Terrain Showcase: Ultron City, Part 3

In part three of this "Ultron City" series, I talk about the construction site and the backdrop buildings that I made for the Marvel: Crisis Protocol miniatures game.

 

 

The Construction Site

The NYC Construction Site terrain set from Atomic Mass Games includes an office shed, track loader, cement mixer, and a handful of barricades. When building the set, I tried to tell a story with each of the pieces...

 

 

I assembled the loader and shed, and created damage in the side of the shed to look as though the loader had crashed into it. To do this, I softened the wall with a heat gun, and then I pressed it with a screwdriver to create indentations and made some cuts with a hobby knife to separate the wall panels a bit. In the shovel of the loader, I added some gravel and two Ultron drone torsos, as though someone had used the loader to crush the drones against the shed, cutting them in half.

 

 

I used a heat gun to soften the cement mixer and make a hole in the side. I created spilled cement with Aves Apoxie Sculpt, and partially submerged another drone in it so it looked like it had been thrown into the cement mixer, and was struggling to escape the hardening cement.

 

 

The Construction Fence

No New York City construction site is really complete without a high wooden fence to keep pedestrians out. I made some sections of fence (broken of course because this is a battlefield) out of thick sheet styrene and some styrene rod for the interior support beams.

 

 

The fence was painted with greys and browns to look like was made of wood, and the exterior was painted green with some lighter streaks to give it a weathered and faded appearance. I printed some "Danger: Hard Hat Area" signs, and affixed these with matte Mod Podge to complete the piece.

 

 

The Backdrop Buildings

One of the things Atomic Mass had requested was a backdrop to go behind the city when using it for miniature photography. I made a few sections of building fronts by combining parts from the Sanctum Sanctorum, the apartment building, and the small shop. These were one of the last things I worked on as the deadline was getting closer and so, as often happens in lengthy terrain projects, I took fewer photos of the building progress toward the end.

In this image, you can see the backdrops with their painting well underway. The central walls for the Sanctum were sandwiched between the apartment buildings, and the corner sections of the Sanctum were used to embellish the corners of the apartments. My main goal was to create more variety in the style of buildings. On the far right, I have stacked a few of the shops on top of each other to make a taller "shop" building.

 

 

All of the apartment windows were kept loose so I could paint the brick walls more quickly, and spray and drybrush the window frames without getting any paint on the walls. The window panes themselves were all masked off and sprayed with black and blue at the top to create a gradient. Then the diagonal streaks were painted by hand with a mix of light blue and white. I finished up the windows by painting the thin window frames on the Sanctorum. This was the most time consuming (and maddening) part of the painting process. 

 

 

Since this backdrop was for the city under attack by Ultron's forces, I added some tentacles breaking out of the ground or out of the windows, and broke open some of the doors. All of the detail accessories like the electric meters, air conditioners, and fire escapes were painted separately and glued in place once the building painting was finished. The fire escapes (one of my favorite detail bits from the apartment set) was bent using a heat gun and some flat nosed pliers to shape it.

Note: If you attempt to bend the fire escapes (or any thin plastic components) with a heat gun, be very careful– too much heat too quickly will cause the whole part to shrivel up, and there's no recovering it from that state. I bent each piece of the fire escape separately, then glued the parts together, and primed and painted them.

 

 

There were three backdrop sections in total...

 

 

Section 1

The largest section contains a six-story high apartment. I was able to build all of this out of mostly two apartment sets (plus the parts from the Sanctum). Because the backdrop had no detail on the reverse side, I could stack up six fronts and six sides of the apartment to get a really tall structure. Sandwiched between the two buildings is the center portion of the Sanctum, with its corner pieces added to the right side.

 

 

I tried to give this apartment a more industrial appearance, with fewer windows and a bunch of the electric meters stacked up on the ground floor. I added the fire escape halfway up, with a scratch-built door and, as I mentioned above, the tentacle breaking through the fire escape.

 

 

The double doors were cut apart and glued in place with some added rubble and the tentacle breaking out of the building.

 

 

Section 2

This section is Josie's Diner with an apartment building above it and the Rescue Mission next door. You can see how the Sanctum windows are spaced higher apart than the apartment, so in order to make the corner pieces line up on the left, I had to trim away a few rows of brick on each level. The roof of the Mission was made using the sides of the apartment roof.

 

 

In order to make the entrance distinct from Doctor Strange's Sanctum, I disguised the holes for the face over the door with a plain sign, and removed the curved holders for the lamps. The text for the sign was printed out, coated with matte Mod Podge, and glued in place.

 

 

I cut out a section of the window and the bricks above it to have the tentacle bursting out. I used styrene rod to make the crumbling bricks, and sculpted the broken area of the window to have the glass fragments pushing outward.

 

 

Section 3

The final section is probably the least complex– It's an apartment front with the garage door, and a few shops stacked up.

 

 

The garage door was covered with a piece of corrugated sheet styrene that I softened with a heat gun and poked a hole through. The door looks like it was bent by the tentacle coming up through the ground.

 

 

To build the multi-story shop, I simply stacked a few on top of one another, with the rear wall of the shop for the upper levels.

 

 

The copper roof of the shop was made out of sheet styrene, with more styrene rod added for the ribs and frame around the top. To paint the roof, I used a copper/ brass mix, and applied the green patina using a wash of GW Nihilakh Oxide and Coelia Greenshade. The weathering was finished off by adding some streaks of the mix brightened with white.

 

 

Coming up in the final installment of this series, we'll take a look at the centerpieces of the board– the Ultron head and overgrown apartment:

 

 

'Til next time!