Hardcore Foamcore: Ruins I

This post is the first in a short series on some terrain that I've been making using foamcore. Today, I'll show you the first part in my take on that wargaming terrain staple, the ruined building.

This whole idea began when I stumbled across this amazing modeling project.

I realized this was the perfect opportunity to push my own limits of 'realism' in terrain, as well as an opportunity to prove that another cheap, readily available material can be used in place of harder-to-find media like EPS, or 'blue foam.'

What follows was my first test building. The plan was to make three more like this and base them on CDs so that they could be placed as individual ruins or together as one building.

A door wall, a window wall, a section for flagstones, and some buttresses.

The main problems with a lot of foamcore buildings that I see are that the surface often ends up featureless, and the edges tend to show. This bothers me because it breaks the realism.

To fix this, I decided I would peel the paper off, as suggested in the above article, so that I could scribe textures into the foam itself. However, in experiments I found that the foam became dangerously thin and fragile when I peeled the paper off of both sides. I decided that the best way to deal with this was to cut two of each piece and then peel the paper off of the opposite sides.

The exception, of course, was the floor. Only needed one of those.

Peeling the paper was a bit of a pain, but with patience and the blade of an exacto, I eventually lifted off the majority. Once that was done, I glued the paper sides together.



My walls in progress hanging out with my cairns in progress.

Once the walls had dried, I began scribing the lines of the bricks with the back of my exacto blade. I took this opportunity to also cut a slot for the window sill, which I made by cutting a coffee stirrer to size.


You can see that I've blocked out the spot for the buttress to the left of the window. I would later push this section in with the butt of my pencil for a more realistic join.

I then went through my brick layers and scored the lines for the individual bricks. I did my best to make them match up along the edges. I then went back through with a pencil and gently widened each of the scored lines. Finally, I went over each piece with a chunk of porous stone, to add some textural variance.

Here is the result so far. Stay tuned to see the rest of the building come together.