Collins Does Scarif Table Build

And all battles need a plan.

This entry I hope to document some research and outline my plan going forward for this build.

Scarif is the name of the planet in Rogue One where the Empire keeps it’s off site digital backup. It’s a small idilic world that houses a big spire full of porn, several small outposts and landing pads that you can holiday to if your papers are in order and is only subjected to the occasional raid by the rebellion.

Although I feel that’s a good description more accurate fluff can be found on wookieepedia

In actuality the filmset for Scarif was the Maldives which is (I’m told) a wonderful place to drink cocktails. Knowing this however gives us an excellent frame of reference. White sandy beaches, palm trees, luscious tropical foresty bits!

Now for some snaps I have shamelessly stolen from the internet!

So lets start with the board.

At my FLGS they have moved away from having ‘wargaming’ tables that are sculpted and cool looking. They’re not very multifunctional and to be honest they’re biggest trade there is collectible card games and roleplaying. The wargamers are not the biggest draw but usually take up the most space.

In a bit to keep all peoples happy they have bought a lot of DeepCutStudios mats and started keeping ‘tables’ of terrain in boxes. It works well.

So in that vein of convenience lets see what mats are available out there that are suitable for this.

So far, nothing that looks like the Maldives!

sure a couple of them are beachy but not exactly white sandy paradise!

So having decided that the previous mats are not suitable I broadened my search to pworks and tinywargames

I’ve seen both these products at shows and at friends houses and they are good. tinywargames are the only ones I know of so far that do mats just for Star Wars Legion. a Hoth, Tattooine and hanger and then generic grass.

I then saw a post on Facebook from somebody who had been designing up a couple of Star Wars legion mats. Apparently they also were becoming frustrated with the lack of ‘just right’ for Scarif and so they made their own and have put it up for sale on wargamevault.com

we what do we have here? is it a winner, I think so! very Maldives!

I’m one of those lucky DINKies with an excess of disposable income and about a year ago I bought a Prusa i3Mk3 printer. I have found my journey into 3D printing to be a much smoother ride than Warren but then that is to be expected as the machine I bought from Prusa is far more expensive and reliable. That doesn’t mean that its been perfect though. I still have been frustrated, annoyed and used naughty words on occasion. Thankfully it’s been more positive than negative. Theres a lot to be said for ‘get what you pay for’ and ‘buy right, buy once’.

Thingiverse is a gold mine for cool Star Wars stuff and there is tonnes of scatter terrain like crates, bunkers, guns, vehicles. Some better than others, some very very naff. It is a real lottery, I just kept searching until I found users who are clearly skilled. There is also a few people on there who remix other peoples work, change one thing and publish it as theirs (with credits – usually) that don’t actually add any real value to the overall community. Also, I found that a lot of people model things and then don’t actually do a print test which means there models are generally very hard to work with as a novice.

Then there are other people who take it more seriously who have left thingiverse and started their own websites/services who’s models are excellent and easy to print. a lot more thought goes into these models than the stuff on thingiverse. ImperialTerrain being such a company.

With all that said, I will clearly be printing some items for this table. Some people would call this cheating, I call it smart. The hobby has had an evolution. Calligraphy is out and email is in!

There are still some items that cannot be 3D printed however. hills, palm trees and vegetation are all either hard to print or would be a waste of time/material. quicker and cheaper to use traditional methods.

The tree sections will be done using traditional methods. time to research exactly how to do it!

To YouTube!!

There are a lot of people on YouTube who are truly craftsmen (or women, people?) and I have lost many many hours of my life watching their content (a bit like those numptys OnTableTop).

The two people who I have taken inspiration from for this project are The Terrain Tutor and Lukes APS. Both of these are different and yet remarkably similar. They both strive for realism and excellent quality but I feel that Luke’s methods are much quicker than Mel’s detailed traditional methods. Both are well worth a watch and I shall be shamelessly ripping them both off equally in this project log.

I used a lot of Mel’s ideas for my Yavin IV table build and will do so again because I still have some materials left over from that, herbs, mdf, plastic plants etc. It is hoped that this can keep the cost down as I will invariably have to buy that awesome mat we found!

