Making models with a hot-wire cutter

I've done almost no model-making for a few years now and oh how I miss it I love making stuff and I love making stuff with my hands they may say that you must get some pleasure surely from crafting a good video and I do there is a satisfaction in editing a good video and thinking hey I put that all together pretty well but it's all just a little of insubstantial pixels that manifest on the screen whereas if I've got something in my hands and I'm cutting and gluing and shaping and molding and I end up with a thing which I can pick up and turn in my hand it's a physical thing there is a definite extra pleasure I get from that and I'm sure I'm very far from unique in this and I've been yearning to to get my hands on some stuff and even though I didn't have any time to do any modeling I've been looking at videos online of other people making models and and occasionally buying some of the stuff that they're using thinking right when I get going again I'll give that a go and I've taken the plunge I I've take I've bought a hot wire cutter it's of a cutting styrofoam and I hope to make loads of scenery now I've been making some already look look some staircases and a small room for a dungeon or something so at the moment I'm making sort of medieval e castle II bits and bobs but I shall be you making adobe buildings very soon and other stuff Roman start an aqueduct I'm gonna make a Roman aqueduct that's definitely on the list now I've been watching a number of her other channels some of them like why Locke's armory and the dm's craft they tend to specialize in making things out of cardboard which I have to admit it's not tremendously appealing to me now I want to make things out of card wars I just don't but there are others like Max diem crafting chap from Spain and perhaps chief amongst the advocates of the hot wire cutter and its effect on styrofoam is a chap called black magic craft not Chaplin a channel called black magic craft me watching a lot of his stuff and because there he is recommended shifting sands extra twiddly stuff I've got some shifting stands extra twiddly stuff what is this well these the these are laser-cut MDF kits the add-ons extra tools to use with a with a hot wire cutter and he's thrown in this I notice an oh I do love the smell of laser-cut MDF in the morning to say anyway and and what is this well you could say but it's obvious what it means it's a template for cutting gothic arches not Norman arches these are not normal arches these are Gothic arches get your architecture right Norman arches and Romanesque arches and saxon arches are semicircular and these as you come to a definite point but what is this is this a useful free template please give me or a piece of waste it could be that he wanted the arches cut out that he could sell those to people because they do actually sell Norman arches and that this is just a waste product what's left over which he thought he would throw in for free which is fine I'm not complaining free is my favorite price but Charlie is that I really would like quite like the bits that have been cut out here because then I could put them on my hot wire cutter and cut round them and then I'd get and I nearly said Norman arch gothic arch shaped holes whereas I can't get the wire as you'll see of my hop why I cut it into these but I suppose I could just saw the bottom off it and make use of it that way so I got here the guider Pro and the angle cutter but are they any use because I've already started cutting angles and and cutting large flat sheets of stuff without either of these tools and seem to have got all all right so it could be that these are expensive luxuries that you need not buy but at least I can justify the cost by saying that I can make a video about how they are perhaps expensive luxuries that you don't need anyway so I'm going to give them a go right this is the thing itself the hot wire cutter the wire itself is there and it gets hot if I switch this switch and it comes on it makes us like humming noise and the red light comes on which is very reassuring this knob here is just to grab the end of the wire and that's the temperature control this particular one is by a company called procs on but i am not here to act as an advert for this particular brand others exist which may be better for all I know but this is the only one I have and I have no basis for comparison whatsoever I do have a few criticisms but overall I'm pretty happy with it one thing that displeased me a bit is that there are gradations marked on it in French which isn't very useful if you're into making stuff for Dungeons and Dragons and the like which uses a one-inch scale and multum or it doesn't even have the the tenths the the millimeters as they're known in between which you would have thought would have been a basic requirement so even before I used it for the very first time I added my own measurements to the edge there in a British another annoyance was this knob here which was labeled with tiny little numbers written in black against a black background which are next to impossible to read under even quite good lighting conditions and the tiny near-invisible notch at the top so instead I got my marker pen I wrote 1 2 3 4 5 6 around the edge and painted on a white line so I can actually see where I'm flipping on with