A new apocalypse table

Hey guys,

One of the best things of moving house is I now have a large garage not currently doing anything. It has been claimed in the name of the Emperor and renamed the Hobby Den. First thing’s first was to make the Hobby Den a bit more livable. This involved adding some insulation to the ceiling, clearing away some of the old junk and getting some new shelves set up. It’s still a work in progress, but starting to get somewhere!

Also, as a side note, don’t go around adding insulation without professional assistance! Power cables are usually hidden in the ceiling and you don’t want to mess around with that.

In regards to my hobby, I have an unhealthy obsession with massive games using massive models. So, naturally the first thing I thought of when I saw the size of the Hobby Den was Apoc Table! At the moment my only real terrain is the city fight table. I will definitely want to expand this into a full apoc table (because I’m a glutton for punishment), but that’s definitely a long-term project. In the mean time, I figure the fastest way to expand the terrain collection was to add some ash waste terrain as if surrounding the city. I love the Forgeworld display table based on the battle for Istvaan V, and drew a lot of inspiration from this.

So, the terrain was designed to be pretty quick and easy to make, and is mainly composed of simple hills. Hopefully they look alright at the end.

The first step was to cut up some basic shapes to act as bases from the hills. I used 3mm MDF cut using a jigsaw. The next step was to cut up the basic shape of the hills using high-density insulation foam.

I wanted to have some rocky outcrops over the hills, and thought the easiest way to do this was to glue real rocks to it. I got a bag of shale for about $10 from Bunnings and then used a hot glue gun to attach them to the hills.

The next step was to use some gap filler, usually used for filling cracks in walls, and use this to smooth over where the edges of the rocks meet the foam of the hill. Try to avoid getting to much gap filler on the main faces of the rocks, as you want to try and preserve the details of the stone. The gap filler will probably take a good few hours to dry. Once it’s dry, fill any more gaps if necessary. When it’s all dry, give it a quick sand to take away the worst of the rough edges.

The next step was to add some small pebbles and rocks to add extra details, and then apply sand to the rest of the hill. I found the easiest way to do this is paint PVA over everything except the large rocks, and then sprinkle on the pebbles, followed by sand. Again, wait for this to dry.

I made several different pieces, adding in dugouts and weapon emplacements on a few of them.

That’s the basic hills constructed, so the next step will be to apply some paint.

Cheers guys!