Another of Sablebadger’s terrain sets. This is the Sci Fi Outpost. Once more it is scaled down to 60% for 15mm scale. The buildings are a bit on the smaller side, but they’re bunkers/hubs so it’s to be expected. I did the red painting with an airbrush and red acrylic ink, masking away the parts to be painted different colours. Using ink instead of diluted paint in the airbrush, was a blast as coverage was immensely easier to achieve. Removing the masking tape or white tack was a pain, and perhaps the whole process would take the same amount of time had I used stipple drybrushing (didn’t have my acrylic markers back then), but it wouldn’t look as good. I gave the whole outpost a blood angels look, inspired from the days when I was playing Dawn of War on the PC.
What begun as a simple paint job got more and more detailed as time went by. I really love how these tech gothic ruins from Sablebadger turned out. Again printed at 60% scale, in black PLA. Spray primed dark grey and airbrushed zenithal and various grey ones. Washed with a brown black wash mix, drybrushed tan. I went above and beyong and did some window glass panels using PVA glue undiluted into the window panels. Followed with some spot washes for grime and sealed with a matt spray sealer, which gave a foggy effect to the windows. I am thrilled with how they turned out. I have enough to fill out a 2×2 table in 15mm.
Yes, you just need thick enough PVA so that it stays in place and doesn’t flow down. The size of the small panes matters as it can’t grab a really big gap.
Something else that I needed for my games, and especially bug hunt is linear terrain in order to create funnels of routes, so in addition to the prior geonosis terrain, I went with the sandbag and modular trench barricades from Sablebadger. Also printed the trench barricade tower, so that I can make an outpost quickly a la starship troopers style. The sandbags were printed in beige PLA and painted in a similar way to the geonosis terrain. The trench barricades were printed in black PLA and painted in gray tones, but because they ended up too monochrome I added rust effects, which ended up contrasting a lot with the monochrome look.
I needed some rocky terrain, and especially for sci-fi look (can also work for desert fantasy) I found the Geonosis style terrain from Sablebadger. I got them from his patreon at the 2nd level which includes access to his back catalogue. Printed at 60% scale, in Beige PLA. Washed in a red-brown wash (Burnt Umber + Yellow Ochre + PVA + Floor Polish) and drybrushed Tan. The idea is if they get knocked around too much and chip, the lighter beige color will show throw and it will be like a highlight. Though with the softness of PLA, floor polish seal, and lack of knocking around (I am a solo player after all) I doubt this extra precaution is necessary.
I have not taken single pictures of every single item, rather, filled a table with them and took pictures. When combined with different terrain I think they will look even better, but there’s enough of them to fill a 2×2 in 60% scale, or 3×3 in full scale.
There are tons of sci-fi stl buildings in the internet, so many that I got overwhelmed. I finally settled on some samplers from Corvus Game Terrain (Tycho Starport, Magna Fortuna, Compound) and a retro Bunker from Doctor Spork. I can’t recall where I got the alien monolith from. Again, spray primer, airbrush zenithal, airbrush basecoat, washes and drybrushing. I decided to give different colours to the Corvus Game Terrain buildings from Magna Fortuna series, but perhaps I overdid it, and I don’t think they look good if all of them are placed together on the table. On the other hand 1-2 of them are good to break the monotony of the uniform color I painted the Tycho starport line.
Some more terrain items I have 3d printed for my sci fi battles. Mainly barrels, crates. Since I am scaling down for 15mm, single small barrels and crates are kinda pointless. They get knocked around easily, are hard to setup, and provide only minimal impact to the terrain. Therefore I chose grouped or larger containers.
Barrels and space junkCratesCratesWasteland wall ruinWasteland wall ruinSpaceship wall debrisAlien flora
Thank you!
It boils down to a few things: planning ahead, good models, and a good well calibrated printer.
The Bambu Labs A1/mini have proven to give robust quality prints. These are mostly printed with default settings. The fact that I go low in scale means I can go as high in quality as I need without spending a lot of time in printing. A 60% scale is approximately 3 times faster to print, and it offsets the increase of going down to 0.08mm layer height.