this knob much better the material I'm working with is this stuff XPS extruded polystyrene foam it's fairly substantial stuff it goes by a quite frustratingly large number of different names but it's sold to builders as insulation material and you should be able to find it online in fact either there's a link in the in the description I believe to one firm that I found that sells it in this color which is what they describe as I think charcoal which I find a bit more useful colour for making models out of usually it comes in pink or blue or as here you can see a sort of a what's that peach color it's quite tough and it's not it's not this stuff now this stuff you'll be familiar with from the packaging materials and you can see it has beed alike structure it's it's this is expanded it's puffed up polystyrene foam and one way of illustrating the difference is if I drop some of this it makes this noise whereas if I drop some of this it makes this noise you see this is this is much lighter and softer than this and if I break this up it breaks up into lots of them lots of little annoying beads and that's not what we want whereas this cuts cleanly and I was delighted by how quickly I could turn out stuff like this I made this in just a few minutes on the first day I got the cut and going these take a little bit of setting up but it's not too tricky and there is a problem though which is that the material is very light and to illustrate this I have two staircases here one of which I have glued a nut into the other side of and the other one I have not and you'll see that if I were to for instance tip my hand the one which isn't support I see that falls over very very quickly whereas the other one can go can go could go to a crazy angle before eventually it falls over and there's also the below test you'll notice what I'm going to place the lighter one further from me but even so yeah if you blow the light stuff just just blows her I'd imagine that that could be quite annoying I'll not say a war gaming table if you place down your serene airy scenery and someone just you know sighs with exasperation after a particularly unlucky die roll or something and then demolishes half the castle one thing I've been working on is this it's some sort of well it's a room I don't know is its subterranean doesn't have to be it's a room of some sort and you see it's got fancy arches along the back wall there a textured floor and a fancy entrance at either end but I'm going to be adding some more pillars and twiddly stuff to it though it's not finished but maybe you are interested in how did I get these amazing arches it was actually very very simple what I did is I drew them out on a piece of card you see this piece of card is from a packet which has a hard shiny coating on it which I think makes it slightly more suitable for this and I draw on this side cut it out with a pair of ordinary scissors that you could always use a scalpel or exacto knife which I believe is just a brand name of craft knife thing and then you've got this and so then what you do is you pin it you pin it to the foam that you intend to cut and then you cut it with a hot wire foam cutter so let's see that sir let's fire her up and see how this works I go [Music] like that ant is done it's as easy as that but just in case you weren't watching I'm going to do it again Paul these beige pins out and you'll see that it's pretty accurate on this side not quite as accurate on that side that's where I went slightly wrong never mind I can just glue that back now there are of course pin holes but since I'm going to be texturing this with a stone texture I can easily hide the pin holes in the texture so I'm not worried about that at all so there you go double arch marvelous right this is another new toy I've got there this one's referred to as an engraving tool it gets hot at the end and the idea is that I'm going to put some holes in this now I tried earlier to put some holes in this using drill bits that didn't come to a happy conclusion and so I never tried with this engraving tool and principal challenge here is to do it whilst also keeping everything in frames that you can see what's going on well that seemed to work reasonably well yes yes I'm happy with that can I do it twice more okay not brilliantly round but but you know that better definitely then I achieved with a drill bit I'm gonna be content with that and that's if I can do it thrice more here's another new toy for me this one is a hot wire cutter but it's a handheld one and I got this pretty cheaply on eBay and I'm gonna try it for a new task now I'm going to use my technique of pinning bits of card to both sides of a piece of foam in the idea the idea being that I end up with piece of foam that has the profile of the card and the card is identical both sides I'd be very careful to pin it exactly opposite and well let's see if the handheld cutter finds this any easier than the the big cutter a staircase I think that was easier difference wasn't enormous but I think it was it was noticeable the easier just trim the top there there you go a staircase that was pretty quick yeah look at the interesting bit of waste cut off I've got I'm sort of freestanding stagger my man should never do something with that don't you think here you see me using the shifting sands guider Pro to a large vertical