Full Modular Wargaming Board Tutorial | Complete 'How To' Miniature Terrain Building Guide

how I made this modular board part one the planning process so here you see a modular board that I built for when I can Hobby and uh this first process the first part of this is actually the the planning stage so what I do is I I printed out a 4x4 grid and I drew what I thought to be a good design so I'm going to have three uh just absolutely plain flock tiles uh there's uh these five River tiles and then there's two River tows which we've got a kind of modular Hill as part of it now the river tows were broken up into kind of straight ones left corner right corner tight corner and kind of chicanes as well um I mean this is my most um adventurous board so far because of the uh the offset nature of the river so each River um drawing thing is uh um I've drawn it on the template here is 1 cm in from the side and one cm wide uh and then after that it's a case of moving these around and check that it works so first of all I wanted to check that the modular Hill in the center so the big hill in the center which works really well as an objective could work with the river around the outside so I just started putting uh the river tiles down and seeing where I got to now this is my first attempted it and realized that you know you can't just have a river ending like that so realiz I rotate that one and I put this one over here then all of a sudden youve got a river that kind of um meanders around the outside and the rest of the pieces can just lot in and you've got a nice Central objective of a hill with a running river running down the edge but what about having the uh the kind of modular Hill split in half and the uh two halves at the sides can we have the river like flowing nicely through the center of the board that way well let's find out so put a couple of uh River pieces down to put make a corner put the little tight Corner in then the other one and then we got three pieces left of river left to put in that one doesn't fit there so we go with that one and and then we realize that we've got one straight bit left over which doesn't really work with that but what we can do is we move that round shift the whole thing up then that piece of river slots in there and we all of a sudden we've got an entirely different design where there's Hills at the outside the river running through the center and lots of open space for scatter terrain or just open Battlefield now the four-way modular Hill can also be used as corner pieces so um this is what this design is going to be so putting the uh the hill pieces in the corner what can we do with the river which will be interesting I also wanted to actually show off the um pieces of river with a modular Hill Design so when I put this straight bit down here you'll notice that the um the modular Hill on the left of it would be a nice flat Edge which we don't really want so going to have to move that one across rotate it and then we can have the matching piece of that modular Hill just there like that so as you've seen with every single design I've done so far just putting it together just by having one piece moved slightly differently all of a sudden we've got a new design so here we've got a river running through the center of um Hills with um some extra Hills at the corner so again this design works really well but I wanted to see basically when you're doing this yourself draw something out and you may have to make a whole bunch of different tiles and you know you may make mistakes I was lucky with this one well you know experience with this one and it just worked for me um so I just went through and did some did e even more designed so this one here want to make take advantage of these modular Hills and have the uh the river running around the outside like this H and once again this gets to a situation where you go ah well maybe we need one more river past but we don't want the whole ball completely dominated by river so I realized that what we can do instead of this is we can have the river the all the river doesn't necessarily all have to be joined up as one so what you can do is have with this particular board is have uh half of the river over there and then half of the river along a different side entirely um and that will actually work I mean this one is actually in three different parts so you got one part of the river at the top using the corner at the corner and that's quite nice to do with these um these modular Rivers a corner piece can just be at the corner um and that's that's Works absolutely fine and there you see you have a different design and I think the final one I'm going to show you in just a minute is where the river is just split into two so with all these different designs the hills have different levels of dominance in the board and the river has different levels of dominance in the board um and and I think that's really nice and that's why I love modular board so much is that every single time you play is going to be a a new design um and you can make really beautiful um board designs with no gaps or anything but they're they're the same every single time and it's only scatter terrain that's going to make the difference so here you see one long bit of river going through with just one corner piece up in the corner so yeah basically this design worked so this is the design I decided to go