I had a chance to work on things a little bit tonight. Got everything glued up except for the door/window panels for within the arches. I need to find some time this weekend to design the Bronze doors for the passage. Here's a few shots to show it from different angles now that it's more stable and movable...
You can see in the one above the hole in the roof from a partially failed print that I patched with Apoxie Sculpt and detailed to match the missing portion.
Here's a wizard's eye view:
Here's some closeups and details:
It's a small thing (punny!) but my biggest accomplishment for the night was a mostly successful chemistry experiment to create grates for the vents in the windows underneath the alcoves on the shorter corners of the building. It was actually not that bad - I followed an instructables guide I found. The hardest part about the whole thing was the weird look at the checkout when I was buying hydrogen peroxide, acetone, muriatic acid and rubbing alcohol - I'm pretty sure the cashier thought I was trying to dissolve a body.
Anyways, I took a laser printout of some grates I designed in Illustrator and used a clothes iron to transfer the pattern onto some .003" shim stock of brass, covered the back in packing tape and dunked it into the etching brew. The etch went surprisingly slowly (I was expecting it to be way faster based on the tutorial) but I think that the fume-free acid I got probably was less concentrated than what they were using. Anyways, here's what the experiment yielded:
I messed up a bit on the initial iron transfer so a few of them were a little muddy but my favorite design came out pretty well (its the one on the top left in the photo). The parts are surprisingly sturdy given the tiny bits. Here's a test fit image on the masoleum:
I think its gonna look pretty good - I think it helps to sell the scale of the blocks for the building by having something so delicate in there. I'm surprised there aren't more photo-etch parts being used in wargaming (I suppose they are a little fragile for heavy play). I'm hoping to do some cool elaborate cemetery gates and fencing for elsewhere on the board using this process.
Much less successful (or exciting) I did a few material tests yesterday with snow treatments. Playing with some flock snow and PVA combos which ended up looking pretty slushy and some casting dental stone which is a lot more promising for drifts and more fluffy stuff. In the photos, the top left of the drifts and the more opaque white on the wall are both cast dental stone with a satin varnish on them (that helps to sell the snow look in person a bit more). I tried glossy varnish too but that looks out of scale.
That's it for now. Thanks to everyone who's commented, it's great to hear from you all!
31 August 2015, 08:11:18 PM