very precisely perpendicular wall that's flat and excellent for making large parallel cuts in big things but that's about it I've used the angle cutter all of about once or twice so yes these tools are useful but very very far from essential and here you see me making the same sort of cut with the guide a bar that comes with the cutter and okay it's not quite as precise quite as easy but that it's fine so having experimented with the black foam and found it fine I decided to order in buck there was a minimum amount I had to order in order to get a free postage and well this was it it really is quite a lot so there are eight sheets here each and quite large just short of an inch thick they're 25 Milo meters there that's two and a half centimeters in metric so just a little bit short of an inch but should be fine I think and right on with the project frantically I drew plans that ball almost no resemblance to what I then later went on to make why was I doing this deadlines they can be good well sometimes at least and sometimes they work on me and I've got one coming up very soon yes just the day after tomorrow is the deadline for a modeling competition being run by black magic crafts another YouTube channel I thought I would use this as an opportunity to to spur myself on to get something done so the theme is foam in terms of material so I have to make it out of some sort of foam this sort of foam is it's fine pretty much all the foam has allowed that stuff that we Brits call oasis you know the floristry stuff for keeping plants watered with the parrot which apparently is quite dangerous to work with you start carving it when it's drying it does still in it so don't and the the theme of what you're supposed to make out if this foam is a sort of a hazard I think a particular one that would be in the context of a dungeon so a dungeon hazard made out of foam and immediately I have an idea but I had an idea quite some while ago the trouble is that this last week I've had flu so I've just spent a week sweating in bed and feeling rather sorry for myself and not making models so now the deadline is really really close so possibly my original idea is now a little bit ambitious but well we'll see after the first session this is how far I've got just about to break for something to eat and so you can see you got the chasm here this is where the pillars will come out and and now here is the very first thing that I actually made and painted up using these new techniques using this new working material this XPS phone so I've got a chasm because we all love chasms and that drops away into well some sort of liquid that I've just painted back whenever I've been underground and I've seen recently still water it's always looked black to me so black I have painted it and at either end there's a grating and the grating itself is made out of that stuff that they sell for putting under pizzas in the oven or oven ships and so forth so that's what that is the paint job is using the black magic craft recipe for a wash which to be honest I'm not brilliantly impressed with I don't know if I'm going to be using that much more but you know I'll try anything once and I was in a tremendous hurry the bridge which is removable it was originally going to start here and then go across to there but that made it far too high so what I do then is chop the ends off and that usually avoids it is set down into the chasm which is perfectly strong way of making a bridge and it means it's not too high because why would you not want it to height well at this end I've got a load of arrow slits you see I've got four there got one and another one there either side of this door the door is a separate piece and the door has a hole in it and that goes there we go like that and I will have to at some point in the future make floors for arches to stand on and to ship through all these various arrow slits because it's not really a usable piece of terrain assuming that you do actually match the battle pass this I got the reception room by the way you can imagine this is not nicest way to be you see now of course if you have a chasm to go down into that means you've got to build a floor up here it's just all it looks like underneath that's what it looks like underneath which means that this entranceway is very high and at the moment I have no way of getting to it so we need to build more stuff now my feeling is that they would probably want no one to be able to bring up anything useful for getting across this bridge or or creating an alternative to the bridge so no very long spans of wood that could span across that chasm so some sort of winding corridor here which would make it impossible to bring up anything really big anyway so there's more to come in the future here now then what is this piece of rope attached to a little wooden wedge I imagine some of your crying well that's because I haven't shown you the whole thing because another separate bit over the top comes this thing like that so I tried several other designs pillars coming up either side of the bridge anyway this is what eventually I settle on so you could imagine that this is part of the ceiling so the ceilings being cut away here and here but we can see this central bit of the ceiling and I can imagine an excuse actually in again for adding this during the game because they might