Scale Kansas City

[Techpriest]

I have been wanting to build a city to play Mech Attack in. I use 1/285 BattleTech minis and there are lots of paper buildings so I had planned to print a bunch out and fold them up. I was playing around in Google Maps and thought, I don't want to play in a city, I want to play in THIS CITY! After much research I have started building a 1/285 scale downtown Kansas City.

I plan to take it to gaming conventions in the area so it is being built on a 4x8 piece of plywood cut into 2x4 quarters for easy transport. All the buildings will be attached to the wood with strong magnets during play but transported separate, I work in IT and am pulling them out of bad hard drives.  

On the top of every structure with a flat roof I will put the height of the level in inches and the weight capacity.  Will make some rules for over-weight units and if they don't make a roll they fall through and are destroyed plus the structure now has a hole in it.

I am going to make the larger building out of foam core board.  The smaller ones will be cardboard.  I am going to use pictures from Google Maps, Google Earth, other websites and some I will take myself for the outsides of the buildings.  I will get the image to the size and shape I want and print it and glue it to the 3D building model.

This is the map I am using. To see where that is go to the Sprint Center in Kansas City, MO. This is just north of that.  This is just a few blocks walk from the KC Convention Center where some of the conventions are held, I was at a convention yesterday that was 2 blocks from being on this map.  I chose this area because it has buildings and narrow alleys, but also parks and parking lots, 5 blocks will be open for the mechs to stretch out in, but also narrow places that the vehicles and infantry can make good use of.



Work has begun. I am using Woodland Scenics Asphault and Concrete for the roads, parking lots and sidewalks.  This is the NE corner.

[Dagger]

Excellent idea... ambitious, but EXCELLENT! It'll be cool to see a futuristic version of a real city.

[Techpriest]

Actually I plan to do the modern version. For one I think it will be cool to be able to walk around the real city and recognize places on the scale version. Just as important, replicating the current city lets reality do much of the work for me. Rather than design a year 2500 version of a building (my graphic design skills are at the novice level) I can just take a picture of the building today, tweak it and print it out. I would not even have considered trying this if not for Google Earth and Google Maps letting me fly around the area and take pictures and measurements anytime I like.

I will post updates as I make progress. It does sound like a lot of work but I enjoy it and there is no deadline.

I bought a big bag of plastic trees from eBay, shipped from China for cheap. I just now ordered 100 small neodymium magnets for $2, also shipped from China. I found Krylon makes paint that magnets will stick to. Every place that will have trees I will paint with the metal, then green. The trees should stay put during play.

[Techpriest]

Made some progress. Am trying to figure out the best way to make the buildings so that has slowed me down. Underneath the grass I have glued metal washers. I will attach the magnetic trees there. The metal paint was not cheap and the reviews make it sound tricky to use and very messy. I used paint pens and stencils for the road and parking lot markings.

Progress2

[WaffleM]

That's awesome! Your doing an amazing job!
Did you think about making the city blocks as tiles so you can rotate them for different setups?

[Techpriest]

My first building. It was much harder to do than I had anticipated. It is made out of foam board and getting all the pieces cut the proper length and square was a challenge.



I grabbed some screen shots from Google Maps and edited them. I printed them on my old color laser printer and taped it to the building to see how it will look. I think it will turn out pretty well when really done. The Google Maps images are not great, they are fairly distorted. My wife is into photography so we will run downtown and get some good pictures for me to use. My printer tends to print light, when I get the final images I will print them on a better printer and glue them to the building. I will touch up the edges with paint and finish the roof. On each roof I will list the height and weight capacity in tons.

Here is a shot to show the scale of the building in this quarter section.



I picked up this metal carpentry angle from Walmart. Note how the base hangs below the foam board. It helps me make perfect right angles and will speed up the construction of buildings.

[Dagger]

I like it... even at the current level of detail I think a table full of them would look amazing.

Some tips for foamboard:

If you remove the paper from just one side, you can make curved walls pretty easy.

For seamless corners, make two deep cuts side-by-side with the distance between them equal to the thickness of the foambard; but don't cut all the way through. Then you can fold over and remove the foam piece between the cuts making an empty channel. After that you can fold the foamboard into a 90 degree corner with the outside having intact paper wrapping all the way around the corner. Hope that makes sense.

Foamboard usually has a flat/smooth side and a wavy side; try to keep the wavy side on the inside of a building.

[Techpriest]

Thanks for the 90' suggestion. I know I can't pull that off by hand so just ordered a FoamWerks 90' cutter.

[Dagger]

Jun 3, 2015 18:11:55 GMT -5 Techpriest said:

Thanks for the 90' suggestion. I know I can't pull that off by hand so just ordered a FoamWerks 90' cutter.

The trick is that you don't need to try cutting all the way through the foam without cutting the bottom layer of paper. You just need to cut a straight line maybe 50% though the foamboard... then bend it back and the foam will naturally "snap" the rest of the way through to the bottom layer of paper. A lot like scoring something to get it to break just where you want it to.

Check out Flite Test on youtube. They make a lot of RC planes out of foamboard. Even if you're not into RC planes you can pick up some techniques for cutting and folding foamboard.

[Techpriest]

Got the second building built. When we get a weekend we are not busy, and they are not calling for rain the whole time, I will get some pictures and start making the outer skins. This building was much more complex than the first, but I have better tools now so while it took longer I won't say it was harder. I also decided to redo the park, I did not like how it was coming out.



Same block from Google Earth



Back view. The old Union Bus Terminal is in the middle.There is a large opening on one side that goes through to the other. Light vehicles will be able to get through it.

You many notice I am simplifying the roofs. In real life a squad of infantry, VTOL vehicles or even a light mech with jump jets would have no problem on a roof with small structures, a slight slant or curved shape but in the game the pieces are not as maneuverable. While I am shooting for realism I don't want to sacrifice a lot of playability for it. This is a game board, not a model train set.



Started on the second board.

[Dagger]

"This is a game board, not a model train set." - ROFLOL... I like where your head's at.

It already looks amazing... I can't wait for you to finish it.

[Mike H "Chugosh"]

That is an amazing project. Your work is really great and inspiring.

[Techpriest]

Wife and I went downtown to get some pictures. She has a 24mp DSLR camera and knows how to use it, my job was to point at things I needed pictures of. We also found a great Italian restaurant (Anthony's).




Then I had to do the long, hard work of getting the pictures ready for printing. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements and Microsoft Paint. Above you can see a the raw image, and my ready for print version. I removed the trees, cars, fence, poles, etc by copying other parts of the building and pasting it over the parts I did not want.

The photo above was taken from a parking lot across the street. Many other buildings we could not step back and get a clear shot of. She took several pictures and I stitched them together in Photoshop Elements. It's automatic panorama feature is amazing.



First building to get some skins. Not done yet but I like how it is coming along.

[Dagger]

It looks awesome, and the buildings aren't familiar to me... Being able to look at the models and see something familiar has to add a whole new level of awesome.

[Techpriest]

Another building done, the Courthouse Lofts.