various terrain boards on top.  The edges of the top terrain boards become the river banks or coast or islands or whatever you want.  This has the benefit that the river is actually lower than the surrounding terrain so looks more natural.  It is obviously a bigger investment and requires more mods to your current set up.

Yes, this is probably the ideal, and something I will look at in the future, but for the short term a simple modular river to lay on top of my grass board is the order of the day

[Eric the Shed]

Can I suggest vinyl floor tiles - they are great for creating both wide and not so wide rivers. Mounted on hardboard with banks added. It would be relatively easy to create two sides of the river out of two tiles to create really wide rivers or banks of a lake.

PS sadly the tiles I have used are no longer in distribution at homebase but I have seen others that would be fit for purpose. Link takes you to the tutorial

http://shedwars.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/big-rivers_21.html

a few pictures...

[monkeylite]

Yep, those tiles are one of the best solutions for rivers I've seen.

[Munindk]

Those tiles look amazing, but I think you could build your own even tiles from water effect plasticard like this: http://www.amera.co.uk/product.php?range=p

Add some putty along the edges, spray and paint the whole thing and you should have nice and thin river tiles.

*edit* Since they're see-through you could possibly get away with adding colourd paper or cardboard to the back and just painting the putty edges.*/edit*

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

Ok, so what I've decided is that I'm going to make my river from 3mm MDF. I'm using brown acrylic caulk for the banks (the first layer is currently setting, we'll see how it turns out in 30 minutes or so) and will use Vallejo water texture as seen in this blog post here: http://talesfromthepaintpot.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/terrain-making-river.html

I'm making my river quite wide (about 6" to 7" across, not including the banks) and since I'm going to primarilyusing it for Saga, I only need it to be four feet wide (and it should have two crossing points).

So in order to address the issue of a modular river with visible joins and pieces no lining up, I've decided to make my river in only two sections. A 36" section and a 12" section. The 36" section will have a ford modelled into it at about the 12" mark. Then I will build a bridge, long enough to completely cover the river, and this will be placed over the join between the 36" section and the 12" section. In this way the river will appear to be one continuous length, and I can still add to it with more sections in the future if I need a longer river. At some point in the future I will make a separate length of shoreline to beach my longships on and build longphorts around.

[tomrommel1]

I use TSS tiles . quite nice but I am just in the process of redoing them so on the picture the gloss varnish on the river proper and the flock is still missing:

more pictures on www.wargamesgazette.com

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

They look nice, have you got any pics of the finished product?

So an update on my river:



Here it is in it's 4' glory.




Here's a couple of close ups of the caulk banks. Since this picture was taken I've added another 'layer' to the inside of the banks to add some width and depth, and also jammed in a few pieces of pine bark to simulate rocky outcrops. I'll add some more once the caulk has set, which the packets says might take up to five days.





This afternoon I had the thought to take some pictures of a 'billabong' on our families property for reference. You can see the colour of the water, the shape of the bank, the width of the water course, the level of scrub and growth on the river banks. Now obviously our tabletop rivers is a slightly different beast, being that the water level will actually be ABOVE the tabletop, not below it, so we need to take steps to create as much of an illusion of reality as possible. So I'll be adding some rocks, and lots of reeds and small trees and shrubs on the river bank to simulate that bushy feeling, and I'll be trying to mimic the colour as closely as possible, although as noted elsewhere, pains need to be taken that the river doesn't just become a black streak on the table. Like everything we do in miniature painting, it's not about painting a miniature version of the thing, but painting it in such a way that it doesn't LOOK miniature. I can't speak for everyone, but I have mixed success, some projects being more successful than others. But I digress, this is a long winded way of saying that I'm going to colour my river a dark black/green/brown colour with lighter shallows on the edges.

[tomrommel1]

Not jet am still working on them

[SotF]

I kind of like the Pegasus River if you need something simple and harder wearing, while it's a bit more work than that, the Amera river is pretty good as well and quite cheap with a lot of pieces you can pick out.

[Gracchus Armisurplus]

I kind of like the Pegasus River if you need something simple and harder wearing, while it's a bit more work than that, the Amera river is pretty good as well and quite cheap with a lot of pieces you can pick out.

I was sorely tempted to get the Amera river, but I hate it when a river is an impassable terrain feature, yet on the table it's nothing more than a shallow ditch which should, at best, be difficult terrain.

That's the main reason why I decided to build my own, since I've made the actual water way a touch over 6" wide. Still a little on the small side, IMO, but any larger would be too impractical. Besides, the Saga rules call for a river between 4" and 6" wide so I didn't want to exceed those limits by too much.

[SotF]

I was sorely tempted to get the Amera river, but I hate it when a river is an impassable terrain feature, yet on the table it's nothing more than a shallow ditch which should, at best, be difficult terrain.

That's the main reason why I decided to build my own, since I've made the actual water way a touch over 6" wide. Still a little on the small side, IMO, but any larger would be too impractical. Besides, the Saga rules call for a river between 4" and 6" wide so I didn't want to exceed those limits by too much.

With the Amera ones, you can easily cut them down the center and widen them up to whatever width you want to have at the cost of adding in a base or a sheet of foamcore to base it.

The Pegasus one is a great option for if you need to haul bits of terrain around with you since the things seem damn near indestructible.

[dinohunterpoa]

Eric the Shed, vynil tiles are great! Some have great texture and color:



As an alternative, you can take white vynil tiles to the print store and have some river pattern printed on them!