As you can see from the videos above. Luke’s methodology is quick, simple but still gives excellent results. Mel really does go to town on his (personal) project and the results are amazing. I just don’t want to go to that level really. I plan to land squarely in the middle.

Use Luke’s grout method and then half of Mel’s ground cover methods.

Now, to the workstation!

I will be making some palm forest sections for this board. One of the things I found out from the Yavin IV build is that it was very easy to make the forest impenetrable so every tree/hedge becomes LOS and movement blocking. Need to avoid that here even though the reference pictures show the actuality to be very dense. Good news, that means less materials per item, keeping costs down or allowing for more terrain.

Effective what I did was to cut out the bases of MDF using a jigsaw, then sand the sides to a bevel using the Dremel. This was quite time consuming. I did 7 bases in an hour and I got covered in MDF dust. I did wear googles and a mask and so should you!

I then sealed the bottom of the bases using a cheap wilkos house emulsion paint in an appropriate colour like hessian.

once dry I flipped them over and wetted with water. Then I slapped on a few lumps of DAS clay and smoothed out into mini hills. You wet the MDF first so the clay sticks better and drys more evenly. If you don’t, you’ll find the clay will pull away from the MDF on drying.

Once that was dry I slapped on some sculptamold so to build in some texture. perhaps this can be skipped but I felt it would help keep the clay down a bit and add minor texture to the otherwise flat areas of the MDF.

Once dry the whole lot got painted using the hessian house paint.

Including drying times (in the English sun) this took about a day to achieve. The clay was the biggest time waster here. polystyrene or high density foam would have been much quicker, I just didn’t have any!

Once at this stage I basically followed Luke’s video with some minor tweaks.

I tea strainered the grout over the bases and hit it with a misting of 99% isopropyl and then a watered PVA spray. I found old window cleaning spray bottles to be excellent for this. raid the cleaning cupboards people!

Once the tile grout was dry it was predictably, rock hard. I am hoping that this makes it super durable and will help with the next stages.

Using neat PVA I put down my tree debris areas on the bases. Theses were concentrated on top of the hill areas so to accommodate the drilling for the pegs of the trees.

Once PVA was where I wanted, I dumped a load of mixed herbs on it. This came from a catering pack from The Range for like £2. Cheap and simple. Once on I pushed hard on them to make sure they made a good bond with the PVA and grout.

Then after that had dried, for some reason I decided to spray it again with watered PVA. I’m sure I had a good reason, I just cannot remember why. Possibly to minimise the herb smell. This had an unforeseen side effect. It leached the green of the herbs onto the grout. I kitchen towelled most of this up and now only a little remains around it, im now claiming that it was a good idea and I totally planned it as it makes the sand look a little more interesting and stained from a storm knocking about debris and stuff. Yup, not a cock up, a deliberate artistic choice!

With the ground and debris sorted it was time to move onto the trees and foliage of the whole affair!

Here are the topiary balls I got from The Range and Homebase. Not cheap but when you look at how much terrain you can get out of one ball they suddenly become very efficient. even more so if you can find them in a sale!

The trees had to have a little prep done to them.

first I lit a candle and ran the trunk through them to try and minimise the mould line. This worked well but if I lingered too long completely destroyed the detail of the tree, they are only cheap plastic and a flame is actually very very hot even if it is small.

After they were all done I took them outside and sprayed all the trunks Army Painter Fur Brown. Once dry, Agrax Earthshade wash and then once dry from that Army Painter Matt Varnish. Trunks done.

The palm leaves had previously been removed and tried addressing their shininess. I hit one with matt varnish to see what happened. it totally changed the colour and made the leaves look flat. I also noted that if the leaves flexed in any way the varnish would break and fall off. All in all a total failure, I elected to just leave them as they came.

When it came to placing the tress what I did was guess what might look good and  then drill the holes using the larger of the two drill bits.

I attached plumbers tape to the drill bit so I didn’t drill too far into the base and potentially damage my dining room table. That would have ended with my demise.

