Foam Floor Mat Terrain - Part 2

Flocked up one large mat and three "slopes" over the weekend. All was very quick and smooth and I'm estimating <20mg of static grass per 60cm x 60cm square, so say £2 for the grass, £1.50 for the mat, £3.50 all up (cf 6 hexon units for same area, ~ £3.50 each = £18.50!)

Base coated simply with Dulux Feature Wall Enchanted Eden which is a great general purpose green, seeing as a textured approach didn't work out. Note to self - where I've then brown flocked over the green the green shows through a bit, so will base coat "fields" in brown next time. A few bald spots but can be easily touched up.

For the two hills I mixed in some brown flock with the grass. My intention is to use more brown at each contour tier so as to make relief more visible. In fact I think the brown mix really breaks up the "bowling green" look of the plain grass, so I'm tempted to mix a  bit of brown in even on "ground" level. In the above image the brown is mixed 1 brown to 2 grass.

In the bigger hill its 1 brown to 1 grass. Will play with the mix in the next iteration. The nice thing is that even if I change things around all these units can just be re-used as hidden tiers on the high contours.

One thing I do need to watch though is that on slopes the "lugs" on the underlying mat show through - see above photo. So I need to make sure that if an underlying mat will have its lugs exposed they'll need flocking on the lugs too.

I also need to think about and "field" arrangement - these were just tests as ever and whilst they work fine with hedges around (top photo) look a bit barren on their own. My thinking is to keep all fields out of the edge set of 10cm boxes, so that any mat can match to any other mat, but it may be useful to bleed a few to help hide the edges and to try and randomise any pattern.

Whilst the joins are a bit more obvious in the earlier photos than in my first run (there I flocked an edge that was already joined, here I flocked separately) I still don't think they are too bad and can be hidden by hedges (above), or terrain or probably with a final does of free flock before a photo shoot! Odd that in the top photo the flocks on either side of the bottom join looks so different as done at same time. Also the join to the underlying mat closest to camera again has the same flock - but that was on a darker green. Once nice thing about the 60cm mats is  that at least joins will not minimised (30cm certainly wont have worked), as you want a max of 3 deep (180cm) for reach reasons.

My next trial is sculpting a road/river into the mat - not looking good at the moment but will see what it ends up like. Then try a more "textured" approach to the final board based on YouTube videos. Then time for a second pack, probably to try more curvy hills and have enough to actually play test game on.