From: PaulS - Visiting the Underhive

It is a bit late, but still Saturday, so hopefully it'll make it this week.

We tend to find that we're playing a lot of the new Necromunda on the 2d boards at the moment as no-one has enough 3d terrain to fill a board. Yet. I'm working on it and hopefully some will appear in later weeks. For now though, I picked up a set of modular walls from Blotz at Warfare late last year.  These are designed to fit in the black voids where walls theoretically exist on the board tiles, to bring a bit more scenics to the game. They sell individual bits separately, but for a nice discount they had a box of enough pieces to make any combination of setup from the core tiles. I've not yet had a chance to try all the layouts included on the additional board pack yet, but if there are options missing I'll pick up a few more bits.

The system comes with a selection of long and short walls, junction point pillars and some broken walls as well. Below are a couple of examples.

The pillars have multiple combinations of slots to allow for dead ends, right angles, t -connections and straight through connections.
between 1 and 4 connection points, allowing for some very varied layouts, like this one

For these I had a play with some new techniques and tools that I'd not tried before. I've had an airbrush for years, but never really had much luck with it as I had nowhere to set it up. Now my gaming room is coming together a bit, there is a dedicated paint area with space for me to use it without needing to pack stuff away all the time.

First it was all undercoated in black car undercoat, so that the mdf got a nice soaking and wouldn't absorb other paint. Then everything was given a rough, random spray with a rusty coloured car undercoat so that it looks kinda patchy. Before going any further, everything got a random spray with some AK Interactive chipping fluid through the airbrush (so much easier than brush or sponge... why have I never done this before?!) which I'd not tried before... so it was an interesting experiment.

After the chipping fluid had dried, the bottom part of the wall was airbrushed a greeny brown and then a creamy off white across the top to give it that worn, slimy look. As you can see... the red is now well and truly hidden.

The magic of the chipping fluid comes into effect when you then attack it with a wet toothbrush. This slowly wears away the paint, giving a really nice worn effect.

A smattering of the trusty rust effect later and we have some finished walls being nicely modelled by our Strawbear. I wish I'd managed to make it to Whittlesea in Cambrigeshire earlier this month as they had an actual Strawbear parading around.

There are 26 pillars (2x2x2.5 inches), 21 short walls (2.5x1.3x1.75 inches), 10 long walls (2.5x3.75x1.3 inches), 1 short damaged wall (1.3x2.5x1.75 inches), 1 long damaged wall (2.5x2.5x1.3 inches) and two small broken wall termination points (2.5x1.3x0.5 inches). With the pegs (not included in the measurements above) it just about all fits into a 9 LitreXL Really Useful storage box, meaning it is easy to store and take to games.

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This post is very topical for me as our group is just starting to get into Necromunda. Upon seeing the 2D terrain in the base set, I immediately started shopping for 3D versions. I've only seen the stuff offered from 4Ground and have not heard of Blotz. I will be going there right after this is posted...

This is awesome, Paul. I really like the weathering effects you achieved with the carpaint, airbrush and chipping fluid. Very effective. I picked up my first airbrush a couple years ago and absolutely love it, so I would like to give this technique a go. 

The fact that your Strawbear looks so good in these new environs gives testament to the success of your overall project. :) 

Your estimates of dimensions made my head ache, so we'll go with 3 cubes worth: 60 Points. Well done!