ahead with and here you can see it uh it it made so coming up next will be the remainder of the how to do this uh moving on next to the basic construction so the very first thing that needs to be done is to have uh MDF boards in place uh for the bottom of your tire so you need 16 of these so what I do is I buy these packs of um well I buy lots of them and they are double the size that they need to be now in order to cut these I Mark out a line and then I very softly just begin to score it with a sharp knife I go over it maybe eight or nine or 10 times once I've got a proper score in it so that the knife isn't going to go anywhere else you're able to then kind of put a bit more pressure safely without kind of endangering your hands and then you can snap it a bit and uh yeah it comes off quite nicely and then it comes to cutting the foam so if you want to buy uh either those boards or this foam there is a link to buy this uh stuff on Amazon and to cut the foam sharp knife and I'm just very very slowly just again getting a score Mark in place so this first one I'm barely pushing down at all I'm just making sure the line is there then on future scores I'm going a bit deeper you notice I've got my finger there I'm pushing against the side of the blade which is going against the uh the spirit level which I'm using which that the blades going to be going directly downwards rather than off at any angle and once that's done you can deepen the score with just having a steel rule there and then once you've got it to a certain depth um I'm not sure exactly what that depth is but it will it's a it's a field thing more than anything else you can just take it to the side of a um a counter and then just lever it and it will just snap off in a beautifully straight line like mine very nearly did there but it is perfectly good enough with what we are doing it for and then same thing just to cut it in half so I like to Mark out with the a sharp knife rather than the pen because a pen is that much wider and I'm trying to be as accurate as I possibly can with these because the more accurate you are when you make these the better the uh the board alignment will be uh and hopefully the less obvious the uh the gaps between the boards will be but it's impossible to get them absolutely perfect believe me I've tried now because they're not absolutely perfect uh one the one of the steps I do is this kind of matching up process I take my 16 boards I've cut and my 16 bits of foam and I work out which ones are going to be the best ones for each different board so with the boards which are going to be non River tiles we're want to go through and find the ones that line up the absolute best if the ones that don't line up particularly well then those foam boards are going to be the ones you want to be using for your River because those ones are the ones which you going to cut the middle out off so that the size Matters slightly less now I'm going to show you how I stylize these three plain tiles I just beat the living hell out of this one with a rolling pin because I wanted to have a a bit of a divot in it um and you can cut this out or I just hit it with a rolling pin now with every single one of these tiles which took a long time believe me I uh I rolled it with um aluminium foil or tin foil rolled up so that it create this uh this lovely texture to it which I later painted brown uh to make make it more soil like now rather than just having them all plain so of them had a divot one was completely plain and one I decided I wanted to have a rock attached to it so I took some U larger foam this is an offcut from another board and I just started carving into until I had a shape that I liked uh and this uh this rock was then glued down at a later stage now people have asked me uh what's the point in gluing um gluing stuff down onto the boards why don't you just have it as scatter terrain well this is made out of very light XPS foam and I'm sure you've had it when you're playing games that you know you move your troops to exactly where you want them to be because of some scenery and then because it's you know it weighs a matter of grams or a matter of ounces it's so easy to knock it so that it kind of moves out the way so by having it glued down it can't move because it's attached to the board around it so um once you've done your rock or once I've done my rock I uh very roughly drew around it and the reason for this is so I knew exactly where I wanted to go and mean I had to do slightly less of this tin foil rolling which like I said takes quite some time so once I've done that of all three boards um I hadn't glued this down yet um I uh glued them to the uh the phone boards to the MDF boards now to attach them I use instant Nails which is not as instant as the name might suggest but it is U it works really really well as an adhesive which allows you to kind of press press it down onto it and then make the adjustments you need to make so going scoop up a little bit of the excess there and then just line this up put some pressure down that squidges the glue out might have spotted my board spot there um and then just lining up the edges of the two boards as closely as you possibly can and this is where this matching up process from earlier really helps and that's basically it in terms of the basic construction of these Tes I'm going to be going through the painting and the