Shoe's 30 for 30, day 3

Day 3 project is an XPS build.  This is a small-ish two story half timbered and jettied building.  It has one playable floor with the base and painting to be completed at a later date.  The stairwell doesn't make sense but it's a proxy regardless.  The walls go with the upper floor for both so that the playable space is actually playable.  The top floor is a full 4x6 inches (2x3 of my standard tiles) of interior and.  Both the upper floor and lower floor could be standins for individual buildings though the roof on the lower floor would look odd and the upper floor has no door.

Lots of people make the roof lift off with walls stuck to the floor.  I think that's a mistake.  In addition to being hard to move figs around in (in my game, figs are often in a fustercluck configuration) realistic walls block line of sight for players.  Now everyone's gotta stand and invariably someone (Wes) will spill whatever he's eating/drinking/messing with.  Jeremy at Black Magic Craft talks about this specifically (interior playable spaces, not Wes being a butterfingers) but I'm pretty sure that both DM Scotty and Wyloch have said something similar.

There's a building in here,
Shoe.  Maybe two of 'em.

My buildings start here, a foam block milled into almost-random sizes. I start with the walls and ceiling (the floor of the next story) and fit the base to it rather than measuring and wondering why nothing works.  I like milling various sizes of things in bulk so that building isn't interrupted by using the Proxxon despite how gratifying it is to use.  When things are built I mod podge the fuck out of everything thing.  Yes, I verbed it again.

Texturing on the upper floor was done with the wood plank textured rolling pin from Green Stuff World.  I've bought a few of these and stolen borrowed a few more from Shoe.  The only bad part is that you have to press pretty hard to get them to take in XPS, especially on a large piece. The good thing about being really fat is that it's not hard to find enough force to texture with these.  The bad part is that with great weight comes great chance of breakage and you can probably see that I mangled one of the corners. 

I don't really spend a lot of time planning stuff out or measuring when I build.  One concession to this is measuring interior spaces to generally work with my normal tiles.  Those would be just like Wyloch's except scaled up to 1.5 to 2 inches on a side which I'm sure I'll talk about at some point.  I generally keep roofs to 45 degrees or something like that (this one's not quite) with a beam going across.  Everything else is guesstimating the number of blanks required and going wild with a hot glue gun.  It's all fun and games and goes together really fast right up until we get to shingles.

So thin they're translucent!

Shingles are bullshit.  I've scoured the facetoobs for different ways to make them but I haven't yet found a way that looks good and doesn't suck.  My current method is cribbed from Dungeons and Gluesticks which I'd link to but apparently his channel is gone, hopefully only temporarily.  The technique consists of milling wafer thin cross sections of XPS and then gluing them one at a freaking time to the roof.  These are so thin that the static charge they have makes them unhelpfully allergic to themselves and the bin I'd otherwise keep them in.  I don't texture them; I don't think it's needed. Also, I find scissors easier to chop them up with.  I think John used a utility knife. 

I draw horizontal lines across the roof as a guide to ensure they line up correctly.  Experience teaches me that without the guides I have a mess of a time keeping the lines straight.  This process would be 10x easier if you could use hot glue but that would add too much thickness so we're stuck with PVA.  This takes far too long to dry which means that I inadvertently shift things around screwing up all my work and prolonging the torture.  They do look good, though.  It's a hard life.

Total build time was around 10 hours including a bunch of problem solving and working with new materials and techniques (windows, jettying).  Other than a bunch of the milling of foam which happened late last night, this was all completed before dinner today.  The next building in this style will most likely go a lot faster.  FWIW, this is the fifth structure I've built out of XPS not counting scatter terrain.  It's a pretty forgiving medium.