How to make 3D clouds!
I've been wanting to add some clouds to my WGF games for quite a while now and decided to finally do something about it. I like the convenience of the AD Store clouds but also wanted something 3D and realistic.. just like the miniatures are! So here's my take on the clouds:
A quick visit to a local hobby store for some ingredients: Different sizes of polystyrene balls, absorbent cotton (the kind used for hygiene, found on most conveniece stores), basic white glue and a bag of AD Accessories bomber flight pegs. The other day I also bought some acrylic disks and white cloth not shown here.
I cut all of the polystyrene balls in half using a sharp knife, whichafter I cleaned and sanded the exposed surfaces so that no more little balls of polystyrene would disintegrate from the surface. I then glued these together using toothpicks as an additional support.
The different shapes glued together and dried.
Next I poured white glue all over the shapes and smoothed it out with a brush so that the whole upper surface was covered in a layer of glue. I then took small patches of the cotton and pressed them against the surface in order to cover the whole shape leaving no polystyrene exposed. It is better to glue only small patches of cotton at a time to make the layer as thin as possible so that most of the cotton really sticks to the surface. After the cotton was glued on I let it dry overnight so that I wouldn't rip it all out during further processing.
The next day I started working on the bottom surface of the clouds. At first I glued a small bomber peg to each cloud. I did not have a drill in hand so I made a small hole to the polystyrene with the screwdiver in the picture and pressed the bomber peg firmly in place with lots of glue. After that I cut out some cloth and glued it to the bottom surface of the cloud, making a small hole to the cloth in order for the peg to come out of it.
I let the glue dry and then cut the excess cloth away.
I glued a bomber peg to the center of the acrylic disks with superglue. Note that the peg is the otherway around than usual. This way I didn't have to cut the pegs or make holes to the acrylic disks. Now all that's left is to attach the cloud to the base...
...like this!
And here it is! My very own 3D cloud
This one clearly is somekind of cumulus cloud that can be usually found during spring and autumn when the sun doesn't anymore warm the ground as well as in the summer. This reduces the vertical extent of the cloud and these types of clouds also actually have fairly flat bottom surfaces.
These clouds can be used either as a purely visual aspect (the height can be adjusted so planes could just fly under them) or use them as a gaming aid and allow planes to fly in and out of them. I plan on buying or making white surfaces (just like the one on AD store), which could be put under the cloud bases and then used to determine whether an airplane is inside the cloud or not.
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Originally Posted by grumpybear
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