flocking of all of these in a later video but that is the basic construction and the three plane tiles that is how I constructed them if you saw part one you'll have seen that I made these little uh uh paper drawings of what the uh the tile should look like so I followed that as a guide so with each tile I know that it's uh 30 cm by 30 cm and in order to have these Rivers join up they need to be exactly the same joining point on each one so it's 5 cm in from the edge and then an extra Mark 8 cm uh further than that for the width of the river now I'm marking this out with just a gentle Glide of a sharp knife and basically anything can happen between the one side and the other as long as they end up at the the kind of marks at the end you can do whatever you want so the way that I went through this was to just pick up a paper towel um Mark out the uh uh positions on the edge and then just do some random things so this is uh a tight this is a right hand corner I'm doing here and again doesn't matter what happens from between one and the other all all of them will always match up um it's a shame that you can't see in better detail the lines I'm putting on but you can uh see that I'm uh doing something with the knife there at least now so I did that with all seven River tiles um so I'm not going to show you all of them because it's kind of a little bit unnecessary I want to show you this one though because with this one I've noticed there was a little bit of damage on the phone now when you buy this phone normally it's in pretty good shape every now and again you'll get a bit where it's been like dropped by delivery driver or landed on by a swan or something and it can create a dent if you do find sometimes you just have to not use the uh the foam at all but for this one because of the um the shape of the river I could actually get away with doing a carving into this which made meant that the uh that part of the damage was just going to be completely cut out so yeah I got away with that one which is good because it's not nice to waste your materials uh so yeah that was good so went through all River TOS in exactly the same way and finally it's going to show you this uh this is a tight corner so once again just filling in a line with a a sharp knife uh and that was all done and then just show you that uh you can just about see the lines of how they all match up now I uh cut these up with my hot wire cutter and I set the angle of the the wire um off at I don't know how many degrees that was but some so that I knew that every single single cut I did um on the ends matched up with another one I mean I could have had it dead straight but then you know what rivers have got a absolutely dead vertical thing not very many and in exactly the same way as um with marking out the lines of where it goes and everything you can also change the angle that you're cutting at as you're going through as long as you end up going straight through uh at the same angle in each one obviously everything that I'm doing here can just be done with a knife so you can just use a knife all this I have a hot wire cutter because I do a lot of this so why wouldn't I use it um but yeah each one is being cut through at the same angle at the end so that they they join up as well as possible one of the great things about having this hot wire cutter means that I can easily uh put a big slant on it just like I'm doing here just by lifting up the foam which creates this kind of uh greater angle on it which uh comes a little bit more realistic uh and like as you're seeing here do anything I want in between the two cutting points as long as I end up uh in the same um flat and straight at the very end of it so that is one uh the basic part of that one done at least let me show you some of the other ones just going through this quickly so nice and simple with that one didn't do any fancy angles just went straight through like that and that was another one done I just show you how just how nicely these actually match up by going through at the same angle H this is a nice straight one so just zipped on through just like that uh and that was another one done so I did that with all seven tiles and then I moved on to the next stage which is shaping now I've got a handheld hot wire cutter here once again you can do this all with a knife but this is a really good way of getting through the foam and for this one I decided I want it to be more like a forward so I had a nice um angle going down so you get into the river uh and that was just a case of putting a nice uh flat angle on the on the hot wire cutter and as you can see it comes off very satisfyingly and uh I think it even even like that it looks great but decided to go uh even flatter and then put them down to see where the other one should be and then you can see how the what I like about that is it doesn't just go kind of perpendicular it go kind of goes in through at an angle and then using this um this cut you can also kind of just wiggle it through and create little shapes and then that just adds a little bit more realism I think to the the kind of uh the rock edges of the of the River Bank um and it's nice and simple but we're not quite finished there uh this stage I'm calling texturing so what I do is I get a sharp knife and cut off anything that I look think looks a little bit too um you know planned or unrealistic and then from there