Thursday 7 January 2010

Terrain Features Anyone?

Just discovered a company some of you may have already known about, David Graffam Models, which offer a wonderful range of buildings in the form of paper models for the gaming table.

These buildings are scaled to 30mm, but work well with 25's and 28's. They are available from a company called Wargame Vault here at very reasonable pricing in US currency. The downloadable files for your buildings are provided in two formats, multi-layered PDF and single-layered PDF. What this means is that, if you have Adobe Acrobat, you can use the multi-layered files and change colors, details, etc., making one purchased building into several. If you don't have Acrobat, you can still purchase the buildings and print them with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader and, depending on the cardstock you use, you could tint the printed building with some water color or acrylic tints to modify their appearance.

You can also go directly to David's web site here and download a free sample "hovel" that is a very useful cottage. These buildings are advertised as "Fantasy/Medieval, 1600 to 1700" but would work well into the 18th century to create a village or even a walled city. There are multiple single buildings available (sample picture below), a tower and wall section, a city gate (pictured at top), and even some bundles of multiple buildings. They are all designed to be printed on cardstock and then assembled with a gluestick or white glue, fairly simple. You can also combine different buildings to create your own designs.


I would say overall, very highly recommended based on my printed sample of the "hovel". The one thing I'm still working on (e-mailed David to see what my options are) is scaling them down to about 60% of original size to use for 15/18mm.

Bill

4 comments:

Bluebear Jeff said...

I have made a lot of "Old West" paper buildings and have been hoping to find some "Fantasy/18th Century" buildings.

Thank you for pointing me toward these . . . I suspect that you just cost me a bit of money!


-- Jeff

Sir William the Aged said...

Jeff,

Happy to help my friend ;-)

I finally found the print scaling function for my new printer, scaled the hovel to 60% and printed on some matte finish photo stock - excellent results! It is now perfect for 18mm and at the smaller scale, the lack of "real" 3D detail is hardly noticeable. I may still try and add some additional "depth" to one with some watercolours and will post a picture of the finished buildings when complete.

And BTW - I think my bank account is about to take a hit also ;-)

Bill

Andrew said...

They're really nice, aren't they? I have a bunch that the designer offered on his site before he started selling them.

Corporal_Trim said...

Yes, these are excellent. I've built a few already for use with my Prince August troops. They're a bit under scale for 40mm but the effect is not bad at all.

One nice feature is the great variety of customization depending upon which options you select - in effect gaining multiple different-looking buildings from one download.

Steve