 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about making a dungeon tile style base. So let's say you want to have somebody indoors, like in a dungeon type setting, we're going to take a crack at that sort of thing. So here I just have a blank 32 millimeter base, what I have to be working on right now. We have a little piece of green stuff here that I've pre-needed so it's all ready to go. Still quite workable and stretchy. We've also got a little bit of rough white texture, some rough white pumice from Vallejo. And then we have a nice selection of different sculpting tools, most of which we won't use yet. We're going to use in the later part of the video. This will be in two parts because obviously the green stuff has to cure. So but first I just want to talk about the green stuff itself very quickly and then we'll get on to making the base. When you're using green stuff, a few quick simple tips. One, use less than you think you need. It's always green stuff goes farther than you think. Second, when you're mixing it together, one of the easiest ways to mix it together is just to stretch it out like this and then put the two pieces together and then stretch it out and then put them together and then stretch it out and you kind of repeat that over and over again and it'll actually mix very quickly. Okay, so once we've got all that, what we're going to do is we're just going to take our little piece of green stuff and I'm going to make sure my finger is wet and I'm just going to go ahead and start literally pushing this down into the base. Now I'm not actually going to cover the whole thing in this case because I want there to be a little bit of broken rock and we're going to have some dirt there and stuff like that but we'll cover most of it. So we'll start by just using our thumb to just literally smooth it out over the whole thing and if you get a little bit hanging over the side, don't worry about that. That's no big deal. We can clean that up later. Okay, so now we've got a nice little flat-ish piece of green stuff. Now comes the next most important thing. You want to make sure we get our green stuff nice and wet and just have my normal water cup here. Then I'm going to take this which is just an old like spice jar. You can use any flat piece of glass or a rolling pin or something like that and we're just going to roll it back and forth over the top. You want to make sure your green stuff is real, real wet when you do that. That way what happens is you get a nice perfectly flat smooth surface. Okay? Alright, so that's basically it for part one. It's pretty easy. We roll it out. We get it nice and flat. Now we need to let it cure for a little while. Now we're not actually going to let it cure for the whole amount of time. Normally green stuff takes about 24 hours to cure completely and to harden, sometimes longer if it's a really thick part but this is pretty thin so it'd be drying a day, easy. But instead what we're going to do is we're going to let this set up for about an hour, maybe two. You kind of have to test it and I'll show you what you do to test it but when we come back and just let it sit for about that amount of time because you want it to get slightly harder so when we do the next steps we're not pulling at it. If you try to work with it too much in this state with the stuff we're going to do what'll happen is you'll just end up pulling it apart, it'll bunch up, it's still much too soft to work with. So let this sit for an hour or two and we'll come back. Alright, so we're back. Now I've given this about, let's call it a little more than an hour and a half, hour 45, something like that to set. And the reason I can't give you an exact time is because how long it takes you is going to vary a lot based on how humid it is, where you are, and how thick you apply this, and exactly what type of green stuff you use, or milliput or whatever. And by the way I'm using green stuff here but you could use certainly like milliput or anything like that. So the key is the time, the key is the test. So how do we test? Well we start on anything we squish over the side which is going to inevitably happen and you want to just give that a little pull and you see how I can pull that down and I don't pull anything more with it than what I'm working. Like I don't cause a whole bunch up here to move. That tells us we've set up enough. Okay? Alright, so you want it to be, it should feel, you know, sticky, sticky-ish, a little bit of that sticky icky when you're working in there. So now what we're going to do is we're going to shape it into some bricks that we're going to work with. You know, the cobblestones. In this case, when I'm thinking of Dungeon Tile, I'm thinking of something that looks like our old Hero Quest board or something like that. So what we're going to do here is we're going to, this is the tool I'm using, so it's this one that's got this little end and then this. You can get these little tool sets off of like Amazon or other places like that or your art stores. So I want it to be somewhat off-center. One of the tricks when you're doing sort of blocks is that in general you don't want to make your blocks completely even. You want them to be somewhat off-center. It just makes it feel a little more realistic. We make sure the tool stays wet, which there, it worked a little too long. So I'm just keeping a thing of water next to it. You'll notice there's water down in here that's running in there and that's fine. Okay? So that's kind of one cut line. In this case I'm just kind of eyeballing these to be straight because if there's little imperfections it's fine. I'll go up here for this one. I'm going to keep that tool nice and wet. Okay. And let's go ahead and put another one right