I got a a bowl of tin foil and I rolled it over everything so this flattens out some of the kind of sharper things you can obviously leave them sharp um and the other thing that I did was I did it all across the uh the flat surface as well this is going to get painted later on but it ends up just with a a lot more um natural looking finish to rather than it this being all flattened I did that with every single River tile H and it ended up look looking like this so you can see all seven River tiles um done as well as the the ones done from the previous stage so this is the Two River Hills and the four-way modular Hill we're going to start with the taller of the River Hills which I'm calling uh Hill one Higher River Hill fascinating so this is one of the corner River tiles uh with another board next to it and then uh adding a hill as part of the design so I started with a chunky 50 mb foam and and I quickly realized when using this handheld hot wire cutter that uh that wasn't going to be big enough to cut the size that I needed so uh off camera I uh cut out a rough shape using the um the table hot wire cutter which uh went a lot better and most of what you're going to see for the rest of this is me making the shape a bit more interesting to me kind of sometimes making it a little bit smaller or just generally making it um more playable um and what do I mean by more playable well it needs to have a kind of needs to have models actually be able to go on it but once I had the vague shape in mind like this what I did was I put a couple of marks at the uh at the point where it would need to be cut and then just started carving into it uh that step there was me putting it through the table wire cutter an angle so we had a nice slope for um models to be able to climb up onto the top of the hill uh and then whenever you're cutting with a hot wire cutter you end up having kind of these ridges which kind of just naturally occur when you're doing it but they wouldn't really naturally occur in nature so I went across with a a sharp knife and a kitchen knife just to kind of smooth these off and make the whole thing look a little bit more random should we say a bit more like uh a hill might actually look and then once I had that position clear in my head um and had the thing shaped how I wanted it to I took a uh another block of foam because I wanted there to be a rock on top of the hill just as a little bit of cover something a little bit different make it bit more interesting U so I just carved a random shape out of this um this chunk of foam here ended up kind of having a higher bit and I lower bit and then I decided that it should um it should split down the middle and span across the two boards so I also cut it in half which just with a the kitchen knife I believe um so that it um so that it could be half on one board and half on the other just like I'm showing you there that was well timed well done me um completely fluky uh from there I just wanted to uh finish off the final shaping of it I wanted to put an overhang on the cliff so I did it by with the handheld hot wire cutter as you're seeing like that um and just just a final finishing touches in terms of the terms of shaping it uh which you're seeing here uh and then going over all of the surfaces with the uh my favorite uh tin foil which adds you know rolled up bit of tin foil um just creates this kind of Rocky texture so end of up looking like that uh so that's basically finished but and then I cut it in half on the hot wire cutter um so that there you go Tada uh final thing to do was to just draw around the um that part of it and then roll it again with the uh roll out the bit I hadn't drawn around um with that tin fold just to get it looking nice and Rocky as well and then sticking it down so to stick it down with all of these modular heels I'm using something called instant Nails there's all sorts of different products works with similar names it isn't instantaneous it is a nice strong bond though and you don't want it to be instantaneous because the most important thing here when you're gluing it is accuracy you really want to make sure that the line of your Hill lines up with the line on the tile so that when they come together they look as close to one piece as they possibly can um and yeah it's well well worth spending some time I'm rushing through this in terms of the the video edits it's not very interesting see me millimetric move around bits of foam but uh yeah I that's that's what you end up doing just try and get it absolutely perfect uh I'd recommend a glue gun for sticking down other other pieces for for some reason I used instant now it's probably because it was to hand rather than it being everything that's it should be hey on to Hill two which I'm calling the Lower River Hill and this is more simple in design for this I just took a 20 mil bit of foam and cut out a random sloped Mound kind of shape um just with a hot wire cutter that was kind of a minute of cutting span down to just 5 seconds and just carved different shapes into it and moved it around until I felt like it was I don't know you just get a feeling about when something is right so I moved it around until it felt like it was in the right position and roughly way you're seeing it there is how I decided it should be but U me being me I decided that should be also be a rock on top of this so I found a chunk