Seeing as I'm new to the scene and no doubt many others are as well I figured I'd document my initial progress, to be seen as some kind of benchmark of what your first project could look like. Think your stairs look a little shabby? Wondering if you have the right gear? Hating your printer? See someone else and their tribulations and maybe it's not so bad.

Day 1
Pour over forums while gawking at freshly downloaded .pdf documents and thinking where to start. Decide to nick down to the university late at night and highjack the printers there to print as much off before security roams by. Fight off the urge to go Office Space on the printer as 210 gsm cardstock jams printer.

Lessons learned: Buy a printer.

Day 2
Go to office supply store and get a printer. Get somewhat annoyed when finally you're a customer with money to spend and everyone is on smegging break. Drag printer to counter and shoot dirty looks. Once home decipher the manual with no english instructions and revert to finding it on the internet. Stay up until 3 am getting printer to work.

Lessons learned: Printers have been flawed technology since their inception. It's not that they're not user friendly, it's that they're openly user hostile.

Day 3
Start printing one of everything, it's all gotta have a use somehow, right? Attempt to use adhesive spray instead of mounting the card onto foam by hand only to put a fine coarse layer of glue over your entire workbench. At least everything is grippy now, for safety and all that. Put the soundtrack to Metal Gear Solid 2 and begin feverishly cutting, folding and gluing until 4 am and in a daze decide it's a good idea to document it.

Lessons learned: Don't spray adhesive glue into the wind or at least have paint thinner to remove it from your person.

Results of the day:



Arsenal consists of:
Steel right angle ruler - super safe glue covered edition
Elmer's No-Wrinkle glue - Not a good idea. It's thick and very sticky, so if gets everywhere and makes it tough to cut precisely once things are folded over.
Bostik Glue Pen - runny, might have higher water content but tests I did shows it's just as strong as Elmer's with no wrinkling.
Cutter - the smaller snap-off blades ensure less waste than xacto and their equivalents.
Fuji Xerox cp205w - Fast, great quality ink but curls the card when it prints and is cheaper to buy a new printer than to replace the toner.
Citadel Cutting mat - tripe. I'd rather have a real grid and angle guide than a damn logo with a weird curve to the bottom. I was mugged.

To do tomorrow:

I hear you on the edging. My previous papercraft experience was with crates and small objects, mostly from Toposolitario and edging made it look totally better.



As for Elmer's, I was using the broad applicator which has teeth that spreads the glue, and although it looked very thin it still went rubbery when dry making it hard to cut. I'll do another control test between the two and use a skewer to smear it.

I was also thinking of modifying some of the walls to act as doors by cutting out the door texture and making a slit at the top to drag it up or down... then I decided to just do baby steps. Also, when making a second level, what's the best way to do so? Just place a foamboard ground piece on top of the anti-warp walls and use the railings to block unsightly foamboard edging?

Day 4
Cut up the template emblazoned foamboard and start getting some ground going and then realise the amount of tabs you're going to need. Once everything that's been printed has been assembled, start edging and get giggly that it's nearing a point you can actually build something. Get irate that someone queued up an infinite amount of garbage for the printer and lose all the cardstock. Fuuuuuuuu-

Lessons learned: Apply a password to the printer or an access control list on the network. Cutting out tabs is the most vital part of the project but the most soul crushing. Put a movie on and think about outside.

Results:



Oh yeah I used Elmer's for the textures on the ground and really spread that stuff thin; seems to have worked well. Used super glue for the anchors.

Edit:
To do tomorrow: use TerrainLinx program to actually plot a map.

So I assembled what I have to make sure it all lines up and... well it looks a little ramshackle. Part of it is the anchors are too far from the edges, so when putting a post on a set of anchors on separate ground tiles it gets hard to get it to sit straight. Know of a quick fix?





