3d-printable terrain for all your samurai wargaming needs
There's a new terrain board on display at our little studio here in Aso (Japan), mixing the temple walls and the temple bell with the big pagoda, with a scattering of festival market stalls and even the new ruined hut model!
So come and take a look, and transport yourself back into feudal Japan....
▲ Foolishly, I only printed 4 temple wall sections in addition to the big temple gate building, and while they make a great solid wall of terrain to cover one edge of a board, it's harder to bring that wall into the centre of a table - so this was the slightly unorthodox arrangement I came up with!
▲ The street right outside a large temple makes a great setting for an impromptu market, so I've placed them at intervals alongside the road and the large bridge.
The mat, by the way, is a design called "Treasure Island" by Playmats.eu. The models are mostly metal minis by Warlord Games, Grey for Now Games (creators of the Test of Honour game), and Perry Miniatures.
▲ Cherry blossom tress always make a board look alive, and bring some much-needed colour to all that faded wood and roof tile grey!
▲ Here you can see a local watchman checking in with one of the temple priests at the temple gate. But is everything really calm and peaceful?
▲ This is stinky old Jiro, the local drunk, enjoying his early morning bowl of shochu (potato alcohol) by the ruins of an old hut.
▲ Inside the temple walls, everything seems tranquil and calm, as a basket-headed priest quietly plays his shakuhachi flute beside the ancient temple bell.
▲ Stall holders carry tubs of water from the stream, oblivious to the lurking danger.
▲ .... if you haven't spotted the dangers by now, then you'd definitely be going home with a shuriken star in your hat!
There's a new piece of terrain available for our samurai collection - the Ruined Hut!
Let's get dusty and take a proper look inside...
▲ For anybody who already has the Samurai Farmhouses set, this shape will be very recognisable! This is what happens when you abandon your house in the Japanese countryside - it falls apart pretty quickly!
▲ The collapsed roof is completely removable, and the building still looks great without it! Ruined, obviously, but still great.
In this photo you can see the wreckage of the rear balcony. I'd suggest difficult terrain checks for any warriors trying to get through this house!
▲ The ruined hut makes a great base for masterless ronin!
▲ The interior has 2 doorways and 4 windows, plus all the extra holes from collapsing walls, so it should make a pretty ideal hideout for snipers and archer groups.
▲ The genkan section (shown on the left) can be split from the room section (shown on the right), if you prefer to use this model as two separate ruined buildings.
Note the thin strips of rubble which have been placed against the join lines (at the front edges), which are also included in the set.
▲ House for sale. Fixer upper. Light and airy interiors.
Ideal accommodation for travellers on the move.
▲ Here's the larger section with the roof in place. Almost looks cosy, doesn't it?
▲ There are plenty of small details, like those hand-powered millstones left against the back wall, and the 100% authentically-textured ruined walls.
▲ So come on in, what are you waiting for?! Add some ruined buildings to your battles today!
▲ The Ruined Hut is available for download from today.
It's painting time, and for the new Ruined Hut model it's going to be useful to get some good real-life examples to use as reference photos.
There are a few in the recent blog article about designing the ruined hut, and I'm going to be using this photo as my main colour scheme, which should fit nicely with the existing farmhouse models in my collection....
▲ The walls are dried mud reinforced with strips of bamboo latticework, which takes on an orangey-brown colour. On top of that is a cream-coloured layer of finer plaster, which contrasts brilliantly with the ruined patches.
The wood may have started as brown, and moves through golden yellow to a darker brown as it ages, and then finally to faded light brown when it's very old. Once the rainwater starts getting into the wood (as you'll find on ruined houses), it bleaches to a light grey and starts to crumble away.
▲ I spray undercoated everything in matt black, before covering all the sections in a light brown spray.
I then gave a very gentle dusting of lightgrey spray on the very bottom of each exterior wall, where the rainwater and sun would have faded it naturally. The floor of both sections was also dusted with light grey.
The final colour to be sprayed was a slate grey, for the rooftile section.
▲ Once the undercoats sprays had dried, I washed every piece with a heavy black wash. This naturally falls into all the crevices and corners, creating shadows.
After the wash had completely dried, I carefully drybrushed the rooftile edges with a medium grey, and then again with a very light grey.
▲ Next it was time to drybrush the building sections with a light brown, on all exterior and interior walls and every piece of wood.
A second drybrush was done in very light grey, just on the very edges of the wood pieces and more heavily on the floors and lower exposed walls. Since it's a ruin, you don't need to worry about being too neat!
▲ It was time to move on to the wall panels, and I started with a light sand undercoat on the wall panels and internal dried mud and bamboo.
For the topcoat layers of wall panel, I roughly highlighted up with flesh tones to a light cream in the centre of each panel and on the broken edges.
At this stage I'd be perfectly happy to use it as a finished model on the tabletop, but there are a few simple tricks with washes to give it some extra age and detail.....
▲ First, wash those internal chunks of dried mud with a red-brown wash (Reikland Flesh), and then repaint the bamboo sticks in the light sand colour. You might also want to paint some dark grey dots on the rough string that ties the bamboo pieces together.
There are also a few roof tiles scattered around the model on the floor (inside and outside), which can use the same dark grey to pick them out.
▲ Green wash is your secret weapon to age this model!! It sounds odd, but roughly poke green wash into every corner and crevice, and along the bottom edge of the outside walls.
I even decided to use a little green wash on the bottom few rows of roof tiles, and under the central spine tiles.