there, it looks good. Just carry that through. And then finally let's get a second little implied brick here and there we go. So now we've got some nice rough cobblestones to work with. Okay? So now what we're going to do is we're going to take the other side of that same tool. We're going to get it wet. I can actually pick this up so I've got a little better control. And I'm just going to get in there and start kind of forcing that side into a little bit more of a divot. And what will happen is you'll get these little ridges, which you can see in there when you're pushing initially. Don't worry about that. That's fine. We're just basically deepening that guideline that we put in there. Because these bricks need to have mortar in between them, they weren't placed perfectly up against each other. So we just work our way around. What we're trying to do is get a nice separation in between there. One of the keys when you're working with stuff like this is you always just want to think of like, and this is something people come to me often, they say, you know, I'm doing like an underground or a cave environment or this type of environment, you know, what else can I put in there? My answer is always just think of everything possible that would be in there. Think of the environment. Really, really think about it. Don't just look at it abstractly. When we picture these things in our head, like a grassy field, we just picture a field of all grass. But of course, that's not what they actually look like, right? There's actually wildflowers and little animals roaming and fallen trees and you know, the same goes for the dungeon. When you're thinking about this dungeon set, you want to be thinking about all the different elements that would be here. And the first thing is the stones wouldn't be just dropped in perfectly. They're not machine mason, right? This is a human who cut a square or a dwarf or, you know, some human like creature that cut a square slab and fit it together. And it would be somewhat imperfect. Now we're going to take a clay shape or tool. I'm going to use the one that looks like this. You can use, these are again something you can get relatively cheap. And we're going to just go ahead and take that in there. We're going to just smooth that edge right along with the point down in the brick. I'll help get rid of some of that bumpiness. We still want a little bit of it because it helps the brick look a little less even. We can also push up with this to further round the edge in the corner, but we're really just kind of smoothing it out. We're using that tip to just deepen that ridge. Make sure we get that nice separation. We can also help straighten lines at this point if you've got anything when you're working on this that's a little bit off, you can always kind of restrain out a line here. So now we've got our nice tiles. Again, don't worry about stuff like this on the edge. If you want, you can kind of smooth some of that out, but if it's over the edge like this is where it's kind of pushing over the edge of the base underneath, don't worry about it. We'll handle all that later. The imperfections are not that concerning. Okay, so now we've got some basic tiles. Fantastic. What now? All right, well now we're going to actually do something fun. So now what we're going to do is we need a really sharp tool and there's a couple of options. You could use an etching tool like this that you can use on things like plastic card or you can use like your poking tool like this, which is just a single point or we can use this kind of a shaper, which is just more of like a, this is like a mold line scraper type of thing, but it has these nice real sharp edges because it's meant to scrape off a mold line, but it'll actually be really useful for our purposes. So what we want to do is we're going to make a design in one of these bricks. Okay, so we're just going to go ahead and make some straight lines here. It's going to be real shallow because we're just making something that will get picked up like a wash at a later stage. So we kind of get a nice little extra divot in there. Good for straight lines. Pick it up again because we need to do some more careful work. And then up here in this corner, what we're going to do, we're going to draw ourselves a little skull. It wouldn't be a games workshop world unless there was a skull embedded in the, even in the floor tiles. And you notice I'm just using like a real sort of stippling action with it. I'm not pushing. I'm not trying to drag. I'm just hitting a bunch of little spots, basically just stippling this down. Just pressing this nice pattern into here, again, not worrying about getting it perfect. Not worrying about getting it in there. Okay, so now we've got a nice little pattern in there. It gives us something interesting in that brick, which is cool. We can sort of imply the same thing down here on this brick on the edge so it looks like there's a pattern going across. We can kind of paste the top of the pattern there as though something else is repeating in the next one that we're not seeing all of. Then we just need to make sure we clean that up, because again, we wanted to sort of etch it in there, but now we're going to go back to our, to this tool right here. What we're going to do is we're going to take this time the sharp end of it, not too much water there. I'm going to slowly work that up and down and just get a real nice line just so we go ahead and have that shape really well defined. You notice how I'm like rolling the tool, so I'm using the angle of it in my, to help me out as opposed to trying to fight against it. Okay, you can add other flourishes or anything you want, but that's good enough for now to show you what I mean. You can also just quickly dry it off, you know, if you want to just wipe the water out of there so there's no reflections, so you can much more easily see what you've done. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be there. The other thing we want to introduce at this point is we want to go ahead and introduce some cracks. So again, same tool, same end, this little curvy, spiky bit at this end. And let's just go ahead and crack some stones. So what we're going to do is we're going to use the roll of the tool to just lay some natural cracks in there. Now I'm not really sort of directing it where I want it to go, I'm just kind of letting the tool roll for me. Now sometimes when you're doing this, you'll get stuff poking up, like certain areas will become higher than others, where you push the green stuff around. Don't worry about that at this stage. Like if you get little ridges or bumps, that's okay, it's just fine, not going to hurt anything. If we want to do a smaller crack, we can take a sharper tool, it will work a little one in here. Here we can just kind of etch it in, just feel light. We can also draw then from the edge of these, we can have them get real thin. Down at the end we can put a few splinter cracks off of it. Maybe we can crack a corner here, that often happens with these big blocks, like a whole corner comes free. So we get that kind of action. The point is we're breaking up that space. Then we can always go in, take our clay shapers, reinforce anything we've done, leave a nice big crack there in the center. Let it just happen, let it be a little organic, that'll make it feel more realistic. Okay, so now we've got a nice dungeon base as far as the green stuff goes. I had originally said this is going to be two parts and that was me not counting properly because it's going to be three, because I'll be back in just a moment. Well for you it will be just a second, but for me it will be a whole day as I let this thing dry, and then we're going to talk about how we then take it up to the next level, clean it up, etc. Because right now it's still going to end up a little rough, but that's okay. That doesn't matter. We'll come back, we'll do the final cleanup, and we'll get this base ready to go. So back in just a moment, alright we're back. Everything is nice and dry, green stuff's fully cured, you can see I can press into it there and nothing happens. So now we just need to clean it up. So the first step we're going to do, by the way one thing else I did that I did off camera is I took a sharp tool like this, you can use anything, you can use a little pokey stick or a toothpick when it was still kind of sharp, and I just kind of poked into it. You can even do it now even when it's hard, it doesn't really matter, but I just kind of stippled against this and kind of pushed into it to make some texture every so often. Just kind of breaks it up. Stone is very irregular, and you don't want it to have the sort of smoothness of green stuff to feel like stone. So it's just literally a matter of taking a sharp tool and poking into it. So that's easy. Then the next thing we're going to do is we want to get rid of our excess. So we're just going to come in here, we're going to place the blade flat against the edge of the base, and we're just going to give it a nice little shave all the way around and get ourselves a nice flat, even cut. Just like that. Boom. Now we've got a nice, even round base, okay? Now if you have little parts that where the green stuff didn't quite meet the edge or something like that, that's alright, don't worry, we're still going to handle that. So now we've cut off any excess, and you can see that got rid of that weird little bump we had on the side, stuff like that, okay? The next thing we're going to do is, now I'm going to take a file that's like this, a little triangle file. This is sort of an optional step, but if you want to deepen your lines and sort of straighten them out, you can place those right in there, and we just kind of file back and forth. And because it's in the triangle shape, it's going to give us exactly what we need. Just kind of go through there, just a few quick swipes, no big deal, one right there, and we just take a little water, make sure we wipe that out, get rid of all that little green stuff dust that we made, and that helps to reinforce and smooth out any things you've got. Make the lines a little more straight at the end, that kind of stuff. Nice and easy, gives us a nice simple cut. Obviously, you can go a lot more if you want, if you have one you really want to work on and get nice and deep, grind it down in there, make one of those kind of deep, and there you go. So that's kind of an optional step, just a little clean up at the end if you want to go that direction. So the next thing we need to do is texture it up, make sure it actually looks like stone. We're going for like an old dungeon here, something that's pretty broken up. So we're going to take a little bit of our Vallejo Rough White Pumice, and we're going to grab a little, little Poogee Stick, little tool, and I'm just going to grab a tiny little bit of this. And then here, say, on this part over here by the side, I just kind of spread some of this out so it's got a little texture, wipe the edge so that stays nice and clean, grab another tiny little bit, kind of extend that up there a little bit, maybe we'll put a little bit down here, so we've got a little bit of, just to kind of get the illusion of some dust, some debris, some broken rock, that kind of thing. Just a little bit to kind of break up the base, keep it interesting. Different textures break things up, even when it's very minimal like that. Now if you don't have that kind of basing paste, you can also do something