of foam and carved it into a rock shape and once I got it into the shape I wanted it to be I then uh took my favorite tin foil and rolled it across the whole thing basically across the whole board any Rocky surface has been rolled with a tin foil tin foil roll uh just to kind of make it look more Rocky and I've also done all of the most of the flat surfaces as well just because they're more interesting if they're kind of earthy looking rather than it being something which is just smooth foam uh and once again to do the lower Hill some instant nails to glue the river board down uh making sure that you know you get that absolutely perfectly against the edges uh and then yeah just simple as just sticking it down and lining up the lines with the other lines just making sure everything's nice and parallel um and then yeah it ends up looking something like it looks there and once again I probably should have used a glue gun for the rock to be stuck down but once again I didn't I used I mean it's not it's not like it didn't stick using in Nails it's just probably better to use a glue gun because you don't have to be as accurate or millimetric detailed and finally we have the fourway hill so this is a chunky old 50 m bit foam um making sure I'm doing it roughly the right size using on as as much as the board as I can here um so I had a shape in mind and I'm drawing some upward arrows to remind myself that I want to slope it up now if you're cutting a big bit of foam like this and you don't have to be too accurate you can just score a fairly deep line and just snap it and let me tell you that is quite a satisfying thing to do then once I'd done that I uh took the uh 50 sorry the 20 mil boards the ones that be mounted on and Drew out exactly where to cut it um and then cut it I did but uh before doing that um I went around the base of the uh tiles and uh rolled up with tin foil of course now I've put that line on the screen to show you that that's the angle that the the wire on my hot wire cutter was for cutting these out I'd never tried it at such a ridiculous angle before but I wanted to try it with this because it's nothing more annoying than having a hill tile or some hilly scenery that you put your your models on you spent AIS painting and they keep falling over so I wanted to try and make this as flat as possible so first of all I went through it the angle that it was and then by kind of holding up and tilting it as I am as you can see I was able to make it even more of a kind of flat angle so we wanted to be well some of it I wanted to be nice and smooth and some of it I wanted to be a bit more Cliff like so I'm just going backwards and forwards across different areas is trying to make it nice and smooth you see those ridges I was talking about those need to be smoothed out and uh so like like I did before just take a uh some sort of sharp blade don't need any Force going through the knife at all it's they just it just cuts through it like a knife through foam because that's what it is then I rolled it it was some uh some fo foil and matched it up to the tile it was going to be next to and then drew a line um so I could see where it needed to be cut roughly so that the the two tiles matched up and what I did here was actually because I had a line I could work to actually worked by pulling the foam towards me rather than the the foam uh pushing away from me um which was an interesting way to work and it worked absolutely fine actually better than fine so just cut a bit of it off so that I had that kind of vaguely matching up then held the two towels next to each other and then I worked on making as good a join between the two as I C as I could so this involve kind of carving some of it out with a knife rolling it with a foil and just going doing that on both sides because I think that with the the gaps between tiles what you can either do is you can either try and hide them as well as possible or you can make a feature of them so this one I'm trying to make more of a feature of it um but you're never going to make all of the lines disappear so you either like they get lost when when you're actually immersed in the game that you kind of get lost in it anyway so it doesn't matter too much about the lines in my opinion and I like having the modular aspect of the board so you know it's uh personal preference really uh so as as you saw I did the same thing with the next tile uh and then the next tile after that as well so I'm going more into a vertical here so I wanted to make a more cliff-like join between so it's going from like a a nice flat angle to there being a kind of more sheer part of it um and on this particular T I wanted that there to be a kind of UPS slope that um was kind of Cliffy at the edges so once again I took advantage of the nice flat wire there and cut out this uh and I'd never tried this before either and uh you'll see it better here worked really well as a like an up slope that was kind of sheltered on the side slightly and having played a few games um on this board since making it it's a it's a really nice tactical feature um nice little bottleneck that feel feels quite natural uh so once again I'm holding the two tows next to each other there to make the uh the join as smooth as possible and then going around the rest of the um I think that's the second tile that I started but um you know not the the final one that I'm