GHQ Models Forums

Has anyone got any techniques or materials they can share?

I want to scratch a few historical buildings in Market Garden campain as well as some Normandy buildings - and so need some bricks / stones and tiles.

Thanks
Richard

Have you looked at N-Guage or smaller model railroad buildings? I've been away from the model railroad part of the hobby shop for way too long, but I know they had supplies for N-Guage that might work. Z-Guage might be closer but I dont know that they make a lot of scratch building supplies for that scale.

Tom Oxley

Hi Richard,

I have some success with the Evergreen plastics in Z scale if you can find them. Your best bet is to go to their website and look for the different sheets of texture. I believe Z scale is 1:220 which is close to 6mm at 285. I have found that the slightly larger bicks and stones don't jump out at you as much as the benefit of seeing the texture...your eye won't really notice.
The one drawback is that the plastic houses require some work to get a good fit at the corners and in maintaining a straight line. Too much of the bonding agent will warp the pastic with an uneven pull on one side that gives the wall a wave to it.
I would also highly recommend using a template with the plastics to get uniform cuts. It will help to keep things square in the end.

Good luck with your projects.
Brent

Hi,
Evergreen for building house walls,
and Slaters "embossed" plasticard is what I have used with good results.
Hope this helps ?
Cheers,
Vdmfighter

Funny, I am planning games and armies for Market Garden and Normandy too. Some time ago I found a very nice website: IanH's wargame pages. There are some free paper buildings on his website which you can use for Normandy. I have adopted his idea and I am making my own paper buildings at the moment for Market Garden. Since I live in Holland (actualy in a village next to the 'hell's highway') it's easy for me to take pictures of buildings that were actually there in 1945. Building paper models is cheap, pretty fast and rather easy. Although all sides of the building are flat, it still looks nice. And if you have a decent printer, you can have amazingly good detail. Most of the work involves the editting of the photographed pictures, but after that you can print as many as you like.

Here are some examples:



Please give me a shout when interested.

Gompel

That looks magnificent. Love the way that it includes weathering as the actual building would have it.

Also the table layout looks very good - lovely orchard trees.

Do you mind sharing your designs.

BTW for others - back to my original question. I have just received some packs of the Slaters card as suggsted by VDm - really good, scale looks fine, good price and great service to Australia

Richard

Welkom Gompel!

Glad you have joined us in our little corner of the web. That's a VERY nice lay-out you have created. Not just the buildings (which look very good indeed), but the whole thing.

I know I am not alone in suggesting I would love to see a little more ... more pictures of the roads, fields, hedges, walls, etc. The whole effect is very impressive!

Do you take pictures of your micro armor, too? With such beautiful terrain, I would bet your tanks look good. And how about your games?

Got any AARs (After-Action Reports) you could give us?

Now see what you've done? Whether you want it or not, you now have a fan club.

Just ask any famous person, fans can be merciless in their demands for more, MORE, MORE.

Thank you for the dutch welkom Mark
Ok, I just made a first post but haven't introduced myself, lol. (even among enemies this is considered rude) So here's some of my background (I hope you don't mind hijacking your post Richard):
I've always been interested in WWII stuff and as a young child I played with plastic soldiers and equipment from Matchbox. I went into boardgaming too and mainly the WWII theme would interest me. Since some years ago I got more and more bored by the limitations of boardgames to fight a decent battle (games like Axis & Allies, Blitzkrieg General, Tide of Iron etc.), so I decided to design my own game. I had a reasonable good double blind game, but I wanted more. For this game I bought a bunch of cheap Navwar tanks and infantry to add to the 'feeling'. Later on I went to Germany for one of those big model fairs (Intermodellbau) for my modelplane hobby and found a stand which was selling GHQ stuff. At that time I thought GHQ to be very expensive and only bought one Panther (he sold seperately). When I got back home the comparison with my Navwar was striking (or should I say shocking).

During spring this year somebody got me into miniaturegaming and I wanted to try this too. Of course it would be GHQ, but I wasn't sure about what rules to get. I searched and searched and found CrossFire. I bought a copy of the rules and have only played 2 full games so far, but I like the focus on tactics and reasonable fast games without the hassle to refer to the rules all the time. CrossFire comes very close to my ideas of a realistic and dynamic game I was looking/longing for.

