I already have a vast collection of terrain, but just needed more modern city stuf. So I started building some mayhem buildings.

However, due to the limited space I have left. Or should I say, want to spend on storing my hobby, I was looking for a way to build my buildings, which would make it possible to also take them apart again and store easily.

I ended up using fencing staples and foamboard walls.

Here you can clearly see how the walls are being kept together:


you push these fencing staples on the top and bottom of the walls and before you know it, you have one solid building. What I didn't do, but is and option is to even push them through the base (which is also foam board) and lock everything into place.


another close up:


I just glued some paper to the side of the foam of the roof, so if I put it on top it anchors everything even more and you won't see the foam. The nice thing is, these strips are actually in on the print outs


Another picture to show how the paper strips work out


And to be complete another shot of the inside


You can also see some sidewalks in front of the building and I made those myself as well. I just like it a bit more if they are above street level.

Here is how I made them:


Since I have a table that is textures black gray which is usefull as road I could choose between painting the sidewalks on or making thm seperatly.

After quite some thought I'm going for the last becasue it gives more freedom in setting op scenery.

Having a day off is also great. In between working on my mad doctor I'm busy contrcting the pavement for my city terain.

I started out with big 5 mm thick polystyrene blocks:



After cutting these into strips of 5 cm wide I had quite a lot of material to build pavements from:



For the first test case I drew and the tiles to make sure they would look nicely (sizewise):



After this I used a pen to make deeper grooves following the drawn template:



A few conclusions a this point:
Drawing all the tiles take way to much times. For the next tiles I just mark a few dots and after that use a sharp knif to precut where I want to have the grooves. Only after that do I use the pen to deepen them a bit. Precutting also results into nices tiles.

I already painted a small square to see how the end result would be. Imporant to note is that using you fingers it is easy to just make some of the tiles a bit of uneven. In this case I didn't paint any dirt ow whatever on the pavement yet. putting some sand on, some weed between some tiles and maybe some paper, a soda cans and other dirt will enhance the pavement a lot. I'm sthinking about intrudusing some sewers gutters, but I'm not yet sure how to so this. As of yet I haven't made any corners yet, but have a lot of spare material letft to make them, just a some special tiles containing other scenery.

The plug and play is a great idea. Another effective way to make collapsible buildings, and even more economical then the method with magnets.



The sidewalks are very nice. And thats a great trick for doing cobblestone. But personally given the time, effect, and expense of doing it I'm sticking with normal cardstock tiles. Although perhaps with the raised curbs.

Those fencing staples are a good idea.

Maybe find some small eyelets to reenforce the holes where the staples go into the foamcore so they won't get worn out from repeated use. You could put them a little bit closer together than the span of the staple so that when you insert the staple it would tend to draw the pieces together for a tighter fit.

I like that idea of using the fencing staples to hold your build together. I wish I had thought of that. Those sidewalks are very nice, also. I have one criticism, though. It doesn't look like you are edging your print-outs before applying them to the foamcore. Edging is described in the free tutorials on the WWG site if you're not familiar with it. Basically you color the edges of the cardstock with a felt-tip marker to hide the exposed white edge, usually with a color that matches the color near the edge, or you can also just use a black marker (results are similar to blacklining a mini) or a gray marker ( gray seems to work well with many colors. I think a black marker worker best against the black foamcore you are using. Another trick I picked up here is to cover the exposed edge of the foamcore with a strip of some other material. I have used black construction paper for that, sometimes I use a strip cardstock with a texture from the model, such as the black trim at the top of the warehouse wall. Little things like that can really add to a build. Thanks for posting.

Luckyjoe

Love the sidewalk tutorial! Those look great.

Cool, just like making walls of bricks can be applied to that.