As some of you know Greenacres Gamers will be hosting the inaugeral
Griffin Grove Adelaide Dungeon Bowl Cup on April 27th 2013.

details here
http://www.ausbowl.com/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=8594





One thing I've been really keen on doing for this tournament is to build a 3D dungeon for the grand final to be played on. This turned me on to Hirst Arts Molds.

As I explored the availability down under I discovered that Griffin Grove stock the molds at about the same as they do if ordered directly from Hirst Arts in the USA (but with cheap local postage instead of international). In addition to selling molds, they also cast to order in dental stone, for those people who only want a small amount or don't have time to make castings themselves.

So I was very happy when Ian Plumb at Griffin Grove Gaming came on board as the major sponsor of the tournament, offering a variety of prizes for players, and of course help with making our grand dungeon for the tournament final!

You can find details of the tournament's prizes here. It is important to note that every player who pre-registers for the tournament will receive a free dungeon kit so they can put together a room to link on to this dungeon project, so hopefully this won't be the last modeling diary associated with Adelaide Dungeon Bowl Cup!

Enough background, on with the project...

I wanted to emphasize the wild untamed wilderness for this dungeon, imagining a large natural cave system. Hirst Art's Cavern style seemed like just the ticket, as shown in the images below. Rather than a man made (or dwarf made/goblin made etc) dungeon of masonry and stacked stone I wanted a cave system with weathered stalagmites, cracked tiles, treacherous waterways and dark corners that might hide monstrous creatures.

Towards this I purchased 4 molds, from Griffin Grove.
cavern floors,
cavern floor accessories,
water cavern walls
extra water cavern walls

The first thing I did, while I waited to get my hands on some good dental plaster, was make some rough castings with some Plaster of Paris. I then tried a few arrangements and got some ideas for the dungeon.





Following the principles in this painting tutorial for these Hirst molds I found a green, beige and white paint in rusty old paint tins in the corner of my shed and slopped on a bit of paint as a test (very hurriedly as I rushed to get out the door to go and play bloodbowl of course!).

It is nice and easy to get the base colours on these, dipping then drybrushing brings out the nice texture and highlights some of the special features of each cast.

Next I tried a base colour that was a 1:1 mix of the dark green I used above and the biege I drybrushed over it, and as it turns out I prefer the original when they are placed side by side:



RHS
Base dark green,
drybrush 1 cream,
drybrush 2 white

LHS
base 1green:1cream,
drybrush 1 cream,
drybrush 2 white.

middle,
Base green,
drybrush 1 1green:1cream,
drybrush 2 cream.

the one in the middle looks nice in good light, I never realised how great the rock texture is on these pieces until I started drybrushing.

there's nowhere in the shed that gives good light for photos, but you get an idea from these shots.



I've gone through with a smaller brush and painted on a bit of white to the crystal structures (stalagmites etc).



after trying a few colour schemes I found one I like for the floors, a nice dark tone.



I also discovered that my rough castings can be improved by sanding them down with a piece of 40grit sandpaper, this takes out the imperfections on the bottom of the piece caused by overfilling the mold or not scraping the mold well enough (doesn't happen very often).



this is what 5kg of hydrocal looks like (cost of ~$20)



(there are other castings not shown here, small pieces like barrels, crates, chests and part tiles, so this is less than 5kg of castings).

From this I can cover about 300-400 squares with floor tiles and about 110 squares with walls.
all up this (by my quick calcualations) would cover an area a bit bigger than your standard blood bowl pitch. Not bad from a weekend's work and $20 of plaster IMHO.

I have found a supplier near me of styrofoam sheeting like used in this tutorial
http://www.hirstarts.com/cavern/cave050.jpg
a 12inch square (one 6th of the size of our dungeon bowl boards in this thread) is $1. (minimum order cost of $30+GST)

They cut to size so it might be the perfect base for a regular BB pitch too.

Will order next week and report back.

I have been resiting buying hirst blocks from Griffin for ages, and this freaking awesome project DOES NOT HELP MY CAUSE!

Final product will look magnificent no doubt! Makes me think of the Mario soccergames with their different arenas you can play in...

It is so fun. Turning inexpensive dental plaster into awesome scenery and gaming boards is more entertaining than I ever expected.
Every few minutes I find myself thinking: "Ooooh, this block can also be placed this way to make a doorway, or a window, or a staircase..."

Ok, so I guess those of you familiar with dungeon bowl might be saying-
"hey its all well and good that you are making a 3d dungeon, but I hope you are not planning on using those crappy cardboard counters to represent the all important chests packed with explosives (and if you are lucky the ball)."

