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Author Topic: Dark eldar terrain  (Read 2198 times)

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Offline Khain Mor (/kharandhil)

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Dark eldar terrain
« on: July 20, 2009, 12:50:40 PM »
I remember making the same type of topic several years ago.
Back then I was making several dark eldar towers myself, but various unfortunate things happened and I had to quit 40k for some years.
The towers I had back then were never finished and I ended up throwing them away, because they were just collecting dust in my room.

The very nice addition to our previous DE artwork was the page 176 from our 5th edition rulebook. It give us a lot more on DE building and tells us that gravity seems to be a lot more different within the webway. Recreating a large piece of Commoragh (or any other dark eldar city) would be pretty impossible, but creating a few DE buildings doesn't seem that impossible.
When I look at the new wonderful 2 page artwork I have more than enough to stop thinking about how the buildings have to look, I figured since I have more than enough artwork I can finally start building DE buildings again!

Back at my first try I was pretty crazy, first my buildings were too small and I somehow wanted to even work on the interior of the buildings, which I also did. I had done a lot of interiors, even more crazy I had made a system to allow me to make the interior of every stage of each tower. This was just too crazy and took too much time so I never finished any of my towers.

Right now I have to start from scartch again, but I wanna do it well this time.
As I've said artwork isn't a problem right now, I have enough ideas and I got a lot of from the new artwork.
I have 2 main problems: 1) shape of Commoragh on the battlefield and 2) sizes of the buildings themselves.
These 2 problems are currently stopping me from starting on this, when I'm done solving these 2 and getting more ideas and inspiration, I'll continue doing more artwork and I'll start the building of this terrain.
It's kinda my point to build a 40k scale partial Commoragh, for my DE forces, the terrain would also be fit for apoc. (if anyone has the guts to attack dark eldar forces within their homeworld lol)

1) Shape of Commoragh: by this I mean that "flower" structure you see in the artwork. If you look at just one group of buildings you can see one in the middle and a whole bunch of smaller buildings around it. Should I recreate this or should I just put all the buildings straith? If I follow the logic of the artwork some buildings should be standing a bit to the side with an angle smaller of bigger than 90 degrees compared to the ground. This would look pretty cool as it would defy our logic as gravity would make that impossible in our world, but gravity seems to be different in the webway...
This does sound cool, but it's harder to make , since you have to find a way to hold the building in place without falling. Putting the buildings just straith would be the easier position, but I'm not completely forgetting the more complicated approach.

2) Sizes of buildings: How tall should they be ? How large would the base be?
Tallness is troublesome, the way I see it they seem awesomely tall, in 40k scale they would still be several meters high. How did I come to this conclusion: well a 40k model on average is about 3cm high. I mesured several models from various races and to have the most simple math possible it's better to always have round numbers. Most IG infantry models are about
3 cm high and I compare that as being about 1m80 cm in in real.
(note these are very rough calculations, just to give an idea of the size)
3 cm*  5/9 = 1m in 40k scale => 1.66666
So the burj dubai (in contruction, 818 m)  would be about 13.6m high
around 400m high you have aroun 6-7 m high, which is still pretty average and still too tall for most rooms.
Frankly speaking I'm guessing that DE have even taller buildins than our own.
So the height is a problem, but to still get around this I have 2 options:
either just make the lower part of the building (upper part wouldn't fit in the room, so no need to make it)
OR I could just make the buildings lower than they truly are for the sake of being able to fit them into a room and to be able to see them completely.
With these same calculations a building only 1m high would be 60m high in real, 2 m would be around 120m high, which is pretty small even for a human building.

Now the second problem is the base of the building.
Using the same calculations as above:
60 m *60m is very acceptable for the base of a building about 400 m high, that still means that it needs to be around 1m * 1m
If a building has a base this big we can only be talking apocalypse big.
A base only 20 cm*20 cm would be redicously small, since it's only about 12 m, that the base of my own house ...
Each floor of the building would be redicoulously small.
Now since I already considered making the buildings less tall for the sake of the terrain, the base could be make smaller for the same purpose.
For me the smallest acceptable would be 50 cm* 50cm, but probably more.
 I still need to see how that would look like in real, it has to look like the shape of a building, not too big, not too tall.

A base of something around 60 cm*60 cm would mean that you can only put 1-3 on a normal battlefield, more on an apoc table.

The floor would just be black, with maybe some type of dark eldar roads, buildings might have some small decorations on the sides (which would grant cover in a game)



Some possible alternatives:

1.
I guess you could make a smaller version of various Dark Eldar buildings, but I don't think it's ok for a city/hive . You only have room for huge buildings, to serve as home for as many as possible, you don't see any houses in the middle of a big city, just tall buildings...The way I see Commoragh it's just a huge city with high pointy buildings everywhere.

2.
Then again, DE may have smaller cities within the webway and there may exist smaller DE buildings.

3.
Why not just create the top of 1 building?
Like I said above, DE buildings might be incerdibly tall and just so huge, just the top could be somekind of battlefield. On the table it would look like several very pointy islands, sometimes connected, sometimes not connected
Infantry would be able to move through DE bridges, or may have to resort to jumpacks and skimmers to cross some parts. Like I said it would be like several DE islands (which would be just the top of the building)  and between the islands there would be nothing instead of water (plain black terrain would represent this)
It would be like a very weird cityfight terrain, Dark Eldar style!


Feel free to discuss any ideas, feel free to bring any ideas!
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Offline tryanotherone - smurfernating

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Re: Dark eldar terrain
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2009, 03:00:46 PM »
That's really funny. You are standing at the same point where I was almost exactly two years ago.

Here are some ideas that I was able to collect back then.

http://www.40konline.com/index.php?topic=142015.0

My suggestion is that you try to scratch build the outskirts of a DE city. These would be made of smaller towers, storage areas, sentry towers and the like.
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