▲ Here's how it looks with plenty of green wash used inside and out. Rather like a Ghibli movie, right? Even the interior of the section with a roof will have green mould starting to take hold after a couple of seasons with water and creatures coming in.
Note that the stove tops are usually black or dark grey, and there's a broken wooden lid just next to the stove.
As a last touch, I went back and added a few lines of brown wash around some of the wooden wall panels, just to add a little more depth.
▲ If you have some of these little leaf-shaped herbs (sorry, not sure what type they are!), you might want to try scattering a few around in corners and crevices. I attached mine with PVA glue poked into corners with an old brush.
Alternatively, you can put some dried brown leaves in a blender and shred them to a suitable size.
And that's it - all done! This model will be ready for release tomorrow, so watch this space!
Printing the new Ruined Hut model was super easy, and assembly is almost as easy, too!
Let's take a look....
▲ Here are the contents of the Ruined Hut model files. The two building pieces print in one part each, and the roof prints in 4 parts. Everything should print fine without print supports!
Also included in the set is a broken wooden beam (shown on the left of the photo), and a thin rubble strip (shown on the right of the photo). They are optional parts, for anybody wanting to customise their models.
▲ The roof section prints in 4 support-free pieces, and assembles as shown in the photo above.
You can even miss out the middle section if you really want to create a shorter roof (perhaps useful if you are printing multiple models?).
▲ So here is the completed model! Since I'm only printing this model once (my shelves are already groaning under the weight of too many other samurai buildings!), I decided to print at 0.1mm layers rather than my normal 0.2mm layer height. And I have to say the added day it took was really worth it - there are so many awesome little details in this model that it's well worth printing at high resolution if you have the time to spare?
You can see that half of the roof has collapsed inwards, and some of the roof tiles are scattered on the floor inside. The front doorway frame has also broken off, and the splintered doors are in pieces inside.
▲ The rear of the farmhouse features this detailed balcony framework, which has completely fallen apart. All the windows feature smashed shutters and frames, and these give excellent vantage points for archers and gunners.
▲ You might find it useful NOT to glue the two building pieces together, as this gives you the option to use the model as two separate terrain pieces.
The roof piece is carefully designed to only cover one half of the building, just for this reason.
▲ I printed two of the optional rubble strips, which can be placed (or glued) against the flat join lines of the two sections, as in the photo above. That way, the two terrain pieces should blend better with your tabletop!
▲ You can always leave off the roof section (or remove it during play) for full access to the interior - and it's a pretty fabulous interior!!
▲ Here's a top-down view of the interior. You can see the genkan (entrance area) at the top with its cooking stove, and the central firepit and floor beams in the room area. The tatami mats would have rotted very quickly, so now the floor is just a mess of rock and wood debris.
So that's it - a fairly flexible multipart ruined hut model that adds great detail to any battlefield. This will be hitting the paint desk today, and should be ready for release early next week!
It's time to announce the next design on the release schedule - a ruined hut for the samurai terrain range!
This is a design I've been looking forward to adding to the collection, ever since I designed the ruined stone walls last year. This time I'd be combining the layout and shapes from the farmhouses set, with some completely new techniques for detailing I've developed recently.
▲ Whenever I'm driving through the Japanese countryside it's quite common to see abandoned houses slowly collapsing in on themselves - so I make sure to take reference photos if I can! By 2030, a massive 33% of all houses in Japan are likely to be vacant or abandoned!!
Here's the front of a small house in a quiet rural village, that had some great textures and shapes. The collapsing roof is something I really want to duplicate in this design!
▲ Here's a great close-up of the wall construction, with dried mud strengthened with woven bamboo strips, covered in more fibre-blended mud. When a house wall is exposed to the rain and storms for several years, the walls are usually the first things to fall apart.
▲ Once the walls start to let rainwater inside, the supporting wood frames tend to rot quickly because of Japan's summer humidity, and then finally the beams supporting the roof start to collapse inwards.
▲ An excellent example of exterior walls slowly falling apart in an abandoned house, that I snapped when waiting at a red light!
Okay, so let's take a look at the final designs....
▲ The house is a small farmhouse, based on the layout of the existing farmhouse files, and the main part of it prints in 2 sections. The image above shows the smaller of these sections, which was once the genkan (entrance area) of the farmhouse.
You can see a fallen roofbeam, broken pieces of sliding doors, the built-in oven (too heavy to remove!), and scattered rooftiles and debris. The walls are fully textured with broken surfaces and underlying bamboo frames.
▲ This is the 2nd section, which shows the remains of the single tatami room. There's a central firepit, and plenty of broken woodwork and tiles.
▲ The rear of the house features this completely ruined balcony. It took quite a long time to first build the balcony frame, and then carefully scatter every piece of wood around where it might naturally fall.... and still ensure that everything will print support-free!
▲ The last piece of the ruined hut is this collapsed roof. I chose rooftiles rather than thatch, because a thatched roof would have vanished, leaving only a wooden framework - which wouldn't be very printer-friendly! So I foolishly chose to model this tiled roof instead, and every single tile was carefully placed and angled! That took quite a while....
This roof is designed to print without supports too, in 4 easy sections. The underside is also fully detailed, and you can choose to leave the roof off if you prefer, or remove it during play for easy access to the ruined interior.
The last pieces of the ruined hut are currently test-printing, and I should have some printed pics to show you later this week! Watch this space....
Samurai Ruined Hut 
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