Terrain Showcase: The Danger Room, Part 6

As we near the end of this Danger Room showcase, it's time to take a look at the buildings with the larger Sentinels crashed through them...

 

 

Building the Smashed Apartments 

 
For these buildings, I used two of the NYC Apartment Buildings from Atomic Mass Games. I sketched out the plans for each one so I would know which sections of wall and which windows needed to be cut away when assembling the kits. (These sketches were also part of the overall concept submitted to Atomic Mass at the start of the project.)

 

 

I stayed pretty close to the sketches– One apartment has an open corner, and the other has an exposed upper floor with the caved-in roof.

 

 

Inside the buildings, I built up the structure with pink insulation foam, and carved out where the open, exposed areas would be. For the building on the right, I only needed to have a relatively small open area, and used the foam to form the "caved in" backdrop. For the top level, I built a floor out of thick illustration board, and cut it to angle some of the panels downward. I also broke open the store window on the ground floor and covered it with boards made form basswood.

 
The building on the left was much more involved. On the ground floor, I extended the footprint with some thick styrene card, and built up a mound of Aves Apoxie Sculpt that the collapsed Sentinel would be sitting in. 

 

 

I discussed the posing and painting of the Sentinels in the previous installment. Here you can see the partially-assembled Sentinel in its resting position, with its arm propped up on the floor and through the window. It was built as I worked on the flooring and other details, and was pressed into the putty to ensure that everything fit together securely.

 
For the floors, I used illustration board, and covered that with a layer of styrene with a square tile pattern. Basswood strips were used to create the stud framing extending from under the floor, and to frame out the window sill. 

 

 

To build the interior walls, I used a wall panel from the small Daily Bugle shop. The inside of the exterior wall was covered with illustration board and a thin plastic rod to match the horizontal molding on the plastic wall. I also added sand and some I-beams in the rubble.

 

 

The putty and foam was coated with glue and sprinkled with sand. I made a ton of loose bricks, cut from a rectangular styrene strip matching the height and width of the bricks sculpted in the plastic walls. These bricks were then glued into the rubble with larger ballast and gravel.

 

 

I also added bricks to the broken ends of the wall. Here's the finished Sentinel, in position. (It was kept separate for painting.) You can also see in this photo that I made sure the dirt spilling out of the front of the building would not be wider than the sidewalk path, ensuring that it would not hang over the curb.

 

 

I scored some panel lines into the top of the roof to make it look like sheets of tar paper tiled together. I cut out a gap, and softened the plastic with a heat gun to bend it down. In the upper floor, I used a piece of the billboard that comes with the apartment to fill in the debris. The hanging bits of roof would obscure most of the foam, so I only coated it with sand and limited the bits of brick and metal to the floor where they would be visible.

 

 

The base of the water tower was glued to the roof, with a styrene tube representing the broken water pipe. (The whole roof section was left unglued so it could be painted separately.)

 

 

The water tower itself (which has collapsed through the roof) had its legs bent and broken, and I added two long metal rods which would allow me to pin it securely in place after painting.

 

 

The front of the tower was cut and broken open.

 

 

Here's the first building, fully assembled. (Well, apart from the windows– When building these apartment kits, I always leave off the front and rear window frames so I can spray and paint them separately.)

 

 

On the second apartment, I filled in the upper areas with sand, bricks, and other rubble. 

 

 

The roof was also scored and cut, and then softened with a heat gun to bend it down into the upper floor.

 

 

I made use of some spare billboards to create the caved in ceiling, and the upper roof was bent and fit over top of that. The floor was covered with basswood strips, and more sand and rubble was add over that, including some sections of brick wall that were cut out of the apartment's walls.

 

 

The roof was in two sections, and underneath, I added some I-beams to look like the exposed framework.

 

 

Once the roof was in place, only a small area of the floor was accessible, but the extra layers of detail added a lot of depth and helped to create the level of debris that would be in an actual collapsed building.

 

 

The destroyed Sentinel in this building was added to the side, decapitated as it was attacking a Mutant hiding inside. 

 

 

The Sentinel was mounted on a styrene base, mounded with putty and debris. The miniature's back armor was cut open, and I used styrene strups, tubes, and rods to create its broken internal machinery.

 

 

To give the Sentinel a stretched, reaching pose, I angled its torso further than the kit allows, and sculpted new detail on its stomach to hide the gap. 

 

 

One final bit of detail that I added was a rubble pile at the base of the building. (One of my pet peeves is seeing ruined buildings that don't have enough rubble to account for the collapsed, missing areas of the structure.)

 

 

The buildings were painted in a several pieces (the main building; the roofs; the windows; the water tower; the Sentinels; the fire escapes; and details like the air conditioners and electrical boxes). Everything was assembled afterward.

 

 

Here are the finished ruined apartments with Sentinel wrecks:

 

 

In the final installment, I'll show you how I made the taller buildings:

 

 

'Til next time!