The trees were then dry fitted, potentially heated slightly and bend if required to look good. Not all palms start growing directly upwards!

I then went onto start playing with the ground plants (next blog entry!)

once I was happy with it all, I mixed a small amount of 5 min epoxy. I only ever made enough to do one base at a time. I figured I wouldn’t be able to fix two bases worth of stuff down in 5 mins. I was right to do so!

With epoxy, mix little and often.

I feel that the ground foliage on these pieces is the best part and it is super simple.

Using the smaller drill bit I drilled holes in the debris areas, never on the sand, and not always in all of the debris areas. Sometimes I would drill closely together and sometimes just one on its own. The reason for the overall relative sparseness was that I had previously bunched it very closely for the Yavin IV build and found that although it looked good it made for naff terrain. im hoping that this rectifies it, only time will tell.

Once the holes were predrilled I snipped a load of foliage from the garden balls and dry fitted them to see how it looked. Lichen was shredded into smaller pieces and stuffed in aswell.

When I was happy I then broke out the epoxy and glued all the trees, foliage and lichen down in one go.

The reason I used epoxy for this build rather than the safer hot glue was because I found the Yavin IV build to not be as durable as I wanted, some foliage bits have come away and had to be glued again. Im hoping the drilled holes and epoxy really make these pieces bomb proof.

The final thing I did was to add some lime green static grass tufts. These come from the citadel range. not the cheapest around but easily available, and more importantly, I had them to hand!

Ok, so as you have probably guessed I had some of the 3D printed bits already done before I started writing this blog up. I’m sorry, but hey, that’s Blue Peter for you!

What I did do today however is paint all those items.

Ive made crates, in 4 flavours, turrets, comms relays and some tool sheds.

Quite a collection really.

There are two painting styles in this lot. Firstly the good old trusty paint, drybrush and wash method, which is reasonably quick and secondly there is the more advanced ‘learn how to use an airbrush method’ which is noisy, unknown to me and somewhat frustrating.

The sheds and the laser turrets were airbrushed. You can tell that I have no idea what im doing, even something as simple as paint consistency is a mystery to me. I do like the ability to softly blend things with an airbrush, looks so good. I need lessons though, I’ll have to get a friend to teach me.

The comms relay and crates were all done using the archaic method of primitive brushwork. Overall the effect of the dry brushing works well but I think I went a little overboard on the nuln oil wash. I shall not be redoing them though. It’s only terrain and not a competition level paint job miniature.

The way I’ve done the greys is quite simple and a copy of what I did for the Yavin IV build.

Mechanicus Standard Grey Base/prime

Russ Grey Drybrush

Fenrisian Grey Drybrush

Necron Compound Drybrush

Nuln Oil wash

Army painter matt varnish.

A note on the varnish. It says its matt on the tin but that’s entirely dependant on what the environment you spray in is. Tonight is a cold and not exactly dry (but not raining) atmosphere. As such I have ended up with a satin finish. This will be easily rectified by doing it again when its a bit warmer during the daylight, no biggie.

The orange and blues used were Jokaero and Caledor with a necron compound drybrush and Fuegan and Drakenhof washes over appropriately.

The next places to go are the landing pad, which has finished printing, with major warping issues. will need to be ‘hobby’d’ to be looking at its best I expect and also a bunker, the roof of which has just finished tonight, again with warping issues.

I need to find a way of having wide short prints stay stuck to my PEI sheet. These are taking up the entire of my print bed and so my usual raft/brim method is not on. I shall research and get back to you if I need to.

On top of that I will write up an entry about the 3D printing stuff. The settings I’ve used, the material, the print times etc. I’m sure there are people who are interested in that.

Obviously as part of this build I will need a landing pad. Its quite a large piece of recognisable terrain for this theme along with the bunker.

It would be quite easily to make one out of MDF, Card, Plasticard, Grit etc but I decided to try and test my 3D printer.

I shall preface this with, If I was to redo this, I would go with a traditional method rather than 3D printing.