see the bridge that having come through this doors look across see the bridge see the opposite door see all the arrow slits and that not look up and not notice that there is in fact a great big humming log here you see it's got a it's got a pulley thing here which does actually go around and that comes up to them there and now this is going to put this down because I need another either the hand to set it so this is the wedge which goes underneath there like that and this end of this rope goes through the door and I can't receive them going through there we go through the door like that so the enemy sees you coming and you've got this very narrow bit of bridge here to cross in the middle and and how do you do that well if you all charged then it's gonna be very embarrassing because you'll get perhaps three or four breasts on this side of the the bridge but then you'll suddenly after all everyone oughta know after you know I don't this awkward B that's clearly only one man wide in the middle so there's got congestion there and don't forget all the time you're being shot from not just the front but the two sides as well and then when they decide that the time is right they can pull this wedge like that and that releases the log now the real log unfortunately he's made out of just a very light piece of wood and so the tiny tiny bit of friction isn't enough to stop it swinging but you measure the real thing wood under his weight cousin you adapt that tree trunk with wait a few tons would swing down and smash you yes swag like that so that would discourage your further attempts to get across and because it's got this rope attached to the end of it there people whoops the people are who are this side of the door can actually pull it back up and then let it go again and so they can they can have a second try admittedly the first one when it's a triggered by the the the weight being pulled out will be the best swing but after that they can still have some pretty good swings as long as they've got enough people here to pull and hold me the weight of the thing but there it is on a pulley and don't forget there could be a winch or pulley or even some some mules or something pulling on this end to help them so there you go that's actually a practical would actually work in real life Riu a reusable reloadable during a combat trap I suppose you could call it a trap and you've got conventional try tested yes arrow slits in the real world do actually work there really are a thing and why do we not have more arrow slits and dungeons because it's a pretty obvious way of defending one and you've got the defensive chasm so there we go hours of fun and that didn't win I went in for the competition I didn't even make the shortlist and I wasn't I wasn't for one moment expecting that I would win but I had some hope of at least making the shortlist but I didn't anyway so there they go it's my first attempt and I hope get better sponsor time yes if you have watched this far that it's quite likely that you're a war gamer or a roleplay gamer and or a model maker or possibly you're one of my many of you errs who are working on novels I get quite a steady trickle of emails from people who are working on novels or have some question about world building that they want to put to me and maybe occasionally I help a little bit anyway so if your that's all the person then maybe my sponsor will be of great interest you my sponsor being world and yes now world anvil oh god be consistent is a browser-based platform so they go it's online and it's there for you to organise that vast mountain of data that you as the responsible and conscientious world builder have amassed what do you do with all this data all the all the families and all the people in them and all all the timelines of all the battles and the histories and things that happen in the past and all the borders that have moved this way in the other and all the maps you got so much data wouldn't it be great to do what to me a pen and paper cannot do and cross-reference everything and have maybe interactive maps and then and a showcase it's not just your immediate friends but to the world wouldn't that be good well with world anvil you can and if you go to www.engvid.com you don't I mean you don't have to type in because that's silly okay I should just I should have missed out them possibly okay so dummy I'll be sound at this time don't need only W dot world anvil dot-com then you will find that you can make use of okay not all the features but for a lot of the most of the major features for free yes for free you can try it out and then if later you feel that is definitely for you you can pay extra for they call guild membership and with guild membership and you get certain extra things including perhaps most importantly privacy because maybe you want to keep your world secret you don't want other people to see it maybe if your players read ahead it'll spoil the game for you or something like that or maybe you think that you've got such a bit of hot property oh yes at the rest of the world we queuing up at your door to buy it from you so that they can having given you some financial recompense enjoy your world as well so if you think you've got a saleable world then yes maybe that's another reason you might want privacy or maybe you want to restrict access to certain