Wrecked House ruins set coming soon

[Dave]

Here are some views of the mock-up for my new Wrecked House paper model. This is a fairly big model with a lot of playing surface. For the first time in any of my ruins sets, there's a flight of stairs that you can see through the hole on the north side. This is going to be a lot of fun to put some skins on.

[squirmydad]

Looks nice and accessible, that would be my main concern with a big structure like that.
JIM

[Dave]

Accessibility is always my main concern with ruins models. I started with models that had walls on two sides, then models that had walls on three sides, and now I'm being really adventurous with walls on all four sides. The nice part is that I can always rip off half the roof for easy access.

One the of the benefits of doing these ruins is that it's given me a lot of time to think about solutions for creating interior+exterior models, since I get asked for those often. When I get back to designing non-ruined structures, I think I'll have a good technique for lift-off roofs and some good ways of using columns to support the upper floors.

[squirmydad]

I have struggled over doing full interiors for buildings as well. I would like to expand my Elven buildings to match the tower look, but am just a little put off by all the work doing interiors. Your ability to kick this stuff out is really getting me chomping at the bit to do some buildings as well, but very stylized and quite different stuff like the elf, orc or necropolis style stuff.

Also ,I wish I had your textures to work with. I might just break down and get a texture pack for outdoors and materials for doing this stuff. I tend to actually draw all the texture, then color, using material textures will allow me to just design the structures.
JIM

[Dave]

I think the smartest thing I ever did was building up a texture library. It's really easy. I just take digital snaps of anything that might be useful. I would think that you've got some great textures around where you live, even just around your house.

I'm looking at the wood grain on my kitchen chairs and wondering why I haven't photographed them yet!

Pre-weathering my textures is one of the greatest time-savers I've discovered. I was spending a lot of time on that sort of thing for each model, and it wasn't giving me any better results than what I'm doing now. The time I save on weathering, I try to use for additional details that are labor-intensive by their nature, such as adding nails on wood planks or placing individual shingles and tiles on my ruin roofs. (But I still save time by having some prepared 3-tile and 6-tile pieces.)

[Dave]

Here's a sneak peek at the Wrecked House model coming soon!