On my comute home today I had an idea, and I present the fruits of that inspiration here, a task that at first seemed impossible ended up only taking about 5 minutes inbetween getting home and going out for a meal (waiting for the other half to get ready- that's the key boys: make that time work for you!)


We begin this story with two of these little chaps, hirst arts dungeon chests.


Step one, get your Dremel and attach the finest cutting disk you have

(if you don't have a Dremel close the computer, go get your manhood out of your wife's purse, take some cash while you are there and return back to this thread when you've been to Bunnings to get yourself one!).

Gently put the chest in a vice of some kind and carefully cut off the lid.
if you put it in the vice this way it will crack (D'OH!). Turn it 90 degrees stupid.
:oops:


Take your time, be careful, it will take about 15 seconds if you go slow and steady, blowing away the plaster dust as you go.

SO now you have a dungeon chest's lid.


Next, with a different chest gently cut the lid off and keep the bottom. Another 15 seconds gone.
(the width of the wheel will mean you are left with too small a chest unless you use two as described).


Now we have the two parts


<continued next post>

Here's the clever bit, grab your carving attachment with the flat bottom and hollow out the chest bottom.



Dental plaster is awesome stuff, I went pretty close to the edge and it didn't crumble or give at all.
This is abit more time intensive, it took about 30 seconds (though most of the time was spend sipping on a beer and remarking to myself how damn clever I was to think of this).

Next, with your rounded carving/engraving attachment hollow out the underside of the lid. Another 15 seconds.



Now we have plenty of space to store treasure, football or loads of TNT.



Grab a crappy brush and a pot of Flesh Ink, slap some on. Don't undercoat prime or treat the surface, check out how good it looks after putting some metal on the support bands and latch. 20 second paint job never looked so good.



I hear some of you negative nellies saying "yes but what if the lid falls off when a dice hits it and my opponent gets a peek at the ball?"

SImple, mix a bit of green stuff, pop a magnet under the lid and one under a base on which the chest will sit, and this will keep the lid held down until you want to pull it off. Here I have drilled a space in a Cavern tile to act as the Chest's base.
For extra credit make a football shape with the leftover Greenstuff.
(you did check the magnet's polarity before you greenstufefd them didn't you?- D'OH!) :oops:



Well there might be one or two of you who are saying, "But my opponent will hear the rattle inside the chest and know it has the ball!"
In that case, with the leftover green stuff from the magnet step feel free to sculpt a few ugly looking bombs, or just pop your favourite severed heads into the empty chests!



There you go folks, 5 minutes including stopping to take all the photos. You'll have a set of 6 done in half an hour.

if you are coming to ADBC and want to make youself a set of these, just ask nicely and I'll cast you up a set of chests.

(Sorry I don't have any BB footballs with me at present to show in the pics).



Do you dare open it? Maybe this is the only chest that isn't packed full of explosives?
:-D

What fun is bloodbowl if you can't take a flying leap off a high place and elbow drop that poor defenseless halfling laying stunned on the cave floor far below?!



The problem is that if you make each step big enough to put a 25mm base on it, the stair becomes large and unattractive, but if you make a skinny attractive staircase like this one the models teeter on the edge waiting to plummet and get chipped.



Take one full floor tile and one half tile, in whichever style suits your staircase.



glue them together like this


now this stand can be placed anywhere along the staircase to make a flat full floor tile for a model to stand on.





As the player goes up and down the stairs just pickup the model by the stair base

You can even make one bigger than one square if needed for bigger models.

Then when you are done you just take the stand off and put it aside.

Hopefully this will mean those of you building a chamber for the Griffin Grove Best Custom Dungeon Chamber competition won't shy away from sets of stairs for your chamber!

I was astounded at how much hydrostone I've gone through in the last 2 weeks, but looking at these images perhaps its not all that surprising.

All the floor tiles I've done. (each stack is 5 high).
The human blitzer in the bottom left box is looking quite dwarfed.



Walls I have yet to paint.






Here are a few of the tools I use:

syringe to fill the more fiddly molds



scale to measure the water and plaster each time I mix (so I get the ratio right with no messing around and also so I don't mix up too much or too little.



Flexible rubber bowl, when ready to mix again just bend it and the plaster comes right out.

Damn cool!