players in your game the guild of mages they get access to the magic stuff but they don't know about the other stuff and so you can control all that sort of thing or maybe you have patrons on some site like patreon and you want to be able to give them the advantages of generously being your patron and by getting access to your stuff so again privacy settings will be something you'll be after and you can if you are a guild member you can invite in co-authors and other people to contribute to your world and so it just builds up and up and you can join a community yes a community of over two hundred thousand world and Ville Earth who are also working on their worlds and you can perhaps consult them with questions you might have and offer them advice and just generally team up and make the world just that little bit better so if you reckon that this is for you why did you go - w-w-w-whoa and Ville comm and find out it's it's online it's available it's largely free and good Lord it's British so go to world anvil today all tomorrow I mean you don't know media rush right back to making balls now to texture all my castle and dungeon scenery I'm using these rolling pins I got them from a company called green stuff world and I'm using just two at the moment there's one for the floors which is called flag stones and that's this one and that gives you this sort of texture which is perfectly authentic that's a flagstone pattern that I've seen in a number of archaeological sites so that's fine by me and the other one which I use for the uprights so the walls so this gives you this effect and you can see here I've done made little laboratory the Voyager II laboratory laboratory laboratory I always get those confused anyway here we are it's it's a loop and you can see this is has spaces for for two and you can hear the the stones that make up the walls now I say stones what what is this rolling pin called it's called small bricks bricks how are these brick these are quite clearly not bricks he's had quite clearly stones these are his largely worked ash Lars these are not bricks bricks are made up of clay and fired in a kiln and and they're usually reddish and orange and all exactly the same size they are created by man they're molded into the desired shape whereas stones come out of the quarry sometimes a little bit random and so you have to fit them together like this these are quite clearly stones not bricks but anyway apart from doctor linguistic error I'm reasonably happy with them and I suppose I should show you them in action now here I have a biggish bit of the the foam stock that I'm using for making this stuff out of and something I want to draw your attention to is that the outside of it is dark and rough and a slightly textured you see it's got a slight ripple to it in places where is the inside the cross-section doesn't expose by cutting is much smoother and slightly paler and here's the thing it takes texture a lot better so you've cut a bit and it's got an exposed side and the dark rough side and you use your rolling pin to try to put texture on that side and that works fine you turn over and my goodness you may have a lot of trouble putting texture on on this it's also like an outer crust on it which is a little bit harder so one thing you can do is use your hot wire cutter to cut a very very thin layer off the surface now if you don't have a hot wire cutter this this option really isn't available to you and even with a hot wire cutter it's a bit of a faff and is a bit of a risk as well to your the the wire on your cutter which is vulnerable to snapping it's an annoyance but sometimes it is necessary to think about removing this surface now here is an off cut of the phone which I'm going to use to demonstrate just how well and quickly these rolling pins can work fingers crossed now they do sell these rubbery rings to act as guides you're supposed to stick them on like that either end and this is meant to keep you straight as you roll I have found these to be completely unnecessary and so I wouldn't I wouldn't particularly recommend them although if you are using them in their other purpose then perhaps they have a good use which is that if instead of foam you're using some sort of play some putty and you want that putty to end up the exactly even thickness then this will give you that thickness and the ring has come in a few different sizes for that purpose right now then this is the exposed side and I put it on one end and I go pressing down quite hard there you go it is that quick and I think you'll agree that there's a pretty decent bit of texture now if I flip it over this is the outer crusty side of the the phone and it makes a different noise I'm having to push much much harder and actually I sort of got away with it it's not as good but sometimes it doesn't do anything like as well as that so that that frankly that hasn't Illustrated my point terribly well because that's worked reasonably well I mean not brilliantly but use ibly well and it looks better as well it looks better because this is darker the contrast is higher so the texture looks better than on this side but when you come to paint it you'll find that this paints up a lot better than this this detail is much more shallow and vague now these very tall pillars illustrate the point quite well you may notice that on this