The Making of the Deck House – Part 1: The Foam Structure

(skip to part 2)
Recently I started playing Flying Lead with some friends, and so I decided to start thinking about a gaming table for a Sci-Fi setting. It was the most obvious choice to me, since i’m already working on a WWII table, with my 28mm resin scenery i’m working with in this days.
For starting, I choosed to make some buildings, since even if I drop the project i can still use them as generic future scenery.
So i downloaded google sketchup, wich i reccomend to anyone interested in making sketches (nothing more!), and I started to make shapes… as complicated as i could imagine!

Now, after i realized the sketches, i just took some black foam core and started cutting in shapes. I always had problems about join the pieces in the corners, but this time i followed the good tutorial from Antenociti, and i have to say that now it is much easier to work with foam core.

Here you can see the rabbet joints. Using those gives you many advantages, first of all you will hide the corner joint, but you will also have much more stability! It is a top quality technique!

Finally, i managed to make the first floor. The shape is really irregular, but every piece was cutted with quite a good precision, and having a 3d sketches on the desktop was extremely useful.

Now, some hints about the use of the corrugated cardboard:

1) Always cut it from the backside! This way you will have a nice profile on the right side. Otherwhise, the cutter blade will press the weak cardboard, giving an unrealistic look to the edge.

2) Strip off the back cardboard on the corner! I find absolutely antiesthetic finding a cardboard behind the roof… it is unrealistic and really easy to remove!

Back to the main topic: i managed to make the second floor, and added some small roofs for the irregular parts. then i covered the rest with a whole piece of corrugated cardboard. I know that many parts should be better, but i forgot to split the roofs in parts before making it.

And, as my name says, i’m Lazy.

Here is the finished (Of course Still WIP) work!

Next, i will have to add frames and scratches on the walls, to make it look much more like a Borderland building!