Do you use a wetting agent? If so, what : )

I did use the wetwater method on the Hirst Arts website for early castings.

this is what I do
Add water to the rubber bowl (on a scale so I get the right amount).
Pour plaster into the bowl through a flour sieve (still on the scale so I measure the plaster)
when I get to the right amount (1part water to 2.8 parts hydrostone) mix thoroughly with a spoon
clean off the spoon and set the timer at 15 minutes
molds are usually sitting in a bucket of wet water inbetween casts (but sometimes I just use them dry, particulartly if I'm just doing a couple of castings in a session).
pour from the bowl into large molds (like big floor sections) or use the syringe for fiddly things like buckets and chests
when the 15 minutes are up scrape the molds, set the timer to 30 minutes.
when the timer goes again it is time to take the castings out of the molds and start again.

I've used about 20 kg of hydrostone TB in the last 3 weeks, so I'll have some photos going up in the next few days.

Folks in adelaide who haven't registered their interest in the BB tournament that this dungeon is being built for should send me a PM ASAP if they are interested in attending as its only about 4 weeks away.
see the website for more details
https://sites.google.com/site/adelaidedungeonbowlcup/

Did you answer my question there, re; what wetting agent? If you did I can't see it X D

http://www.hirstarts.com/casting/advanced.html#wet

just standard dishwasher rinse-aid

As some of you know, I've been casting up small room sized floor sections, measuring 6x4 squares. Now that I have 20 of them I decided to have a go at arranging them in suitable orientations for dungeon bowl games.
Here is a dump of a few layouts, some of which look quite promising for a one on one game of dungeon bowl using our playtested rules.
(some even look good for 4on4 games!)

THese are made with 20 (or fewer) 6x4 pieces and 8 2x2 pieces are used in some layouts.

Will get some paint on these tomorrow!

Hottest 100, beer on tap, $40 of ribeye steak in the fridge waiting to be grilled.
a perfect storm for getting some modelling done in the shed today.











1 month and 1 day until this board sees some action.

now painting the floor sections, the following took about half an hour

stage 1
add some black paint to green house paint,
water it down,
and slop it on



stage 2
heavily drybrush with the original green
( I do this while it is still a bit wet so the colours blend a bit)



stage 3
mix 50% green paint with 50% cream paint and lightly drybrush
(again I did this while the previous drybrush was wet in places, so the two meld a bit in places, giving a more subtle colour gradation.



here is a closer photo of how it looks at this stage
it might look a little different when it has dried, so I won't apply any cream drybrushing at the moment, but maybelater.

well dipping seems all the rage these days, so here is my dip tip

mix some cheap hobby paint with water.
Dip your plaster barrels halfway
when they dry dip them from the other end.
takes 5 or 10 minutes do a few dozen.



then paint the metal bands and you are done.

no levels, staircases or waterways yet, but you can get an idea of what it might look like from these shots

this is a monster of a project, how much time do you guys spend on this a day?

also the dipping on the barrels and chests turned out great

about 3 days a week I do an hour or two after work,
once or twice a week I do stuff sporadically throughout the day (e.g. mix &pour- then wait 15 minutes, then scrape and wait 30 minutes, then empty the molds and start again).

The plaster takes up paint really well, all the walls were just dipped and left to dry, then drybrushed with two lighter shades. Each of those 3 stages takes about 5 seconds or less per wall. So in the 30 minutes while I wait for the plaster to harden I can drybrush over half, or maybe all of the walls you see in the photos. it is very quick and the shape of the sculpts really picks up drybrushing well.

picked up another 22.5kg of plaster today!

all stacks 5 deep




half and quarter tiles




more floor castings




some doors I've put together



some I haven't

some basecoated bricks



some dipped wood sections



26 floor sections



which are waiting to be painted up like the 20 below





some goody bags waiting to give out to people who register and pay promptly.




another update tomorrow!

ok, this is about to start happening!

8x foam boards (blue foam) 12 inches wide squares.

The plan is currently a 3x2 dungeon, but that might stretch out to 4x2, stay tuned!

this is great stuff to work with, I'm set for a busy weekend...

4 of 8 boards now constructed, remaining 4 will be alot easier to build as they'll be flat.

this project is SWEEEET!!

thanks mate

Making Brickwork Walls

using small brick mold #250 ($28.88 at Griffin Grove) it is possible to create a modular series of walls for your dungeon.


These are the brick pieces contained in this mold



There are also archway pieces that I have not used in this tutorial.

It is quick and easy to put these together to form a simple wall to whatever length and height you need.
Adding your favourite pillar at either end adds detail and aesthetic value.
I have built the wall up one extra brick to match the height of these pillars from the Dungeon Floor accessories mold.