surface here that those are the marks left by the rolling pin as are those on the opposite side but the other two sides I've had to texture lavoris Lee with a biro that had run out of ink pushing it in to make an indentation because this side and its opposite were the the outer sides of the material so this pillow used the full thickness of the material there's the stock foam that I was working with and although the exposed inner side stuff the texture from the rolling pin very well the outers ones really didn't and so that was necessary in both these cases and these also illustrate quite potently the value of putting weights in the bottom of these things because without weights these would be almost unusable that a breath of air would knock them over as it is they stand up very stable II indeed with the weight at the bottom of them and why they so tall well I just thought that you know sometimes you might want to stick one into a room hill to indicate that there's a very high ceiling in this room albeit one that's completely at odds with the proportions of this particular example room but in the larger room this wouldn't look so ridiculous I hope you'll agree it definitely would be an inconvenience in the convenience I tried a few different paint schemes one was to take the original foam which is this mid gray and then paint it with a sort moost brushing technique so you just pick up the the the raised areas and I've painted that in brown because very little stone in the real world is actually a pure neutral gray I then dry brushed it white and then over the top of the dry brush white I and you can see some of the brown they're still showing through but yeah not not a huge amount so it's still fairly neutral gray and then over the top of that I have varnished with I've just used this wrong seal which in Britain is available it's not specialist modeling varnish at all he said it's available in all sorts of painter and decorator stuff is just vanishing wooden well anything furniture skirting boards whatever and into that I put some black ink I'm sure there are many brands available I just bought this one because it's what my local art shop just happened to have it wasn't brilliantly cheap but you it'll go a very long way and then mixing that into the varnish I find the varnish holds it in the crevices I've tried all sorts of washes but my experience with washes is that they look great when they're wet but then as they dry the pigment migrates to the highlands and the effect is lost anyway I think you would I think I'm reasonably happy with that and it's reasonably quick and easy here's another paint scheme which are less keen on to be honest this will involve using a sponge you see I ripped this from a larger sponge which had holes in it already and that was to get a rough surface and then I dip this in a couple of different contrasting colors of paint one was sort of a reddish one and the other one was a yellowy beige I then sponged on to the surface and then I dry brushed over the top and used my varnish with the ink mixed in and I'm not so happy with this it looks a bit so bruised it's a bit strange the that the sponging is a little bit random doesn't coordinate with the location of the stones at all and either it's quick I suppose and from a distance looks alright but I wasn't that wild about it now another technique was to do what I did here and paint individual stones techne bit of care you see Sam I painted greenish and some reddish color and and that I think looks reasonably good you may think when you first paint on the greens and the Reds and the other colors that they look ridiculously out of place to contrasting but once you've dry brushed with a very pale color over the top and then put on your your black wash glaze whatever you're going to use they don't look too bad so that's is another technique the snag with this one of course being that you have to bother to put the effort in to paint reasonably carefully so it takes longer this Lou by the way is the smaller of the two that I've made so far I've made a larger one which I haven't finished painting yet and as you can see it has spaces four four six people to enjoy having a pool and playing cribbage together or whatever it is that these people do one imagines that if you were to live underground yes underground you really want to have good lose because can you imagine the stink if somebody just you know went in the corner underground ah they would be very unpopular for a very long time as this one as you can see it's got walls all the way around and this one I'm thinking more of an on-suite design so I've left one of the walls absent so that you get another room with it with a the door like that you can just put the two together and there you go it's an ensuite loo for to a little mini rant now I am perplexed and appalled by this in fashion forever increasingly vast bases why is it necessary to have figures on such enormous places look me these are 1-inch squares it doesn't even fit it doesn't even fit on an inch square he's only an inch tall for goodness sake why does he need a base so ridiculously vast now in the good old days before slaughter bases and before the dark times and the Empire figures came with the base molded on the figure and the base were one inseparable and strong and good and simple and the bases were just