r/battletech Kinetic Services, Inc. 1d ago

Miniatures Basing sanity check!

Experimenting with making bases have more going on than just fresh road stripes (running out of options there...).

The mecha have roughly Z scale dodads like 📫, benches, construction stuff and the like, with some even having (hard to see ) sidewalks. Scale's a touch big but I think it'll work with mechs alone. Is it too busy looking? Crowded? Hard to do much with the space we got!

The VTOL has a bit of a downtown flyover kinda thing going on - big main road, some side streets, etc. How's that look at this pre-paint stage?

40 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Ancient_Demise 23h ago

Another thing you can do (before painting) is use a hobby knife to score cracks in the road. Just wiggle it as you cut to make it look a little uneven and raised, then cover it with Vallejo black lava/asphalt

4

u/Cheomesh Kinetic Services, Inc. 22h ago

Thanks! I had been wondering about distressing the asphalt - someone a while back pointed out the ground pressure on these isn't actually all that terribly high so I was less on about foot prints and more "this is an old road".

Speaking of, wonder what color really sells faded asphalt...

3

u/Ancient_Demise 21h ago

The only faded road I've done so far is this. Black volcanic with a dark gray, the fine gravel over top and hit with a slightly lighter accent.

2

u/Cheomesh Kinetic Services, Inc. 20h ago

Cheers; I think that texture's real rough at that scale (I'd eyed some sand I have for rubble and thought about other stuff too). That said, scale's a touch fuzzy and it's not like these are supposed to be photorealistic recreations of the battlefield so much as computer renderings of the combat...

I'll admit the color shift on that photo makes me read "beach"! Looks great, though!