Been meaning on making some terrain from laser-cut MDF. I was just wondering if there’s anyone whose worked with laser have any experience with this or happen to know where to find any templates/pdf. Also I was able to cut some florescent acyrllic sheet into small signs with characters for use of some buildings I was planning to add to some buildings. Anyone know how I can go about rigging them to be backlit with something like LEDs?
Thingiverse has laser cut stuff on it, it’s just harder to find. There’s a wargaming group on there, I would assume they’ve got some terrain in the 1000+ collection of files they have.
A cheap and easy way of lighting terrain is to use DollarTree LED tealights. You can get 2 for a dollar and are small enough to drop into a building for light.
I’ve used them to make altar fires:
And similar $1 each DollarTree LED bump lights to make glowing runes:
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@HankCowdog ! you are exactly the person I wanted to tag and couldn’t for the life of me remember who I’d just seen post some awesome terrain stuff
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Here’s an example of some laser-assisted terrain. 28mm scale, based on the Conan Board Game “Ruined Keep” map. The walls of this ruined castle are 1/4” plywood cut on the laser and the brick pattern was etched into the plywood at the same time.
The towers are 1/4-circles of connected bricks cut out of DollarTree foam core. The paper was peeled off both sides and the strips glued up to make the towers. DollarTree foam core is especially good for terrain making because the glue holding the paper on is so crappy the paper peels easily.
The tops of the castle walls are peeled foamcore as well, with the cobblestone pattern drawn in with a ballpoint pen.
I’d recommend using a good quality thin (3 ply?) birch plywood over MDF: fine details can break off and the plywood has more fibrous integrity. That being said, the above terrain was made with cheap (nominally 0.25” but actually more like 0.20”) plywood underlayment. Runs about $10-11 for a 4x8 sheet. You can get 5 2x3’ pieces plus a little extra by carving it up.
Prepping plywood at the store
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Have HD cut two 36” wide strips off for free to make hauling and further processing easy. You take home 2-3’x4’ pieces and a 2x4’ piece which can be further processed on the DMS table saws without needing to wrestle whole sheets of plywood.
Plywood can also be used to cut templates for hot wire cutting XPS foam. I do this for arches and straight edges when cutting foam, especially 2” thick pink foam which is hard to cut cleanly with a knife.
Posterboard is also good for adding more texture to terrain. Long straight strips can be laser cut to add interest to the sides of buildings. I recommend cutting long lines in the posterboard and crosscutting to separate the strips by hand later - otherwise they tend to get blown around in the laser and can interfere with other cuts. Keep a stack on hand in various widths to easily add drop shadow lines, cover gaps, make corner bricks, etc.
The black tower in this pic was made of foam core by pentagons of decreasing size with walls to match. The floors, walls, arches, and roof panels are all foam core with the paper left on. The roof edges and corner stones are cut from posterboard - the cornerstones are a single piece with grout lines drawn in with ballpoint and then the brick corners folder over a sharp corner. The roof pieces are lasercut strips in varied widths folded when needed for the corners.
Laser settings
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Here are my notes on laser settings. Note that every batch of plywood is different, so test first. I’ve not even tried to etch the foam core or posterboard.
Min power/max power/speed
0.20” Plywood - (mar 2018 Donner)
Etch 10/10/300
Cut 90/90/10
(Thunder)
Foam core cut
70/70/200
Posterboard cut
20/20/400
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