Greetings Rossyuk!

If you want to use foamcore for your walls and floors and rooftops AND also have interiors, you will end up doing a fair bit of on-your-own modeling. As you noted, the sandwhich folds no longer work.

I too want to use foamcore. I want the walls flat, and the roof flat. It's not about making them sturdier (although they are sturdier). As an experiment I tried making the armory. Printed out everything, cut the sandwhich walls into interior and exterior.

Then I constructed a 7" square box of foamcore (with four sides, leaving the top and bottom open). I cut out where the recessed doorway would go when it was all glued and dried (should have cut the stupid door before trying to glue it - my bad).

Okay, then I glued the recessed door in place. Note I left some extra paper tabs on the outer edges, and I folded those over 90 degrees and glued those to the outside edges of the walls.

With that in place, I then glued the exterior walls, with the front wall going over the paper tabs of the door to hide them.

The trickier part came with the interior. I glued the floor to the bottom of the foamcore box. I wanted to mount it to foamcore, but then the floor would stick up a bit due to the thickness of the foam, and the door would not look right). I then had to trim the sides to fit properly (that thickness of foamcore means all the interior walls need to be shortened - don't just shorten one end, you want the windows to appear to line up).

At this point you now have a 5-sided structure. I had to play around with the roof piece so that the edges hung down over the foamcore AND a little more, so that when you placed the roof on, some cardstock hung over the edges all around (thus keeping the roof in place).

And after all of that ... I didn't much care for it. Because oif the thickness of the walls, the 1" grid I was using meant that all the squares on the outer edge were not full 1" any more. I didn't like the floor being just cardstock - kept thinking that I should have played around witht he door some more so that I could use foamcore for the floor panel. Also, I like my roof pieces to have a raised edge for hiding behind, and the one I made was flat with the lip facing down to hold it in place.

Too much additional work, not enough payback for me. So I decided to just make building shells, skip the interiors completely, and if combat needs to move indoors, I can always have a floorplan template off to the side. I may rethink that at some point in the future, but for now, I make foamcore shells, then glue the exterior walls and roofs on (I mess around a little with the roof assembly to get my raised edges) and I'm happy.

Steve

I have not had the chance to do anything Mayhem related but the methods I posted on doing matboard builds (with opening doors and transparency windows) works just as well with foamcore or balsawood. The thickness as Seattlegamer noted may cause issues with the grids (unless your doing ungridded builds). You'll find the instructions listed for a CWU build in the kitbashing section . As you will quickly be able to tell there are steps you can skip all together if your not interested in adding the modular slots (not sure how I'd do this on a Mayhem build), as well someone has put together a wonderful and useful pdf of both of my kitbash posts (props and buildings) with the instructions and pictures added for me though I don't have the ability to get them off of her at this time. If you are at all interested I'll see if I can have them sent to you.

Also without a bevel cutter (makes 45 degree cuts) you'll have to use a method for joining corners I once saw posted on the forums somewhere though I have absolutely no idea where anymore. It was a link to instructions on how to butt the ends of two pieces of foamcore together for 90 degree corners, as far as I know the method only works for foamcore though. It is far smarter to glue all your walls (interior and exterior) onto the backing of your choice, then cutting out the doors (unless you have a good idea for a hinge I recommend you take a look at how I do mine), then assembling the building. Anything else will give you a headache and make you want to do what Seattlegamer did and go back to standard builds .

I have all the MAyhem sets except for Mayhem Rail, not so sure on that one yet!

Once again, thanks guys

See in the bottom right of this page for the foamcore technique for getting walls to meet without a bevel cutter.

I tried using that technique myself, but it was not super easy. Must be careful or you will slice away that last layer of cardboard and ruin the effect. After my experimentation, it looked fine, but I wasn't planning to make buildings from scratch using this method. I was going to glue the building textures to the outside after building the box. So you don't see the join. Once the outside textures are glued on over the corners, it really made no difference to the look.

Structurally, it's probably a stronger join, but in my "time is limited" hobby life, I decided that a small foamcore building was pretty strong with simple corner construction and left it at that.

YYMV of course. I do believe I would go for the fancy corner if I were going to texture the outside of the building and paint it up. Then again, I might simply glue on some stagered rectangles on the corners, simulating the "coins" that some building have, and then not worry about it

Steve

I have a Xacto hobby nife that cuts at an exact 45 degree angle, the reason I got it was the do something similar to what is explained above(plus for a small side item that I want to try when I have more room to model again). What I imagined was to take the knife and make two passes one each direction to create a 90 degree V grove in the foam while leaving the outside paper.