the final one that I'm doing now once again just going around any kind of angles that feel unnatural with a sharp knife just smoothing them off making them look more Jagged rather than more like rather than the 90° that they uh they end up being when you cut them and then rolling and rolling and rolling with the tin foil got through fair amount of tin foil um on this um but it's it's worth it because you end up with a nice smooth looking so essentially some of it is Rocky faed which is then gets rolled with the tin foil and some of it is not uh and finally on this just gluing those four pieces down so once again instant Nails making sure everything joins up nice and um correctly at 90° step one was just to base coat this so everywhere apart from the kind of uh Rocky River edges was just painted with uh a combination of burnt Umber and black to make a kind of nice dark brown chocolaty color which dried and then looked like you're seeing there now for the river beds and for the cliff edges uh I chose a nice light gray I mean they're gray already but I just wanted to have a nice consistent gray uh across all of it so all of the surfaces that were kind of Rocky or jaggedy or whatever and all of the river edges I painted with a light gray um this is just cheap acrylic paint and all you have to do is just be careful that you don't particularly get it onto the brown bit but it doesn't matter too much if you do because you're going to be putting um flock over that bit any anyway so yeah this is all just nice and simple um so after this we're going to move on to actually making the scatter rocks now for the scatter rocks I just find bits of foam that are off cuts and I tend to just work with whatever that has given me so I tend to shave the kind of 90° angles off and just you know always cutting away from myself I get told off for extending uh these blades more than 2 in but I'm not using a lot of force it's kind of just shaving off the edges of Pham which is very easy to cut and if it gets too difficult they stop cutting with that uh once you've cut it to whatever angles you want then just roll it with the tin foil foam that we've done the rest of it with and just going got a more of a closeup of me kind of cutting into a rock so not a lot of force needed and just you know working with whatever you're given and just going over all of the uh the surfaces uh with this tin foil roll which gives it a nice random Rocky indentation uh and now I made a whole bunch these now part of these are for the uh the river um the river bed uh and some of these are for just general kind of scatter but uh this is what they end up looking like and it doesn't take very long to make um quite a lot of them so that is that uh on to part three which is the um is the riverbeds so I took these rocks and then I'm just gluing them down with glue gun um so some of them have gone onto the the riverbed surface and some of them have gone on on the edges now for the riverbeds themselves uh next step is to use just some uh cheap PVA glue and just cover the entirety of it now the thing about this is it doesn't have to they don't have to stick that well because they're not going to they're not going to float this the sand and the Rocks aren't going to float when you put the resin in anyway but it's kind of nice it's kind of held a bit in place so that you know where it's all going to be uh but yeah quite simply just uh these are just rocks and bits of sand and stuff that I just scattered on there randomly and just kind of filled up leaving some space so that uh you can still see the gray beneath so there's a a hint of some depth now into part four uh which is all about flocking so using uh just PVA paint sorry PVA glue again uh going over the entirety of the board so I started by going over the nine tiles which do not have River things and this is uh some scatter called um spring mixture from from Javis I'll try and put a link in the uh description below um and just went over the entirety of the board apart from the kind of heler areas uh for the heler areas I used a slightly different glue this is um you a strong PVA it's almost a bit like wood glue um but for I was going to be putting static grass down order to make sure that it's uh stuck nice and uh strongly very quickly so what I did is I went through one um one tile at a time or just a couple of tiles at a time cuz the drew the glue dries a lot quicker than uh PVA so I think it dries within 5 minutes now I've got a fairly cheap SCA static um grass applicator it's not amazing but it does the job and so I've got a a mixture of a few different flock types um and yeah just shaking it making sure it's um earthed and then shaking it so that the uh the strands fall out vertically and then you get this nice um nice texture to your tiles so they actually feel like they've got uh a bit of depth to them a bit of life to them um and end up looking a little something like that now uh at the moment I wasn't particularly pleased with um how it looked but I didn't expect to be uh because it just felt like the the bright green on the on the flat and the dark green on um on the Hills just felt like two completely different worlds so I was thinking about how to make this uh flow from one to the other a lot more uh fluidly um and so I was thinking about this as I was tapping it all off um so once I'd done that I gave a good coat with um some