Terrain Showcase: Ultron City, Part 1

In 2022, Atomic Mass Games commissioned me to build a terrain board representing a city that had been completely overrun by Ultron, the Metal Tyrant and his mechanical drones. Here's a look at how the board came together:

 

The board is for the Marvel: Crisis Protocol miniatures game, and you may have seen it in some of Atomic Mass Games' promotional photos and games. The entire build incorporated a 3' x 3' battlefield, a bunch of smaller accessories and buildings, a row of taller buildings to form a backdrop for photography, and the centerpieces of a large Ultron head and an apartment building with tentacles growing through it.

In this post, I'll focus on how I built the streets and sidewalks, and the tentacles burrowing through the ground.

 

 

To start, I made a 3' x 3' wooden frame with insulation foam board in the center. The foam would allow me to carve trenches into the ground where the tentacles would run. The layout was based on one of Atomic Mass Games' old playing mats, and I drew this out with marker on the foam. I made sure there was room for all the scenery to fit in a few different layouts.

 

 

For the sidewalks, I used 1/4-inch MDF board, and the street was made from a large roll of 3/16-inch thick cork board. The different thicknesses meant that they could both be mounted directly on the foam, and the sidewalks would stick up higher than the street, but not too high, so a model's base could stand overlapping the curb without toppling over. (In fact, the height of the curbs very closely matched the curbs on the Crisis Protocol bases.)

 

 

The surface texture of the cork was great for a slightly coarse blacktop, and the smoother, hard surface of the MDF allowed me to cut grooves into it to create the sidewalk pavers.

 

 

Because the ground was broken up by the embedded cybernetic tentacles, I used a scroll saw to cut out individual sections of the sidewalk so I could create an uneven surface wherever it was broken up by the tentacles.

 

 

These individual sections were all numbered so I could fit them back in their proper position during the final assembly.

 

Here's what the MDF board looked like with the broken sidewalk segments and spaces for the tentacles cut out:

 

 

To make the recessed for the tentacles, I cut channels in the foam. Rather than "carving out" the channel, I cut all the way through the foam and pushed the cutout down about half an inch.

 

 

For the tentacles themselves, I drew some paper templates and affixed them to a piece of thick styrene card with packing tape. I sculpted the shape of each tentacle with Aves Apoxie Sculpt, right on the template. The glossy tape kept the putty from bonding to the surface, and I could flex the card to pop them off once they had fully cured. 

 

 

Then, each tentacle was meticulously covered with strips of thin styrene, cut to create the appearance of overlapping, segmented armor plates.

 

 

The finished cyber tentacles were inserted into the recesses on on the board, and secured with Liquid Nails construction adhesive. I used wood filler putty to fill in some of the gaps and build up the ground around the areas where the tentacles were breaking through the surface. In a few places, I made pipes out of thick styrene tubing, and had these positioned to appear as though the tentacles were growing under them, and pushing them up through the street.

 

 

The loose sections of sidewalk were then set in place with Liquid Nails. The effect I was going for was similar to when a tree's roots lift the sidewalk pavers making them uneaven. I included some pavers that were broken apart, and distressed the edges with my hobby knife to create chipped, broken corners. I was careful not to go too crazy with the surface variance, and continually checked to make sure a model would still be able to stand properly on the uneven areas.

 

 

Once the sidewalk pieces were all in place, I added the street. The cork board was trimmed to fit snugly between the sidewalks, and it was cut up to create sections of broken blacktop that I fit around the pipes and tentacles like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

 

 

The final bit of detail was to add sand and gravel in the recesses and on the areas of open ground.

 

 

Part of the board featured a construction site where I had a depression cut out with some exposed water pipes.

 

 

Here's a bird's eye view of the entire board:

 

 

The large cutout near the top of the board was for the basement of an apartment building (which I'll cover in a future installment).

 

 

I left a few cutouts in the street that could be picked up and thrown. There are seven spots in total, and I made them all the same size and shape to make it easy to fit them in place. Underneath each one, I added some exposed pipes and sand.

 

 

At this stage, the only thing left to do was cut out some grooves to mark pavers in the central areas of the sidewalk, but that came much later in the build, after the Ultron head and ruined apartment were finished and their final positions marked.

 

 

The completed board was painted with mostly sprays and drybrushing. The sidewalks were sprayed with a warm grey and then spattered with a variety of light and dark grey, and off white to create the speckled appearance of concrete. The streets were primed black and drybrushed with a mix of grey and bone.

 

 

The lines on the street were masked off with tape and thensprayed with yellow and white. I went back in and added some chips in the paint by stippling with a darker grey to match the street color.

 

 

All of the cybernetic tentacles were painted silver, and the red lenses were painted a deep red with a brighter red highlight at the bottom and a white spot highlight at the top, similar to painting a gemstone. For the grassy areas, I used simple flock rather than static grass so buildings could be placed on the grass without having to worry about the thickness of the grass itself or any tufts causing the building to sit uneven. 

 

 

In part two of this series, I'll cover the smaller buildings and vehicle wrecks. 

 

 

'Til next time!