Already when I was looking for this game it became clear to me that loads of terrain was something really needed (and it would look much better in my eyes to what I had seen on Flame of War tables). I checked loads of websites and together with the GHQ miniatures I bought a bunch ground cover bags (foam). The trees I bought somewhere else, but the rest is all home made (I try to keep things low cost, as I do have lots of time, but no money). Biggest problem was I had to be able to transport everything by bicycle (and trailer). Some old green curtains were about the only durable solution I could think of. So everything needed to be soft and crack resistant. Only the miniatures and buildings are something to take care of, but packed between all the soft curtain pieces and foam, in some strong ammunition boxes, they seem to do fine

So, I really needed loads of terrain to be able to play my games, but for the miniatures I was using my old Navwar stuff. Meanwhile I was checking websites and paintingguides for my GHQ miniatures. Some websites like RitterKrieg, Lloyd and the Miniatures page were very usefull and inspiring to me. At the moment I am still busy with painting to be able to 'upgrade' my games to GHQ. Some new GHQ equipment (all brittish/german) is on the way. I am satisfied with how my first vehicles look, but I haven't dared to paint the tiny soldiers yet. I need to test some ideas I found on the IntoBattle site.

Ok, enough talk. Here are some more pictures of the first landscape I built with all the pieces of terrain. This was for my singleplayer game to test the gamerules.
Mark, don't be fooled by photo's. Pictures most often make things nicer than they are.
Btw, try to find my one and only GHQ panther in every pic.





This is what my flattened out buildings look like:


Currently I have about 20 paper buildings on 5 sheets of A4 paper. I would be happy to share them, but a proper pdf-file of one sheet would be about 13MB. So sending by email is not realy an option for me. I could try to make a website and seperate all the buildings induvidually to download, but that whould take quite some time I think.
Do you have any other ideas? Or maybe a more available and well-know website would be willing to host them, like GHQ for example?
I've searched many many website during this year to get 'into the hobby', but although you find stuff everywhere bit by bit, it might be a nice idea to just have a space where everybody can put there stuff for other people. For example I am looking for more photorealistic paper buildings and more pictures of WWII miniature soldiers, but I have a hard time finding them. Like I want to know what type of soldiers and how many are exactely in the Individual British Infantry (UK59) or Individual British Weapons (UK60). I need units for a whole battalion, but I discovered by ordering that there are no LMGs (Bren) in the first pack, although pictured on the website. Having all this sort of info catergorised on one website where people could add there own stuff would have really helped me.
Any ideas on this?

The best I could personally suggest for that PDF file would be to find a webshare site and use that. Then give us the location so we can all jump out and snag those beautiful buildings of yours up. Though I have to ask, would it perhaps be better to use Card stock instead of stiff paper? Just as a thought mind you ^^;

You could also join one of the Yahoo groups and upload the files there. There is a "micro armor" group with little traffic, but seems like a logical place to store files.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Micro-Armor/

Hey Gompel

Any luck yet on finding a way to host those files.

I would love to give them a go over the holidays.

Thanks
Riihard

Nice to see a fellow Dutch gamer Gompel. Your set-up is brilliant. Easily one of the best I have ever seen (and I have seen quite a few ). It ranks up there with Mluthers stuff.

Have you ever considered giving some demogames at Dutch conventions? At Ducosim or Noorderspel for instance? Or Crisis?

With such an attractive lay-out, you could inspire a lot of people to take up 6mm gaming.

My compliments on your terrain.

Gompel, Your terrain is beautiful. Why not print the sheets and sell them for what it costs plus a little profit for you plus postage, which would be well worth it... and help support your gaming.

I've been doing paper buildings for years. Not from pictures but produced graphically, ...which requires a little more work but it is a very inexpensive way to build lots of buildings.

http://commandoperationscenter.com/new_page_2.htm is a link to some samples from the city we use for training purposes.



The picture above is from a small part of the city. We use 12" hexes for ease of transport and to allow some interchangeability. Many of the buildings in this picture are paper but most are commercial products by various manufacturers.

The vehicles are "Z" scale. A little large perhaps, but worth it for the prepainted variety available. "Z" scale works perfectly with the larger GHQ infantry. There is a wonderful assortment of civilian figures available from Walthers if you follow this link
(SNIP -- please do not post webstore URLs on the Forum) and they are on sale for a pretty good discount right now.

OpsCtr06