Also I couldn't see a way to seat the bridge/railing in a natural looking way. I also cut off the flaps that hover over the tab holes as I thought it was just missing a cut line, but I think in one of the videos they fold underneath when a tab slides in, so when the edge is visible you can use the flap to hide the hole.

This is why we do small sections and test, people! Any larger problems I'm not aware of, lemme know 'fore I get too far into it...

Regarding the anchors not being lined up right... On a couple occasions, I've taken the anchors off of a tile by carefully sliding the edge of my cutting blade under the anchor. I can usually cut the whole thing off without much loss of paper in the process. After cleaning up the area with the blade, you can re-glue the anchor in the right spot.

My kids have been using my tiles, and I find they accidentally rip the anchors all to pieces. It's not hard to remove the old, busted anchors and replace them.

Ah righto. I'll give that a chop. Only issue I see is I used superglue which may tear the paper...

Capital idea on just cutting off the anchors and relocating them, old bean, worked fine. While working on it I noticed a bit of an oddity on one of the wall textures:



A green budgie? perhaps parrot or parakeet perched on the wall, looking quite smug I might add. I tried to shoo it away but it seemed quite nonplussed.

Day 5
It seems the anchors being off slightly led to a chain reaction of nothing fitting. I sliced them off, moved them back a smidge and all of a sudden everything clicks! I improved the edging a bit more, made some 3 inch rails and just tried to make sure what I had works. It's definitely going to look better and get easier as practice makes perfect. Have also been decreasing the amount of glue steadily until I feel like I'm using about half of what I was originally. No glue is coming out of any side, but time will tell if the quality of the glue is going to come back to bite me.

Lessons learned: put the anchors back to the edge until they are flush or you're going to be renting a water vessel to travel upstream in a river of excrement with no propulsion. Cutting things off carefully with a knife can yield impressive results.



Are you supposed to attach anchors to every corner and side, or only as you need to?

To do tomorrow: increase amount of tiles and make sure to do them correctly this time.

The colour of your prints looks very good, what card/printer have you used?

Anchors go everywhere there is a gluespot for them. You don't want little white boxes visible on your tiles.

So I'm going to skip the updates to the last few days, nothing happened and Frozen Synapse has been taking up my time but I got paper today!

I've switched to Color Copy Paper 250GSM because it's the same price per page as the old paper, thicker and much better quality. Oh and it doesn't curve when it goes through. To top it all off, the pack was opened slightly so they knocked $5 off the price! My heart skipped a beat when my printer said 'Paper Jam. Reseat page' but it winked shyly and went through when I complimented it's enormous paper tray.



The photo doesn't do it justice: it's crystal clear. Gonna slice and dice like it's 1100AD!

edit: I was thinking of using ordinary 80gsm paper for the mounting templates, as I didn't like the idea of using good, thick card for something that's just a reference guide. Would this cause issues later on?

Day ?? what even constitutes a day anymore...

Done... oh so much. After marveling the new paper and scorning the old paper, I started to print things. Oh so many things. I divided what foamboard I had, did maths, and settled on about six of each tile piece. I also formulated an idea of what I want the board to look like, but Titan Control doesn't have L, T or X intersections, but it does have a start of a hallway, middle and a central tile of similar textures so I shooped it.



I dunno if there is a spot to upload those, but if anyone wants them lemme know. They're a little rough, but I did them pretty quick.

Lessons learned: Oh so many things.
1. Sticking with a blunt blade because you want as much value out of it as possible is not worth your sanity.
2. You will get a papercut, in fact you should be expecting it. Like a soldier expecting a bullet, you know it's going to happen even though you hope it never does.
3. Foamcore is going to blunt your blades faster than anything else.
4. 250gsm starts getting pretty hard to cut, do more cuts with less pressure.
5. Hold your blade like a pen if you can, it'll save your joints.
6. Cut the tile mounts freehand - I found it easier and faster with the aforementioned tip.

Results:


To do tomorrow: glue the damn things

Besides using them for railing connectors, is there anything you can think of for these offcuts?