big enough for the figure to stand up he stands up he stands up absolutely fine on that and look he fits in the square and you can even get a couple of his friends in and then you want him to stand on the table or go up some stairs stand on the platform whatever there's so much more versatile now I can understand that for a tabletop war games where you might need standardized army spacing there may be an excuse for large bases or at least larger bases but for roleplay gaming no small bases are good plus the the fashion for large bases has tempted a lot of people to make the bases ever more ostentatious and they walk around with with rocks and loads of foliage bushes and bits of wrecked building and all sorts on the base and it's quite distracting and they look quite ridiculous in almost any context but certainly if they step out onto a stone platform like this that the fact that they they got half a forest on their base makes them look just ridiculous now I'm deliberately making my dungeon scenery to be compatible with a lot of commercially available dungeon scenery these days and the standard seems to have been arrived at there are loads of companies all using the same set of standard measurements some of them for people with 3d printers and they just sell their the plans and others are actually selling the things themselves so these wards are 2 inches tall but the floor is half an inch thick so the amount of standing wall is one and a half inches which is quite a low ceiling but you do of course need to be able to see into these rooms and be able to manipulate figures within them so if for example you do have a bit of a cramped room like this and the players are looking at it at this sort of angle on the table you might you can see that the figures could disappear in there so I I decided that when I made five foot wide corridors like this that what I would do is I would make the walls slightly shorter so these walls stick up only one inch above the floor so that when your little figure that little dwarf see he put him in there and he still disappears almost but you can just about see him you see that's that that's the head of the dwarf he's in there you gonna trust me he's in there one problem that cropped up after I've been making a few of these 5 foot wide corridors is that the tiniest inaccuracies start to show up yeah he see this is just three pieces it's this wall this wall and the floor and I would cut them exactly to length glue them together put a bit of glue on sticks and pins in to hold the mosque they were drying and then all seemed fine but then when you match one up against another you see that they're not perfectly accurate you see that's not a perfect right angle that's more like a right angle that's skew if that's more like an right angle ask you if and you can see bit of daylight got you through the crack of course that won't matter when this is set down on the table but it does show you the the in accuracy so a new policy is to make all these walls and floors slightly too long text to them on the sides and tops but not on the ends and then when they glue together and the glue is dry then cut them to length exactly so they should then be more accurate right now to cut these corridor bits so that they're at 45 degrees and all these pits are in a nice straight line and for this purpose I have set this bar thingamabob to 45 degrees and I'm just going to slide it up that way and to get it clear of the wire and just to make sure that they are in tune la la la yeah that's pretty good okay so I now turn it on mmm makes us like humming noise and line this up on the black line here where it does its cutting so I think about there looks good and then holding it against the the bar here I then slide it along and hope this works there we go so now we've got one continuous accurate I hope but line there and to do the other end oh I'm gonna have to adjust this do it to be the other way around so in that case what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the same and of all the corridors at once and then I'll adjust it grande and now they're pretty accurate you see I put them together this way and that's a straight line and that's a right angle and now I can do diagonal joins between rooms possibly I mean how useful this will ever be I don't know but you can at least in theory do something like that which is presumably in some way good you see I think this is overkill as a base for a figure now another thing I've made is a modular system of stairways and I've based this on just a couple of standard measurements there they've all got the same thickness it's an arbitrary one which was based entirely on the thickness of the pieces of foam that I was using to create them and they've there are two standard Heights the high height and the low height and then after that you're away so I've got these pieces which go from the ground up to the low height and I've got these pieces which start one step height higher can you see that one step height higher than the low they go up to the higher one and you can put these together in all manner of combinations I've also got blocks which are just they don't have no stairs but they they they allow you to extend it to all sorts of different ways and I've also got these bits now these bits I got for free because every time you make one of these