How To Make Laser Cut Terrain Kits Look Good For Warhammer 40K

laser cut wooden terrain kits are great they're cheap they're easy to build but when they're finished they do tend to look like a bunch of pieces of wood glued together so I'm going to show you how I take something like this and turn it into something that looks a bit less like a puzz 3D there are two immutable rules with MDF terrain kits seal the surface and fill the gaps in that order sorry to get all technical but MDF is a thirsty thirsty fiber board it'll drink in your paint faster than Uncle Dave on a work outing and just like Uncle Dave this causes the fibers to swell and the surface becomes all fuzzy you can buy specialist MDF sealers but I find water down PVA glue or Mod Podge work just as well for this and the good news is you really don't have to be all that careful with it you just slap it on and let the thirst consume it I'm not going to overly labor the point but the biggest thing you can do to make MDF terrain look decent is fill the edges cheap domestic filler fine as long as you've sealed the ends first and once it's sanded I like to seal it again to try and mitigate that whole escape artist thing it likes to do to get away from the pop-up book aesthetic it helps to add some three-dimensionality to the individual Parts in the case of this power station model that means adding countless raise panels as well as recessing the doorways and windows and adding frames in essence I'm either adding or removing material to create more depth Dimension and things that car shadow cuz our brains love of good Shadow here are three rivet techniques because in the 41st Millennium they are [Music] abundant rhinestones make great general purpose riets for terrain they're just about the right size and you get a few thousand of them for a couple of quid I buy the self- adhesive ones which are designed to be heat fixed but as much as I enjoy the smell of burning MDF I fix them with superglue the self adhesive backing has a kind of waffle pattern which the glue grabs really well which means they don't fall off if you get a bit enthusiastic with the old dry brush I uh I ran out of space ball bearings are fiddly to apply but they produce a very precise looking rivet the process is simple drill a whole the size of the ball to half the depth of the ball and then glue them in place now this is timec consuming and I certainly wouldn't do it on a large terrain piece or a mega gargon but it does look good nail art beads are ridiculously cheap they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and they're a must have for Kit Bashers and scratch builders for me they're absolutely perfect for adding some variety to the representations of different fixings on the model one of the big downsides of flat pack terrain is that curved surfaces tend to look like they're from a 1990s video game in the case of this TT combat power station I'm building there are four very unfortunate looking tubes on the front of the building and they need to go this is the perfect use case for my favorite Kids Construction toy I get so much mileage out of these delightful little tubes if anyone knows a better source for them than Captain ethical dystopia Warehouse then I'd love to know if you sealed the surface and filled the gaps in the building once it's painted it'll do a more than reasonable job of representing a metal surface but I wanted the lower half to have more of a concrete Vibe so I made a texture paste from paint PVA glue and baking soda roughly in equal proportions and slapped it over all the bits of the model that I didn't want to look like they were still made of metal and speaking of metal I also added some tread plate pattern styring to all the walkways by adding these few distinct textural elements the building looks more visually interesting and less wooden than the delivery of this voice over handrails on laser cut kits suck they they just do but on most of the kits I've encountered the dimensions for the mounting holes for the handrails are the same as the thickness of the sheet which you know makes sense because the handrails going to fit in the hole so if you're making new barriers fences handrails whatever then all you have to do is get some profile in this case styrene that's the same as the thickness as the sheet I decided to make mine quite traditional looking with 1 mm wire handrail but you could easily fill the gaps between the post with more starring for a more sci-fi barricade look pretty sure there's another iing grebles never mind grebles GBL detail bits what whatever you want to call them they're the small parts that you attach to the model to help bring it to life and set it in place in the universe there's really not much technique to this just use your imagination to be honest I'm only really including this little bit here because it' be strange if a bunch of stuff appeared on the model when I move on to the next section since this is a piece of terrain I'm not going heavy metal more medium density fire but you you get the idea I started by giving everything a coat of black primer followed by some valo NATO green over most of the building obviously you don't need an airbrush to do this but it does save a truckload of paint on a Model this size and and and time it it definitely saves time then all the metal bits got a coat of gunmal from the Vallejo model air range it's a beautiful paint as is the null oil that I indiscriminately slapped over the top of it then came the step that everybody knows how to do so I'm not going to describe it because I I value your time anyway I finish things up by blending it everything in with some weathering they use this to create some subtle Shadows streets dirt deposits that kind of thing oh and rust spots you got to put rust spots on rivets otherwise how would people know they rivets you might well be thinking you probably should have based that before you painted it in a lot of cases you'd probably have a point but there are so many overhangs tight spots crannies walkways reading Nooks Etc I figured life would just be simpler if I had access to the underside for painting but it did mean I had to be a bit careful with the terrain paste which came out right I think so there we go one power station that hopefully hides its laser cut routs I say hopefully because you may noticed I forgot to fill the gaps in the control room which was a bit of an oversight I kept putting off gluing on the front to make it easier to paint the inside and uh well I just forgot so that's a problem for future Chris anyway I hope you found the video useful or perhaps even entertaining and if you're looking for something else to watch might suggest uh one of these

Channel: Offbeat Builds

Views: 153,935

Keywords: laser cut terrain, laser cut terrain kit, how to make terrain, warhammer terrain, warhammer 40k terrain, how to make warhammer terrain, warhammer scenery, how to make laser cut terrain, how to make laser cut kit, warhammer, warhammer 40k, warhammer terrain building, warhammer terrain diy, warhammer 40000

Id: LXlHd30Kceo

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023