matte Scenic uh spray and then from a height um I've sprinkled some um dark fine Turf and I think you can see that just very quickly it all starts to blend um into one piece that looks like it should all be together so I went across just sprinkling randomly from a height and that that kind of that color um that kind of is a mid between the two maybe just uh just makes it all feel like it's a bit more connected then I went back over it with the static with some more um glue and then some uh static grass as well and then that is when it all started to feel like it was tied together properly because it had all the colors um across all of the different tiles so it felt like uh one big thing these are what the river beds look like uh once they were all all done I did the river beds separately because they require a certain level of accuracy now the way that I do these is I rip a bit of cardboard off cardboard off a completely random angle um and this creates all sorts of different shapes on the cardboard which means that you can flock I'll do this by hand just for a little bit more accuracy um but you can use the different angles that you've got on the cardboard to stop the flock falling into River let's be honest if it falls into the river it's not the end of the world you probably not going to see it once the resin's down there and you can brush it out it's just a bit of a pain if you do so here I'm just using one of the angles of the caral here which just randomly happened to match up with the curve of the river which means I can just drop the flock on there um and catch the stuff that uh does want to be there and miss the other stuff uh so I went across all of that and then we went get to the dry brushing stage and this is kind of very heavy dry brush but it's putting some white paint down loading up a makeup brush taking off most of the excess uh and then just going perpendicular to all of the rocky surfaces so this is all of the little rocks that are in the river this is all of the cliff faces uh and it just starts to bring the whole thing to life a little bit more because the uh when you're dry brushing the paint hits the uh uh the higher edges uh kind of highlighting them and leaving the lower edges the the darker color we started with where we finished in the last part which is having the river beds actually done so they look like that if you haven't watched that yet then please do so now if we're going to do a resin Port we need to Dam up the end so I do this with acetate sheets and UV resin so you can't really see it there but I've got an acetate sheet and I'm cutting a 2 cm High strip um and I'm going to cut um one of those for each of the uh tiles so I think there were seven of them uh and then once I've done that I'm going to draw a line halfway up so 1 cm up see to be having trouble just using a ruler here but order get this absolutely dead um parallel with the bottom of it so just drawing a line with a sharpie and then uh putting a little Mark on it to show which side is the uh upside and which is the downside and then cutting this in half uh so that we've got one little bit of acetate with a mark on it for each end so I did this with all seven tiles um and then is a case of sticking those to the ends of the tiles but not permanently now I have played with lots of different ways of making dams now I've found that the very best way is with acetate sheets and UV resin so this is going to require a small amount of investment a little bottle of that one may cost you4 or5 and I've got you need a black light torch um or UV torch uh which I think cost me about5 something like that a product Link in the description of the ones that I bought uh and then it's just a case of putting some resin down where you want it to to be and then holding the black light over it to set it this stuff sets ridiculously quickly um when you've got the black light on it so putting it um where you want it to go and then just squiding the uh bit of acetate down on top of it now this this won't set like that it will set very very slowly without any uh input from anywhere so you've got some time to work with it which is quite good so I'm just making sure that's nice and level uh with the bottom of the uh the board there so that it's the that Mark is the same height on all the boards and then shining the the UV light I mean that will be setting basically instantaneously as soon as that um UV light hits it um now you can and I've been playing with with a board you can just do the inside and then cover the outside of it with um hot glue to hold it in place um so that UV resin is can you can do it with it just on the inside but I did both on the on this and this port went pretty well to be honest no real disasters with it one tiny leak which was you know I'd fixed before I had a chance to even think about filming it but um yeah I want to make sure that these are fairly secure obviously you would be able to pull them off but you know don't do that uh then you need to work out how much resin you've got so I'm doing roughly a 1 cm deep por so I'm doing rough calculations in my head and it turns out you need about you know 300 milliliters uh for each uh each one now using resin is a is a messy Pro process so I would recommend that you wear gloves and also it will wreck any uh container that you put it in uh so don't use a container that you like so i' I'm going to