In theory this would work even better as the solid peice of paper would add even more strength but the question is how hard will it be to cut the foam and not the paper. Never tried (yet) so nothing concrete.

Richard

I didn't have a good experience using the cardstock supports for Hollywood Flats either, and instead used foamcore on my second tower. Neither of these needed an interior though. I believe that Whitewash City doesn't have interiors either.

I think that adding a single extra sheet of cardstock everywhere will help, and then if it still seems a little wobbly, I'll look at texturing some girders to run across the top insides of the walls. I haven't done transparencies yet and don't plan on doing so for the warehouse since it'll need all the support it can get.

Thanks for the help guys.

Arabin

Whitewash City buildings have interior floor layouts (two versions in fact, one is just plain open squares, the other shows furniture in place), but not interior walls.

Some people create their own interiors, others do the mirror printing of the exterior and play with them in Photoshop to remove some elements. Others don't bother wit the interiors. I do not know if the buildings in the piccy I saw had removable roofs or not.

My comment had simply to do with the thinness of balsawood as a possible sandwhich material without taking up too much of the interior squares space.

Steve

I understand now. Sorry for the confusion. Unfortunately I want to work on building it a little tonight and won't be able to get to a hardware store or anything until the weekend, so it's not an option for me this time around. Depending how things go, I might look for some thin balsawood as an option next time Thanks for the suggestion.

Arabin

No problem. We all have our own issues and pet peeves.

The very first building I worked on with a sandwhich fold was my last. Although I went light on the glue and used the "recommended" UHU Office Pens and all that, in the end it was "slightly" wavy. Not like a potato chip or anything grossly noticable, but just slightly warped. The whole building kinda bowed out in spots on some walls, and dipped in on other spots.

I'm sure somebody versed in physics and surface tension could tell me that the grain of the paper and the direction of the burnishing caused it, but that didn't matter. I looked at the building and thought ... not quite what I wanted.

I then took some building textures (I had purchased the Fat Dragon EZ Heroes set which is basically just some sheets of brick and some extras like windows and doors) and created my own kit perfectly sized to mount to a Kleenex box. No interiors obviously. But the walls were smoother and had a little less puffiness. That was better.

I then build a frame using foamcore, and glued the exterior pieces to that. Again, no interior. And THAT building had the look I was after. Plus it felt a little heftier, so as not to move so easily when the table was bumped. So I started working on foamcore ever since.

Which means that going back to using sandwhich folds to get interiors isn't something I want to do. I've heard of folks using plastic sheeting, but that stuff is actually expensive when you think about how many sheets would be needed. I'm nor sure how balsawood compares price-wise.

Of course my dilema is that a building as large as the warehouse DEMANDS having an interior. I don't mind using a template off to the side for small stuff, but something that large needs an interior. So I am wondering myself how I will go about doing that. I may simply go with foamcore and settle for the fact that the interior row of squares around the outter edge will be slightly less than 1" squares. But maybe I'll try plastic for that one build. Or sandwhich an extra layer of cardstock. Who knows?

I have happily played games using salt shakers and soda pop cans as terrain. But I'm anal enough that when I build terrain I want it to look a little nicer than that. I still use the Kleenex box buildings, even though there is a little warpage, so it's a fine line between what I will personally accept and what I will discard as unusable.

Like I said, we all have our pet peeves!

Steve

You could always use the 1inch think pink foamboard... fill the space entirely and have an extremely sturdy, but light, building.

Since you mentioned tissue boxes... you could always take an existing box like that (thick card) and paste textures both inside and outside. I'm actually thinking of using boxes from Lego sets (I collect them) to slip between the sandwich folds. My cardstock works well enough usually but isn't as think as most people use, so it would need a could of sheets. I'll figure something out

Arabin

Nice pics, though with the figures you chose for scale, it took me a minute to realise how large it is. Two of those three minis are huge, but my eye wants to believe they are 28mm, and therefore the build seems to shrink.

Anyway, very impressive H-Block.

I do the same with reinforcing my flats, and had the same idea for girders across the top of my warehouse However, I didn't actually need the girders on my warehouse and have been impressed with it's sturdyness. The secret was glueing a side of a lego box down the center where two 7" long walls would meet. I didn't take pictures while I was doing it (silly me) as I wasn't sure if it would work, but I'll have to post some pics later. The only thing I didn't like was how the roof came out... I messed up there somehow.

Arabin