Making paper building interiors accessible...

[Extra Crispy]

I have been meaning to print and assemble a bunch of 6mm buildings, as part of refurbishing my WW2 armies. After all, what good is an army if you don't have terrain worth fighting over. One problem is how do you get troops inside. Lift off roofs are problematic because it's hard to get your fingers inside the building to put troops in or pull them out. Damage to the buildings is far too easy. A simple solution is to part shell buildings.

First, print your building. Depending on how it is constructed, you want to cut your walls horizontally. Make the cut at about 3/8 from the ground. Assemble this and you should end up with just the bottom of a building. Now assemble the upper walls and roof. Ideally, you could just stack the top part on the bottom part and access the interior that way. But a slight breeze will knock that idea to pieces. So here's my plan: print an inner "tube" to help hold the two together. The "tube" gets glued in to the top part of the building. You need to print at least part of the building so the white paper won't show through the seams. Your tube just needs to be about 3-5% smaller so it fits inside. I found it was easier to just do this by touch rather than trying to measure.

Here is a rough example I just knocked out tonight. On the left is the assembled building. 1/285 Truck for scale. On the right is the upper portion removed. If you look at the bottom of the upper portion you'll see the inner tube sticking down (I accidentally glued it in wrong side up). It might be easier instead of printing the inner tube to just use a piece of construction paper that matches the color of your building, at least a little. Lift off the top, insert troops, and replace. If necessary, leave the top off for game purposes. If I find I need to do so, I might at least color the inside with marker or somehow get rid of all that white space which would be quite distracting on the table top.

Working this out only took a minute, and only added 30 seconds to assembly (one cut, and fold the "tune" and glue it in to the upper).

[dragon6]

Good looking

Just an idea but what if you print the whole building and the "inner tube" as just the bottom of the building then the whole building goes over the inner tube.

Just two pieces instead of three. The bottom will need to printed slightly smaller than the top so just the same size as the "inner tube"

I'm sure you tried this and there is some problem with it

Anyway, it's as you say, terrain worth fighting over

[Mk 1]

If you take dragon6's approach one step further ...

You could do the bottom portion at a little bit smaller to be your "inner guide" (kinda prefer "guide" to "tube" ... I mean, it isn't really a tube, is it?), but then cut the top edge of the bottom portion (the inner guide) in a ragged zig-zag. Paint / mark up the insides with some darker streaks and add some random some rubble, and voila, you can not only lift the top for a moment to put your troops inside, but you can also remove the top from play to show when a building has been destroyed!

[Extra Crispy]

Scott at Paper Terrain does just that - every building has a "new" and an inner "destroyed." And you're both right the two part solution makes a lot more sense! It would also make it much easier to create a color interior. Just double up the paper. For the floor a piece of card stock with a metal base underneath for a little heft so the building doesn't slide too much on the table.