Tuscany Hill Village Terrain Build

It’s been a while since my last update. In part because of life and in part because I’ve been working on some Blood Bowl miniatures and some platoons of panzer grenadiers. But I’ve still been tinkering on this project in the background. Why it has taken so long to get to this point is explained below…

With all of the other buildings for the town now designed, I turned to the most complex, the church. Looking at reference photos, the church is often a main focal point of the town, especially the tower, so I want to try and recreate something that will also draw the eye.

You can see from some of the photos that while there is a distinctive design for the church with the tower being a dominant component.

I started on paper, to sketch out my design and to ensure that it would fit into the footprint I had allocated to it in the town plan. My first realisation was that this would be the largest building designed to date, being around 19cm by 10cm. This size made me concerned with regards to the average build space for a resin 3d printer. As I don’t have a printer, I had to do some research into this and my concerns were confirmed – namely that I would struggle to fit this size of building into the build space. I needed to break my design down.

The previous builds have been constructed floor by floor, with my thinking being that the only issue I needed to worry about was how to line up each floor and connect or stack them. Breaking the building into smaller parts that then needed to be fitted together was a completely new challenge.

First issue was ensuring structural integrity and how everything would be put and glued together. I decided that I could tackle the tower like the previous buildings – as separate floors. You can see the tower tiers below, with the lower tiers first, the upper tier and the roof.

The roof took chuffing ages to design, being a combination of several ‘pyramids’, tricky angles, layered tiles that had to be cut to fit and a lot of pythagoras and trigonometry to get it to work. Just this section took around 3 weeks to figure out! And at least five attempts.

For the main body of the church, I needed a base plate that I could then glue the walls to. The two long walls would be split in two but the end walls could be designed as a single piece, at least up to the height of the roof. The walls would need to be strengthened around the corners to hold them in place so I also designed corner stonework that would then glue over the corner joins. The below image is the base plate with the upright sections designed to align with grooves that will be put into the back of all of the walls. 

I want the front of the church to be a little grander and so I’ve placed a couple of circular windows into the design. These had to be built separately and then ‘slotted’ into the wall. The same with the door, door arch and steps – all separate pieces that needed to be combined and then ‘slotted in’. 

The roof will help define the building and make it look distinctively Italian. I’m going for the double roof look but in making this decision, I’m adding a lot of complexity. The roof cannot be built in one part and so will require internal supports and trusses to ensure that it stays together as well as staying straight and aligned. I also needed to ensure that the roof could lift off to allow access to the inside for the placement of models. Overall, the roof is constructed of 20 separate parts and that trigonometry that I learnt all those years ago came in handy, especially the old mnemonic ‘Silly Old Hilter Couldn’t Advance his Troops Over Asia’! 

So after a lot of effort and redesigns, I have managed to build my church. It all seems to fit together in the virtual world without conflicts or parts not aligning but until it is actually printed out, I won’t know for sure.

I now need to look into getting a 3d printer to prove all of these designs. And while I do that, I can actually start on modelling the ‘hill’ that all of these buildings will sit on – so some actual, real world, physical stuff.