A quick trawl of thingiverse gives us this landing pad by cheffrey85. It looks pretty cool and has the added benefit of giving some additional cover through being raised about an inch to what might end up being a very flat open area (unless you fill it with boxes and scatter etc)

The model is broken down into 5 parts.

Left side, right side, middle walkway and two ramps.

Cheffrey85 has done us all a solid one by making the model fit on a small sized bed (210×210) so we don’t need to muck about with it at all. I printed it at 0.2 layer height with 7% infill. This I’ve found is the lowest amount of infill I can have without compromising the structure without needing to have lots of top layers. I also tried to put a brim/raft on it. Sadly due to it taking up the majority of the heatbed I could only put a very small brim on it. something that would come back to bite

The left and right sides would take 9 hours to print each and the middle and ramps would take 6 hours to print together. Thankfully my wife was away from the house at the weekend I did this so I was able to run the printer and only annoy myself and the puppy. Prusa machines are demonstrably quieter than others, but they’re still loud and annoying.

It is always hard to keep prints from lifting from the bed. it is especially difficult (for me) with wide prints. I have done all I can to ensure a perfectly level bed and use the electronic adjustments to allow for a 100 micron (+/-50) variation over the bed. There are lots of people on facebook groups that are willing to help and once you get past the standard responses of ‘oh just change your Z hight’ (which is usually wrong advise) you do get the odd nugget of useful info.

There are a number of videos on youtube that explain why we have these problems etc.

The advise I see regularly for this problem is to A) raise the bed temp, B) lower the bed temp, C) clean the bed, D) recalibrate the machine, E) pray, F) drink beer.

A lot of people explain that a clean bed is the best, for me, I find my bed is a lot less ‘sticky’ once its been cleaned using soapy water, isopropyl alcohol and/or acetone (rarely). Once its had two prints done on it it miraculously becomes much more sticky.

Still it suffers from print lifting. I think the only way I can make this better is to rebuild the machine using proper tools rather than rocks and hope. to be fair, its done 3700 metres of filament with minimal failures to date so it is doing quite well. I just think this was a challenge that it wasn’t set up for.

Please advise if you know how I can sort this problem!

Once the print had completed I glued it together using a polyutherene type glue (a gorilla glue). This is a water activated expanding product so you don’t need to use much of it.

It is at this point that the warping from the print bed became a problem for me. It was so noticable that I decided that I had to base it to get around the issue. The point of 3D printing is that you shouldn’t need to base the stuff unless you want to blend it into a table layout. It then becomes somewhat dedicated to that one layout which really defeats the objective. This is the reason I said at the beginning I would do it the traditional way if I was to do it again. It would have been quicker and probably cheaper too when you take into account the energy and plastic used. Cut plasticard or foam board would have done just as well.

On the image you can see the damage to the top layers by the print lifting. It has caused ripple and scratching and loss of details. all parts suffer from this except for the ramps. AKA all the big prints are damaged.

The pad was primed black and then some house emulsions used to paint it.

The house paints used are Hamilton grey and then dry brushed with with Long Island grey.

I kept the dry brushing to the edges of the panels. I thought that it would give the best effect. I then thought about it again and added some larger marks to simulate scratches etc.

Once that was done it was time to add landing markings. When you refer to the research images you can see that they are usually lines and arrow heads and usually orange/browny orange in colour. I broke out the airbrush ive been lent. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to use this fully yet, still learning and I am consistently over thinning the paint but Im getting there slowly.

I made a stencil out of cereal box and then laid it over and sprayed. didn’t take long.

So to get around the warping problem I had I’ve had to base this.

Again I chose 6mm MDF as its cheap. The pad was then glued down using gorilla glue (polycyante glue. the brown foaming when wet nasty stuff) only did it in spots rather than all over. did quite a lot but I wanted it to cure quickly so I went with the less is more approach. That and it would get sealed down later with the process.

Then I went in with sculptor mould and build up around the edges, this is primarily done to hide the warping and gaps but also does help with locking it down.