be mixing this in a container of I think it was isopropyl alcohol that run out now rather than measuring it in a jug what I do is I estimate how much I want to make uh and then I will put a mark on the bottle I put a matching mark on the other one and I pour it in until you know I've got an equal amount so you can see that there's roughly an equal amount in there but the marks on the bottle on the right hand side then you want to color your resin so the mistake I've made before is by putting way too much color in you hardly need any so I'm putting in one drop at a time uh so I'm starting with some green so I wanted this to be a Bluey green cuz that's what my uh my customer had told me that he wanted and and then just very slowly literally drop by drop adding in some more color so I started with the green then I added some blue now blue is very powerful as a color so it can take over quite quickly so I've added a little bit more green in and follow the instructions um as to how you stir it it says about doing small circles initially and Etc and avoiding bubbles I don't mind if there's bubbles in mine because it's water after all but I never seem to have bubbles anyway now once I've mixed all up at a mark on the side of the tub so I knew exactly how much I had mixed up and I'd been counting how many drops of paint I put in so I the future ones I mixed up could be the same color and then from here I very uh just carefully put a little bit bit of resin in each one I was never going to I didn't want to go all out and tip it all into one so just slowly building up the amounts uh across um I think maybe three or four batches I think it was in the end now I'd really strongly recommend having some Lolly sticks on hand uh for stirring and you know as soon as you finish uh tipping just being able to just scoop the resin up like that and then just wipe it off isn't valuable because if you allow it to drip everywhere it's just really really sticky cuz it's resin at the end of of the day so yeah I slowly built up the amounts until it was nice and level with the mark that I put on the acetate uh so that we had the same depth or very roughly the same depth on every single tile so they can match up nicely and it's not the end of the world if they're slightly mismatched but it's good if they are pretty close um and yeah like I said this this port went uh went really well um no no major disasters really liked how the color looked uh you'll see that better when you see them close up in a minute and then uh we got adding the detail to it so this is now set and I'm using some um valo diarama water texture so you start off by covering your tile completely in this stuff this stuff will dry clear um it's a bit like PVA glue but not quite now once you've once it has been covered um I use an old brush and just stipple it like you're seeing me do here and think about how the water might be flowing um through the uh through the tile so I kind of stipple it and move the brush from One Direction enough not it's not something I think about too much uh the one thing I try to avoid is it looking like I've stippled a brush up it so I try to break that up with uh some different um angles of the brush and things like that um but ultimately um it's it's not that hard to do and it it tends to look good no matter how you do it then removing the dams and this can be kind of really really simple um should just kind of come off if you've done it and uh ends up looking nice and shiny at the end when you look at that um and then just kind of neaten up the the ends remove any kind of bits of glue and you know any bits of flock from the end so I wanted to show you one that was a little bit more difficult so peeled it off that went fine and then you can see that there are there's some resin there which you can just peel off um sometimes it be more adhered to the uh the uh epoxy res that's been poured in and you can just cut it with a knife but uh ultimately if you do it like that um do it with the uvi resin it it tends to work pretty well and that's the river tiles finished with all of the texture and all the detail and that is basically the entire board finished and this is what it ended up looking like uh really really pleased with how this board turned out uh first time I've done offset rivers and they're fantastic fun uh I've played on this board number of times uh since um creating it and the variety in it is fantastic uh such a fun board to play on especially with a bit more um modular scatter terrain down on top of it now if you have enjoyed this then I'd really appreciate you subscribing to the channel hitting the notification Bell so you can see future videos and leaving any comments that you might have now if you want your own board of these and you don't feel like you can make it yourself then you can head to good enough scenery. comom and you can simply get me to make one for you uh so that is an option that is available to you but whether you want to buy a board or whether you like um making them or whether you're going to make one yourself really hope you have enjoyed this series on making a grassy modular board catch you for another video soon

Channel: Good Enough Scenery - Wargaming Scenery Tutorials

Views: 1,438

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Id: fc1TZ6VuTj4

Length: 43min 7sec (2587 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024