Thursday, February 19, 2015

Multihex Complete: the Twilight Zone Post

I thought I had posted the post just before this one. I even made a brief comment on January 23rd concerning it. You probably had no idea what I was referring to. So, I put it up just now, even though it was supposed to be up a month ago. I thought instead of just adding to it, I would make an update. The current polar vortex has reached down to NE TN and SW VA. Schools have been closed for a week including mine. So, I've had some time to work on things.

So, here is the multihex completed:


It is surrounded the smaller forest hexes and each road has a road hex added to its end.

I am not happy with it. It warped, particularly at the side were you can see the dark line where it connects with one of the road hexes. Also, I am having a hard time seeing figures being able to sit in the forest. There is only supposed to be no more than one figure in a hex at a time, but I am not sure they can accommodate even that.

Here are some close ups:


The small grey structure on the left side of the road is supposed to be a roadside shrine.

The verdict is that I won't be making any more of these multihexes unless I can think of some way of avoiding the warping.

More Light/medium Forest


While waiting for the banks to dry on my river hexes and deciding what to use to paint them, I made some road hexes to go through the forests. They look pretty boring:


So I thought, why not make a large, single multihex and put a road through that? "Multihex," does that make sense? As you are reading this, each time you see the word "multihex," you need to say it out loud the way Leeloo probably would.


What I mean by multihex is, make single larger hex made up of or the same dimensions as a cluster of the smaller hexes. I punched out seven hexes out of the thin styrene plastic signs; one central hex and six to go around it. I glued them together very carefully with modeler's glue:


By carefully, I mean lining up the edges as precisely as I could. The result looked like this when glued together:
You could be saying, "why not print out a paper template and use that to cut out the multihex?" I did consider that, but I figured that if my cutting was the slightest bit off, the result would be a poor alignment with other hexes. I experienced something like that when I used a template to make my own hex mat.  Very slight errors in hex alignment were greatly magnified to the point where I consider the mat unusable.

Once hexes dried, I took this and used it as the template to cut out the second layer of plastic:



I could have punched out more single hexes and glued them on top of my first layer, but I figured that a single sheet would add more stability. As careful as I was, it was still tough lining the two sheets up.

Here is what it looks like with some of the small, 2" hexes around it as well as two road hexes:


And now for a ComicLife test run:


Yeah, its stupid, makes no sense and no Roy Lichtenstein work of art, but I wanted to see how ComicLife works. I installed it a zillion years ago and never got around to using it.  Lesson 1: make sure the scene is properly aligned and characters are more or less in the middle of the box.