Saturday, June 6, 2009

Osgiliath Project: Phase Four, The City Tiles



Back in January, I showed off some recent pieces I created for this. The project has under gone several major changes over time as I slowly figured out what worked and what didn't. I originally planned to make city tiles very early on, before I changed the city walls and ideas on building construction. Organizing and planning the city tiles proved alot more challenging then I had initially thought. too many different sizes was inflexible and I was not happy with experiments I did with plastic card tiles. As I worked on the stuff for the Spanish Main campaign, (several structures of which have cross use for this) I started revisting Hirst Arts..while the initial learning curve turned me off (as well as the mess) Inspired by friends work- I have gotten over it...worked thru the learning issues and have been getting great and most importantly consistent casts. The city tiles will all be of Hirst Arts casts. Similar to what you see here ( courtesy of Shifting Lands and admittedly my inspiration for the Hirst Tiles) While my tiles aren't quite as flexible as therethey will work nicely with the structures I have built.






Example tiles courtesy of www.shiftinglands.com/cityplan.htm

Overall we have 12, 12 X 12 tiles each consisting of one structure, The tiles and buildings are as follows
3 sections of wall, 2 with towers
1 seperate tower wall section,
3 ruin building tiles with ruined building
1 Church (damaged)
1 large plaza (ruined)
1- 4 story tower (intact)
1- private home (intact)
1- administration building (intact)




I think you can about catch most of tiles in this picture. there a couple buildings missing
and some the other details..it will come together very quick once the tiles are complete.


Besides the previous shownt statues...I have miscellaneous rubble and arched walkways, probably a few trees... coming..overall it will be a dynamic and challenging board for skirmish games..if I want to add some new or expand it, just build a new tile or move the whole thing over to a bigger table and expand. If you saw my last Lord the Rings gaming update we played in semi finished configuration of the final just to see how it played..I thought it played great and can use the extra terrain to minimize the effectiveness of calvary models..(after all your in a city)


You can barely make it out but the piece of rubble thrown by a catapult will be represented
in a trench that follows the gap in the broken wall.


Camera Flash on to catch the detail of the some of the finished pieces and the tile layout

I am confident I am on track to get his entire project finished by August..one year after I started it, I still have few challenges to over come with constant changing design ( mainly the tiles are siting on top of the beach..so I need make something to make the transition make sense.
Looking forward to a finished game on the completed project!


Laying out the tiles is labor intensive, there is alot of cutting and filling that needs to be done
to get the nice neat look of the example tiles I've shown above. A friend of mine cast some larger cobblestone pieces making his own molds which lets the cobblestone casting for this
(the majority texture) go a whole lot quicker.

look for a gallery update on the whole project so far soon.

4 comments:

Col. Corbane said...

You Sir, have my undying respect, your stuff is outstanding.

Bill Lim said...

John,
Lookin good man. I'm really liking the way this is turning out. Just a thought...we could turn one of the "club" meetings into a "lets help John with his table" meeting. I'd be down for that. I love working on nice big terrain projects.

Keep it up.

Talk to ya soon,
Bill

Adrian said...

It is incredible what you can achieve with a good tile saw. This has been helpful but I will keep looking to be able to compare the available machines. Thank you for posting this.

xenite said...

Wow, that is very cool!! I am starting to get into a terrain bender after the infamous hillparty. I will have to show you the cool method for making ancient, or beat-up city base terrain some time.

 

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