By leaving the ends of the walls 'open' it is possible to make walls that can slot into each other,



These can be fit together to make either a straight section,



or by flipping the rotation, a corner



if you make one end of the wall male and one end female you will always have a match for your wall junction



also a handy little piece like this allows you to change the orientation of corners



then when you put them all together you get what ever room orientation you want,



when painted the joins become effectively invisible.

give it a try for your next dungeon, dugout, spacehulk, necromunda project!
:-D

lots of progress with painting and construction-

Soon I will do detail painting on special features, make extra details, finish teleporters, doors and trap doors, I'll add mold, blood splatter and water effects, in the meantime it looks like this

How to paint a bazillion bricks and tiles in 5 minutes

step 1. Get some cheap paint that you have lying around in your hobby box



2. in a tub or cup mix paint to a desirable colour, something earthy is a good start

3 add water until it makes a thin wash.

4 test by dipping a tile or brick into the wash, if the colour does not pentrate into the plaster and is not dark enough add more paint, if the wash does not readily dripp off the brick add more water. If the paint is too thick it might obscure the details in the casting.



5 fill a 2nd tub or cup with unpainted plaster pieces, pieces with glue or latex on them won't take the paint well, so do this before assembly of pieces.



6 fill this tub with the wash, give it a shake.

7 fill the first tub with more tiles and drain the wash into this tub, leaving the coloured tiles behind.



8 dump the painted tiles out on a non stick surface, like a plastic bag, I use old ceramic tiles.



9 repeat

In five minutes you can paint this many pieces!

[How to Build a small bridge

1 gather 3 of the wooden tiles



2 cut the corners of one piece at 45 degrees like this



3 glue them together with the extra support of another piece of 'wood'



4 get playing!




Dungeon 'tiles'
As you may recall from my early posts, I created a silicone mold to allow me to cast up floor sections in the size of 4x6 squares. After painting and sealing these tiles I have mounted them on felt to create a game board similar to the original dungeon bowl (ie warhammer quest tiles).
Now that I have finished the construction of the grand dungeon I have been using up all my remaining tiles. The 2x2 floor piece on this mold is excellent for adding narrow hallways


What I did, after painting and sealing the pieces, was glue them on a piece of felt, then cut them apart with a hobby knife.



I now have 60 4x6 pieces mounted on felt and about 30 2x2 pieces and a few other pieces, mostly 2x3

The 1x2 pieces are perfect for glueing on these doors


Here you can see all the pieces I have prepared for wall-less dungeons, just like the original cardboard halls and rooms, only 3D.
(note the doors in the background are mounted on 1x2 pieces


- well actually this isn't all of them, after taking this picture I found more tiles and made about 10 rooms measuring 6x6. Pics of these tomorrow.


Here is an example layout (teams start from doorways on opposite sides and must leave from one of the opposite doors to score.

just a week away, so you must be expecting the grand dungeon to be recieving some finishing touches, and I aim to please, so here are a few shots of the finer details I've been working on.

dice tower under construction



scoreboard

*manly tears of appreciation*

*teaser*

work to begin again soon on expanding this board...

oh man, although I have been lax in updating this thread I have not been sitting on my hands when it comes to casting and painting, here is a more recent shot of a test layout for the grand dungeon that will be used exclusively for the final of our Dungeon Bowl Tournament on Feb 18th. Hit me up with a PM or go to the bloodbowl section if you wnat to learn more




YES THIS IS REALLY A PICTURE OF A BLOOD BOWL PITCH!!!!






.

This is some truly amazing stuff..

Very cool! Very, very cool!

That's awesome.

Holy jebus this is amazing! It boggles my mind every time I look at that last picture! HA! I love it, keep up the good work

awesome project anc001, you are right about the blocks being addictive to make and build with but you have taken it to an almost industrial scale. Some great tips and hints in the thread.

where in adelaide do you get your hydrocal and hydrostone from ?

what water effect have you used for the streams ?

'grats on a fantastic project and a really well written tutorial.

stu

amcsupplies has lots of the necessary equipment and consumables, including hydrostone.

First I tried Woodland Scenics EZ water, but that didn't work well in combination with the foam, so I then went with an epoxy furniture polish, I think it is the one called glass coat, found it in bunnings.

There are lots more tips and tricks in the more detailed thread on ausbowl (aussie blood bowl forum).

a few "feature tiles" being worked on at the moment, which will be a prize for the winner of ADBC 2012





these will be add-ons to the dungeon kit shown below to add a bit more flavour and aesthetic appeal


example of an ADBC dungeon setup