Pixar Cars Play Sets as F:WW Terrain

[JordanPeacock]

@Wickedcool: Re: Plasticville scale: I love the look of the old Bachmann O-scale “Plasticville” buildings as a good jump-start for building terrain for miniatures gaming, but it has its limitations.

The “Frosty Bar” is my all-time favorite, as its structure really has the “Googie” (retro-futuristic mid-20th century aesthetic) architecture look, and it makes sense for being a small, stand-alone O-scale structure that could be easily repurposed in various ways for a post-apocalyptic setting.

The “Hobo Jungle” (a set of shacks) is ideal for conversion into post-apocalyptic “scrappy” structures, while the “Trailer Park” looks about right as well – and I’ve seen some pretty impressive conversions to add even more details.

The switch tower is useful if you want an Oberland Station style structure. The Motel looks okay, since the individual rooms are meant to be pretty small (a la Novac), but I feel like I’d need to get multiple copies for it to look like a plausible roadside ruin (or else put up some broken walls to represent the “other buildings”). The Toll Booth looks like it would make a pretty good ticket booth for a drive-in theater.

As for the others, a recurring problem is a matter of scale. I think they work just fine as tabletop buildings that are not meant to be entered, even though I’ve seen some incredible interior treatments of (for instance) the Diner. The buildings are often listed as “O/S scale,” which in practice seems to mean that the doorways are scaled for about 1:48 or 1:43 scale figures, but any garage doors are just barely large enough to let in Hot Wheels/Matchbox sized cars (but without any clearance for doors to open on either side). This means that while I love the look of the Ranch House and different versions of the Service Station, they look WRONG as soon as you put a model Chryslus Coupe anywhere nearby, because it’s clear that garage just isn’t nearly big enough to house one.

Even without such visible features as a garage door, these buildings are very minimalist in footprint, as there’s just no room for a realistic interior floor-plan. If you’re fighting exterior battles, and the building is just a boarded-over or partially-collapsed ruin, that’s perfectly fine, and very much like the sort of “theme park forced-perspective scale” used in the Fallout games from 3 onward – as so often those buildings in Boston or DC may look “realistic” until you realize just how tiny they are, such as by standing up on a rooftop and observing just how few steps it takes to get from one side to the other.

I love the architectural styling of the stackable Apartment House, but I can’t even fathom what sort of interior floor plan would make any sense.

Some of the buildings have some potential if you basically treat them as modular starting points for a bigger structure. For example, I plan on building an incomplete kit of the “Hospital” (I just got a couple walls and the roof in a grab-bag deal) as if it were one wing of a hospital, with some broken walls to represent the complex stretching on further toward the end of the play area, so one might imagine there’s a much larger complex that once stood there, but now this is just what’s left of a facade for super mutants to seek cover behind. Similarly, I ended up with several “Supermarket” kits, so I put several facades together for a conglomerate structure I put on one side of a wrecked parking lot for my “Super-Duper Mart” scenario. After all, a real supermarket is going to have multiple entrance/exit points in the front.

The Service Station/Gas Station is just weird. I painted one up as my initial “Poseidon Energy” station simply because I have it, and make a point of not parking a vehicle anywhere near the “service bay” garage, and hope nobody notices the wacky scale. For the Ranch House, I obliterated the garage door entirely, disguised that spot as a damaged wall, then added a car port off to one side of the house (one capable of actually housing a rusted-out Corvega Coupe).

[SHD_Umbra]

I’ve been seeing these on Facebook and they really are incredibly well done.

[JordanPeacock]

Okay, a slight tangent, but I did another conversion of the Plasticville “Gas Station” I mentioned a couple of posts ago. I think this serves as an illustration of the really weird scale issues going on with “O/S-scale” Plasticville buildings.

Note the to-scale “Fusion Flea” and “Blue Dart” models in the picture. The Plasticville Gas Station in the background (now a “VALU * STAR” convenience store) used to have two garage bays (on viewer’s left), one front door (viewer’s right) and one window (off stage right) with a cardboard “scene” insert. Although the doors on Plasticville O/S scale buildings are visibly large enough for a 1:48 or 1:43 scale person to get through (just barely – they’re actually a bit too small to be “realistic”), the garage doors on any buildings that have them are horrendously small: sized JUST large enough to accommodate a typical Matchbox or Hot Wheels die-cast toy car (or the plastic “Plasticville” cars that sometimes came with certain of these sets, of similar size). And even then, it’d be just enough to get the car inside: not to actually open the doors once in the garage, let alone have room for a mechanic to service the vehicle.

