Making Terrain Boards Part 4: Building Hills

I spent some more time on my terrain boards, adding hills and mapping out some roads. It took some time to get everything juuuuuust right. See my progress after the jump.

This is the fourth stage of my terrain board build. Check out the earlier steps if you've missed them:

• Terrain Boards Part 1: Planning
• Terrain Boards Part 2: Base and Edges
• Terrain Boards Part 3: Cutting the River

Planning

I mapped out the roads with masking tape. I tried a number of different variations that would work regardless of how I assembled the terrain boards. Still, there were a few configurations that weren't perfect, but I came to a compromise that I was satisfied with.

Getting the Geology Right

I tried a number of layouts for the hills. While certainly game-worthy (with lots of levels and line-of-sight blocks) they but all looked unrealistic to my eye.

I went back to my reference photos and studied the geography of the northern European landscapes I'm hoping to emulate.

To match the folded and undulating terrain, I layered several pieces of foam on each other, shaping them with my hot wire cutter and sand paper.

The resulting hill was larger than I had initially planned, but I was happier with the more organic and natural feel to it.

For terrain that would have been lifted and exposed by plate tectonics I hotglued bark mulch to the non-sloped areas.

I doubled checked that any sloped area could support figures without them falling over.

Smoothing The Hill

Satisfied with the arrangement and slope of the foam I used calk to fill in various gaps between the pieces...

and gave it a liberal application of spackle to smooth the entire hill out.

There's quite a bit of trial and error with this project, but I'm learning a lot and looking forward to the finished piece. Next up, texturing the entire board.