Once dry it was painted soft hessian and given the tile grout, isopropyl and PVA water treatment. The excess was dabbed up.

sculptormold and tile grout was added to the pad itself to make it look like sand has built up through wind etc. I think this looks effective and helps in my mind to make it look blended in.

Once completely dry I matt varnished the landing pad using army painter spray just to dull it a bit after the PVA left it mildly satin.

Then I set about adding ground cover, bushes and grass as per the palm tree scatter to help tie them together

Ive finished printing some more bits and bobs!

the main item is a bunker. Its a key feature of the landing pad area so is a must on the build list.

Again I suffered from warping issues due to size. only on the lid/roof though but as you can see causes issues.

I ended up bodging this somewhat with fillers and will cover over with a bit of grout. it won’t be perfect but it will do.

Ive also decided to show the table in the mid state of battle. as such I need some craters fo show the explosions from the ground attack and AT-ACT fire.

I got these plans from imperialterrain.com. They make some class not Star Wars but totally Star Wars stuff and they’re well done and easy to print. they are of course paid for files however. not expensive though. I recommend them.

the image below shows the craters mid print and the infilled pattern I’ve been using.

Once the craters had finished printing I primed these in white and then roughly brushed on the soft hessian standard base colour for this project.

Once dry it was covered in the tail grout following the previously documented method.

Everything is all standard so far! well apart from the grout didn’t stick as well as it did to the MDF. I did two coats of watered down PVA for that. Bit of a pain as well because it then left a whitish residue on the craters which was very noticable.

The last thing I did to them which is different however was hit them with two types of weathering spray. Model Mates Dirty Yellow and Light Grey. This is to represent ‘glassed’ sand and explosion epicentres. It was a very very light dusting. not even half a squirt from the can!

IT was sealed using matt varnish afterwards so the model mates couldn’t be reactivated afterwards and ruin the effect.

Having cool terrain is one thing. Having cool terrain that’s easily stored, now that’s where it’s at.

Space is always at a premium and what’s the point in going to all the effort to make cool stuff when its only going to get put on a shelf, dropped, smashed and basically wrecked.

If only there was a really useful storage solution…

The Really Useful Boxes are well named. I use them for all sorts of things both hobby related and general stuff.

The problem I have with the 64L one though is that it’s too tall for the scenery to be stored efficiently and not got enough ground space to lay it all out.

Time to get creative with those DIY skills!

I figured out (by measuring) that I needed 10cm for the buildings and 17cm for the trees and the box had a depth of about 28cm. perfect!

I also figured out that I could get all the buildings on the top layer and the trees and other scatter on the bottom layer.

Tools used for this include a hand saw, an angle jig (45 degrees) thingy and a lot of mental power of the ‘how the heck will this work’ variety.

Looking good so far! time to start a Rocky style montage

OMG! look at how neat that is, I’m a chippy god! time to secure permanently

Mostly neat….well, ok its all gone awry but then i’m not a chippy and I didn’t take 12 days…

I didn’t have a corner jig to help hold it when I drilled and glued it but what I did have is a 3D printer (don’t know if you noticed that before with all the 3D printed stuff I have in this project) so I went onto thingiverse and made one of these!

Ok so I clearly didn’t make a mistake here but am still going to have to find a work around. Thankfully the bunker will fit on the lower level with the trees (there goes the plan of making more tree bases – urgh!) so it will all still be safe, just not as safe as I hoped for.

Still, good enough for me though! Claiming ‘Victory!’ on this one!

Last night I played my first game on this table with it all in technicolour.

I was playing rebels against a load of Deathtroopers. They’re well named as they hand out a lot of death! I tried to win on objectives but sadly only ended up with a generic officer left alive, he couldn’t hold the table by himself! Turns out the rebellions luck on Scarif never changes!

Still the table looks good, although there is the annoyance that even ivory tile grout isn’t as white as I thought it was! you can see that it doesn’t blend well with the super white sands on the mat. Close, but not perfect which is a shame, I’m considering a drybrush of terminatus stone or similar but im not sure I can be bothered.