you cut away one of those book so every time you you you make one of those you get one of these for free and these can be added from the ground going up like that and they can also be added like that loads and loads of uses including if you've got this which is just a flight of stairs that goes all the way up to the hi I'd like that you see if you've got a figure who is running along and he ends up at the end of his turn or perhaps he wants to end up for some reason halfway up a flight of stairs you could make a base for him like that and just stand him on it you see and the figure will now stand happily on a flight of stone steps in the middle of it so there you go hours and hours of fun I've also noticed it made a plinth here possibly would have been more useful if I hadn't put that very small bit on the top of it I might remove that and I'm a double with stairs guess how I did that yeah that's right to single with ones glued together fancy with this one and added a door underneath on both sides actually but I imagine that this would be up against a wall on the inside of some dungeon so you wouldn't see that it doesn't go anywhere and so that would become the door into the next room and yeah that's enough of that next up is one of these what is that it's a curious thing these now have a name these are called dungeon stackers yes that's what the online community oh yes that's right it's a community now of crafting DMS calling these and they're really all the rage this is my own particular design the standard design looks much plainer looks just like that and they're supposed to be usable as staircases but I find that if you've got a fella there's only that tall that you might have a bit of trouble we know in his armor when he's being shot at and in a bit of a hurry carrying lots of gold that he's just looted you know hear about some terrible time getting over those I don't think anyone would build a staircase with stairs that are two and a half feet tall so I have carved a step into each level and so it looks far more believable that he might make his way up there and if his base isn't ridiculously enormous he should have no trouble at all standing on that so why are they called stackers well what you're supposed to do is is stack them you see and then you produce blocks and then you can have bits go up to the blocks you can also have blocks at different heights so for instance you could put a couple of those together like that and then some stairs then like that you see and then have some that come in from this side as well and you could have some come to a platform like that and then it's it's linked like that in because that is in in some way I'm sure good then you can have way heading off in that direction and and and more adventure if they all adventure you see and he's off to adventure now there is a drawback I daresay you've spotted it already with my design which is that if you do that you've got a bit a bit because they've got a whole way left over well one thing you can do is just don't do that or you could use one of the ones which doesn't have that because I did a few extra ones afterwards thinking yeah right maybe it would be easier so that that doesn't leave the gap or you could just throw a rug over it or just saying never mind it's a damage but it needs repair and if you go the other way that way you see there you go it's hidden for the trouble you've now got that bit but of course that that hole there is very likely to be hidden by the next thing that you've put there to to hide it now these are two stages two inches by two inches by whatever think this is convenient I suppose half an inch is would would be the standard so that's a two by one on top of the 2 by 2 square and that's a 2 by 1 on the 2 by 2 on the 2 by 3 and you don't recommend you make at least twice as many of these three parcels as you do of the two partners and they go together in all sorts of combinations hours of fun with I ever use them I don't know I don't know will I ever use any of this stuff I don't know but I'm joined making it and there have some water it's like in bonkers designs here this one as you see goes up into the corner like that and this is the the opposite and of course these can be put together in various bonkers ways there you go look look you got the Lampe theater there you see so that people could can convert what's going on down here and then they can make their way out of the exit which is that way or maybe that's that's another way how they got up there in the first place it's just hours and hours of fun so many combinations and if you really want of course since these are negatives of each other they do go together like that and yes I know there's a little gap at the bottom like that but using you put a thing in front of the in front of it and then you're fine [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 165,256

Rating: 4.9521236 out of 5

Keywords: hot-wire, hot, wire, cutter, table, proxxon, foam, xps, model, make, making, craft, crafting, dm, terrain, scenery, castle, dungeon, building, walls, floor, floorplans, plans, D&D, rpg, role, play, game, gaming, roleplay, how to, adventure, figures, miniatures, stairs, arches, modular, template, trap, medieval, pathfinder

Id: PUjZ0o28JvU

Length: 45min 32sec (2732 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019