THE FIRST TERRAIN BOARD:
I'd done some model railroad work in the past, as well as doing some
pretty detailed miniature diorama-bases. Initially I was going to buy a
bunch of Geo-Hex, but then I saw some good photos of their product and
realized that (a) the Geo-Hex in OGRE Miniatures was heavily
modified...Almost totally reflocked, and (b) that in 2" == 1 hex, I
couldn't re-create the GEV map using Geo-Hexes because they just didn't
have the right shapes at the right scales. Time is money. I decided to try
to make my own hex-board so I could use the bits of the GEV map elsewhere
or swap in tiles without towns, etc. I made a pair of sheet aluminum
hexes, bolted blue insulation board between them and trimmed with a
hot-foam cutter.
Then I cut out all the rivers and streams, roughed in the slopes with the hot-foam cutter and smoothed everything out very nicely with drywall-sanding mesh (works -incredibly- well on blue foam insulation!), put on several layers of multicolored flock and coarse turf, began cutting sheet polystyrene painted French blue and gluing it under the hexes for rivers...
...And suddenly realized that my hex-template was imperfect. I'd done all my slopes by putting two hexes side by side. When I put everything onto the table, nothing fit for a damn. WOE! I worked with it for another day, adding roads and fiddling with N-guage railroad bridges, then managed to knock a bottle of paint-stripper onto it, which prevented me from wasting more good time after bad.
Here are a couple of quick pics I took of the board while I was in the
process of adding roads:
THE SECOND TERRAIN BOARD:
This is a log of the second attempt to recreate the G.E.V. board.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER!
If you follow these step by step you'll be in for a lot of heartache since
you'll make every mistake I did. Instead, read through the whole thing
first.
I've broken these up so that instead of one long page with over a dozen images, each page has one to three images of one step on it, in order to make viewing easier and not break the hearts of people with slow connections. All images are under 100K or so anyway, but still...
Step 1: Layout and fitting
Step 2: Enlargement and adjustment
Step 3: Transferring the layout to the
board
Step 4: Cutting out water areas and
contouring
Step 5: Painting the layout and
cleanup
Step 6: Adding in the 'coastal'
cities
Step 7: Paving roads and cities
Step 8: Flocking and sealing
Step 9: Forestation
Because of the problems at Games Day with chunks of the board shifting around as the table was bumped, and the problems this created with range measurement, I realized I would need some way to hold all the pieces together. I also realized that fewer pieces would be easier to hold together, and much faster to assemble. Additionally, that )(*@#$#@ plexiglass was going to have to go! It looked cool, and no doubt it was sturdy, but it weighed A TON and I would soon find myself having to carry my terrain around convention centers and hotels where I might have to park a block or more away and walk up flights of stairs and...Anyhow, so I remounted it.