And at F:WW scale? They’d barely even accommodate the Blue Dart or Fusion Flea, if even.

So, for my “conversion” of this gas station (I have 3 or 4 of these facades thanks to bulk “grab bag” loose parts deals), I made some inserts out of foam-core board to put at the base of each garage entrance to turn it each into a window, and then sealed the deal with some blister plastic “glass” to fit into each pane.

The buildings also almost always have “PLASTICVILLE” in big letters on the front (“PLASTICVILLE DINER,” “PLASTICVILLE POLICE STATION,” “PLASTICVILLE STATION,” et al.), plus embossed labels such as “GAS” and “OIL,” so I covered those up with some cardstock and made a new “VALU * STAR” sign with some letterboard letters and a star-shaped bead.

Here’s another view of the VALU * STAR, taking in the big sign out front. (That was made with a piece of pink foam sandwiched between two PLA rafts left over from a 3D-print job, using some laser-cut wooden letters I picked up at Michael’s on clearance, plus some more star beads. The end result looks more like something from the 1970s or 1980s rather than the 1960s-or-earlier stylings of signage in Fallout, sad to say. I need to find a good source of some pop-out lettering for signage that’s a bit more “retro.” I’ve got a bunch of “neon sign barricades” to make in prep for more New-Vegas-themed scenery. )

[GateKeeper]

Lot of the model train stuff is great for signage. O Gauge. Billboards, road signs, etc, all perfect for Fallout from that scale.

[JordanPeacock]

Okay, this one was the Pixar Cars “Luigi’s Casa Della Tires.” As with the others, it was missing a lot of components, including the front entrance canopy, and the pile o’ tires out front, but I still had an interesting-looking building with some distinctive signage (too distinctive for me to just obliterate it to replace with something else).

A really weird feature of this building is that the roof lifts up and back to make a little “curving road” sort of playset-within-a-playset, with some guard rails and pylons built in. I removed the guardrail sections and put them on the road tiles out in front of the shop (viewable on the right side of the photo). I haven’t yet figured out how to extract the “pylons” so for now they’re stuck on the ceiling inside the shop.

To replace the tower of tires out front, I made a “Casa Della Tires” sign, using some Oyumaru (plastic clay) to make push-molds of the “Casa Della Tires” logo above the entrance, then made two epoxy putty “casts” and put them back-to-back to make a double-sided sign. That’s atop a wooden dowel affixed to a ruined base at front (but segmented so I can easily remove it and store separately for storage).

To fill the gaping “car-garage” entrance (since this playset was intended for a world populated by anthropomorphized CARS, so the entrance was appropriately large), I used a Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope Starship Door (#80052), doing some pinning to hold the door permanently open. The bendy plastic door has a horribly-designed “hinge” that is hardly functional, and the plastic is terribly warped, defying attempts to straighten out via boiling water. As much of a fan as I am of cheap Reaper “Bones” figures, the “Starship Door” is NOT a piece I’d review well. But in this case it works for a scrapper doorway.

And here’s another Lionel O-scale billboard, with a mod redux of the “Captain Cosmos” billboard design (this one done by “herckeim” – Captain Cosmos Billboard by Herckeim on DeviantArt ). I put a scrap missile segment (bits from an incomplete WW2 model kit) on top as a decorative element for the board. (I liked the idea of having a few “3D pop-out” elements for certain billboards.)

I dug into my bitz box and collection of salvaged PLA “rafts,” and cannibalized bits from a few old broken pieces of terrain to assemble some “scrapper” walls to go around the compound. Here and there, I just pasted on printed road signs for extra visual interest, but for a few large blank panels that didn’t have any interesting texture to them, I tried painting in some signage by hand so it wouldn’t be all grime and rust.

The “Guns & Chems” sign has lettering pieced together from some leftover laser-cut wooden letters, plus some letterboard letters and a couple more star-shaped beads.

Anyway, back to the Pixar playset: as with the rest, it is on a base that’s pretty close to the thickness of one of the Secret Weapon Miniatures “Tablescapes” tiles, but doesn’t happen to have any conveniently useful dimensions (i.e., it doesn’t round off to 12 inches or some simple fraction thereof). The baseplate is in an earthy brown color (though of course it can be repainted). I could have just ripped the building off the plate entirely and given it a new base, but I liked the surface texture too much, and liked the idea of having something I could anchor the standing sign’s post to.

Although I tried to rename/rebrand most of the other stores, “Luigi’s Casa Della Tires” seems like something that COULD exist in the Fallout universe (because, after all, cars still use tires!), and, besides, it has a nice light-up effect, once I scrounge some working batteries to load in, and clean up the corroded contacts.