a little more interesting, because it's not just going to be little rocks, it's also going to be big rocks, so we can take a couple different sizes of grit, this is pretty large, this is pretty small, this one comes from the little, the little black grit comes from Army Painter, the big one comes from rocks that I bought a long time ago that I don't remember where they're from, but you could get some little rocks from your yard or anything like that. Okay, alright, so now we're just going to take a little bit of our PVA glue, so we grab a little tiny pallet, we take a little, this is just good old-fashioned white glue, nothing special about it, we take an old crappy brush, something we don't mind putting in glue, we get it wet, we want to have a nice wet brush, I'm not actually going to water the glue down, I'm just going to rely on having a garbage wet brush, this is my, my garbage wet brush for working with glue and stuff like that. And what I'm going to do is let's take and go a little bit over what we just put on there, let's go ahead and put a little bit up in this corner too of just the glue, that looks good. Okay, that way we get this kind of nice and broken up, I think we'll do just a tiny little dib dab in that corner there, it's not all right on the outside. Then we take a little bit of our big rocks and scatter a few of those around the glue, don't need a lot, we just need a few and press those down, make sure those are all in place, then we'll take a little bit of our finer grit, okay, then we just take the base, tip it up, tap tap tap, okay. Now if we're concerned about how tightly that's adhered, we can go get a little bit more of this glue mixture, but this time we get a real wet brush, we water it way down and we just go over top and we just tippy tap a little bit of that right on there, tippy tap a little bit of that right on there, just basically to lock everything in place, nice and easy, once that dries that'll be real locked into place and it'll give us a real nice spread of different textures around the base. Now the other thing we can do is obviously add some sort of you know dungeon dressing, okay, so you have to know where your figure's feet are going to stand, in this case mine are going to stand right here on both sides of this, so one here, one here, and so we could always do something if we want like maybe we add a little skull because that seems pretty dungeon-y, right, every dungeon has to have a skull in it, so we can take a little skull and put it there, great that looks real good, so we'll take that off, for this we're just going to use a little bit, a tiny little dab of gel glue, so we're just going to put a tiny little dab right there, right next to that PVA glue, one of the nice parts about this Loctite, this is one of my favorite super glues when you have to use super glue, the Loctite Super Glue Ultra Gel Control, it's just a really really strong bond, when you need super glue because it's a gel, it's also a lot easier to work with than some of the other super glues out there, just give that a nice push down in there, and there we go, now we've got our little base for our person to go explore in a dungeon, we've got cracks, we've got all that, let that dry, paint it up, we're good to go, so that's making a dungeon base, it's pretty easy, obviously if you go bigger, this is you know a 32 mil base, there's not a huge amount of size, but when you go bigger you can go a lot farther if you know if I were doing this on like a chariot base or a monster base or something that's larger, then I could easily have other accoutrement on there just think of you know what's going to sit in a dungeon, I'd probably take some chains off of a you know off of a kit or go get some jewelry store chain and kind of lay that over the floor, things like old rusted chains going across the floor, that's very dungeony, broken pieces of wood, scattered weapons, deeper cracks, puddles of water, you know where old sort of grimy water is dripped from the walls and pooled into the cracks and the rocks and stuff, the sky's the limit when it comes to this kind of thing, just try to think of every you know if you've ever played D&D, think of the background dressing and every D&D adventure you've ever played, or just think of what would be in a fun dungeon right, and scatter that stuff around, skulls, weapons, bodies, chains, torture implements, old barrels, bags of food or you know molded gone you know food that's gone to rocks like anything you can imagine that would be in this kind of underground habitation can end up on your base in a dungeon, once you've got that sort of tile matrix down, by the way in bigger bases there are also rollers and stuff that can do this, for something this small I wanted it a little more bespoke because I wanted to do the design that kind of thing, so with that being said, you can certainly also look at things like rollers if there's a style you like, you know green stuff world makes several that are really good, but in this case I wanted to make something more bespoke and not rely on you having a tool like that, but I do want to mention them here at the end that they are available and there are some quite good ones out there that I've used on many occasions, so you know you can certainly explore those as well if there's a texture or pattern that you enjoy, but that's making a dungeon base I certainly hope you liked that, if you did then give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future, if you've got any comments questions or suggestions for future videos go ahead and drop those down below always appreciate those, share this video around sharing is always the nicest thing you can do, but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time