I spend a lot of time planning ahead. This includes looking at finding the right models for the job. If I can find terrain that prints well, paints nicely and works as intended, then that’s preferred. Also I plan ahead the paint job. A model might be printed and wait a long time before painting, not so much due to laziness (which is more a fact for miniatures models) but more so because I am trying to figure out the best series of steps to paint them quickly and have them look good enough.
Hope this helps!
I realised I had not posted the terrain I have been diligently working on since summer. An FDM printer is great for terrain, so much that I am having trouble finding storage space again.
The showcase here is a space junkyard. 6 different piles of space junk, some may look familiar to fans a long time ago of a galaxy far far away.
The paint job took a while. They were spray primed gray and zenithal primed with an airbrush. I painted them in different metallics: silver, bronze, copper, tin and graphite for variety. Followed up with my rust technique: heavy stipple brushing with a drybrush of random and successive colours: van dyke brown, burnt umber, raw umber, burnt sienna, raw sienna and vermillion. I added some rust texture by doing a pva-baking soda-vermillion mix and applying it thick on spots near painted rust. Sealed with a brown-black floor polish wash.
technoalchemist
1:50 am on October 5, 2025 Permalink
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Yeah, they say that 15mm allows you to store things easier. But because of that, then you want to have several things, so in the end you end up storing the same amount as in 28mm.
The perfect gaming board doesn’t exist. What we’re trying to do is have something that is the ideal gaming board taking into account factors such as, storage, replayability, usability, setup, modularity, looks, durability, effort, cost, and time.
The above factors many times work against each other, for example a well detailed board with height maps and rivers looks great and takes no time to setup, but is a pain to store, has no replayability, parts of the board aren’t usable, and of course there’s a lot of effort needed to make it. On the other end of the spectrum, a highly modular set of tiles stores easily, but doesn’t look as good with the seams breaking immersion, and may take a long while to setup and store. In between, rollable mats look good overall, store very easily, but may lose their shape over time and are prone to shedding if flocked.
So I wanted something that stores easily, doesn’t shed, looks nice, and is quite usable. Didn’t want to spend a fortune, or take too long to make it.
The initial concept would be a double sided gaming board made of XPS. I’d print a few texture rollers to give it texture, prime it with spray primer and drybrush, wash and seal. I bought a 2×4 board from the hardware store for about 3 bucks, and cut it in half. However things didn’t go as planned. The texture rollers left a seam between each roll, the spray primer was too dark and didn’t close up the various foam cells, so the coverage of the following drybrushing was terrible. I had to throw away the first half of the board.
I went back to the concept design. Decided against using a texture roller. A texture stamp would be a better fit, but I didn’t want to spend more time searching, designing and printing, so I did manual texturing with a sharp rock, a thin stick and my fingers and knuckles. The dark gray spray primer meant for XPS (Gamemaster line from Army Painter) would not be covered easily. So instead I found some of my leftover house paint (latex paint) which was in earth tones (a brownish grey and a light beige ochre) and painted each side differently. Two coats were enough per side (turned it around when it was dry to the touch) and coverage was great. Finally I made some diy wash with acrylic paint, water and PVA glue. Did a brown-green wash and a brown-ochre one for the other side. Applied it liberally, soaked out any excess with a sponge and let each side dry overnight. Sealed with a spray mat spray sealer, though I’m unsure if it was needed. Just for extra durability.
I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I intend to buy another 2×4 XPS board and make four more different terrains.
What I love about it, is the stability, flatness which allows for scatter terrain to sit on top, no shedding, and still enough texturing to give this uneven look.
XPS board is really cheap, so is house latex paint. Making a diy wash with PVA and some acrylic craft paints is low cost also.
Effort was minimal, each latex coat took a few minutes to do, as well as the wash application.
Onibaba are discussing. 
technoalchemist are discussing. 
Solo, Pen, Paper and Dice 
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