Suggestion For Caverns, Cliff Faces, And Hills

[Corn Cobbler Ryan]

First and foremost I'm an idiot so please assume my ignorance first.

I've seen applications where hills are done via carved foam, and or putties. Some are even heavy pieces of stamped clay or other mediums, but they're not as nuanced as the voxel tiles you could do like in minecraft, for low skilled users. That sort of build it your way kind of flexibility I see in your product.

I've seen some pieces use molded pieces then gloop them onto a terrain, but the inconsistent texture is annoying for a polished look, often solved with flocking...but that in my mind, isn't very durable or easy to service long term with simple scrubbing.

My suggestion is to make a cavern/cliff/hill faces sets.

A good method I think is the "tile face" idea, where you use your current block sets as the dimensions you set for your grass, then you glue those on to existing blocks, and it would be very heavy, but it might mean you sell two products instead of one for a single set of molds. Your surface tiles, and the base set...potentially being a good method of up selling.

Part of this is from me seeing voxel games like minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress.

You can even cheats to save time, use a nice textured stamp, go back, sculpt that over, and then apply the piece into that form that works for the sort of voxel style application.

One you sculpt your stamping product you can then play with the terrain geometry. I would create a mold of the intentional textured look...then create a flexible mat with the texture, planting it into a medium that hardens and then tearing it out. Then you can recreate a mold with the gaps filled via the torn out medium you used to stamp it. There you've just covered your problem for pieces with many nuanced inlets and voids that are hard to de-mold.

Another idea is to offer a larger one and done 2 part mold set, with pieces easy to key with drill-able spots sculpted into the negative of the topper.

You can use keys made via the molded material to sequester the product into a medium, and secure it...then you can map those keys with a registering molded piece aka your topper with paint applied to the protruding portion of the negative keyed locations to locate your drill holes.

This means you don't have to grid your medium to then put in pieces...you can have your your key registering topper, put your keys in, and then apply the molded terrain, and then you can field a diverse geometry with an intentional sculpted look.

This works fairly well as a sort of way to showcase a really excellent sculpted feature piece of terrain.

You could even create it as part of your tile set, and try to up sell again with it being an in-style piece to the tile-face set.

You can also do this well, because of the sculpted scale you're working on, being very consistent across your product range. Some pieces would need to mesh together like a puzzle to establish nuanced pieces of geometry, but then other's could be bordering pieces designed to mesh well with your current tile sets.

Given you're selling molds, and not the expensive sculpted pieces, you're kind of in a good position to try it out in my opinion.

I think using the surface tile set would allow you to try this in a pretty conservative manner, with it being a way to sell two molds for one product...then you can experiment with larger pieces that slot into the tile set, go from there and then go for your keyed feature pieces molds.

The application I would try this first with is probably cavern walls, and then cliffs, with hills last.


Also lastly I'm an idiot so please assume my ignorance first. There very well be very little market space for this given natural solutions like putty, foam, and flocking might really just be enough for most people. However, given that I've seen so many solutions for this problem. I thought that the market wasn't feeling satisfied with what was being served.

Lego has a sort of solution to this that I would look and study, and see if you could even consult them on the problems they found with natural cliff faces for their sets...if any of them are actually cool they'll likely give you the broad strokes.

Part of why I suggested this, is the Dwarvenforge nature scene sets. They're bloody expensive, and this might be an appealing alternative.

If ALL that fails, you can simply sell stamps with sculpted textures that fit well with your terrain sets. Its a solution that might be less consistent, but much more economical for all involved.

For inspiration here is some grass I sculpted. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yD56Jn I appreciate just how big a pain in the neck it is to sculpt grass so salute to the sculptor on your stuff!

[Syagrius]

I think the problem would be keeping it randomized and not have a repeating pattern in a weathered/eroded cliff face over distance.

[brucehirst]

I think this idea is possible. In fact, I had drawn up some ideas for this as well (I'll have to find them again).

The main idea came from seeing some of the sketches from the Lord of the Rings art books. There are a few mordor buildings and towers that look like they are growing out of the rock. My idea was to use mountain blocks in combination with the Castle Cube molds 370 and 371. Instead of just stacking up main floors of the castle, you could also stack them onto mountain blocks for this same kind of effect. For a game, a random assortment of mountain blocks would be put down and players would have to figure out (Tetris style) how to build their castle on top of it.

The ideas are also kind of similar to the hex rock mold 180. Instead of hexes they could simply be squares. The trick is to create a texture that tends to hide obvious seams, which I think can be done with some experimentation.

For me, the use would be more for giving a nice base for a building to set upon, or to make an uneven looking base that you can easily build upon like a rocky hillside.

Anyway, I believe it can be done.

[Corn Cobbler Ryan]

If its more about integrating it into some base work, or adding some natural elements like climbing foliage...I feel you could get away with it as well for just testing demand.

Once a few pieces are made, the mold user can go ham and try to extend the value of those pieces within the set, that might be enough to showcase the value of having it within a scene your buyers might like to create.

To hide seams I recommend UV resin or alternatively painting it, and finishing the seams with a thick application of matte medium. I found matte medium to be sufficiently fluid to flow smoothly, but also goopy enough to stop atop a significant gap without bleeding down into it. A solution not many people may think of as it's within the painting stage of a primed piece. The matte medium I used for this was a Hobby Lobby product of some sort. It may very well be a broader property of the medium and not a specialized feature of the brand's own take.


As for repetition this is an advantage for the seller to create more variety through more sets. Once you solve demand, and design, that's actually just an advantage in general. I feel that repetition can also be solved in the painting stage. You can add technical paints with textures, or simply have variety within painted areas...that might be enough to create a feeling of variety through the set.

Its like the joining on your furniture in terms of how you have to angle things, and carve the patterns to join properly, so maybe consulting a carpenter might help you solve some of the appropriate angles for joining pieces without losing strength.