Sirrob01

The Cardboard Warriors forum hoard 104 was Xmas Wars and as I’ve always wanted to try my hand at creating some terrain I thought some Snow Tundra tiles would be a nice start. It turned out to not be as easy as I hoped as getting some form of texture into a white snow background is very challenging.

First up I sorted through my skiing photos looking for a good snow texture, unfortunately real snow when used as a texture looks very boring basically you may as well just go and cut out 6 inch squares from plain white card. So I took a segment of particularly interesting textured snow from one of my photos, duplicated it and then bump mapped and played around with the colours until I got a base texture I was pretty happy with. I then added an overlay of irregular white shapes to represent blown snow drifts and then finally placed on some rocks, logs, grass tops and a frozen pond (sorry no river it was beyond me, plus no time). I’m fairly happy with how the tiles turned out although the shadows around the rocks didn’t really work the way I wanted but overall they look good on the table. I turned the whole thing into a layered PDF and with the bits I’ve put in you can get about 8-9 fairly unique tiles.

Ready for Xmas Wars miniatures to be deployed

I also put together a quick snow covered tri-fold pine tree, I changed the colour a little on the tree so there is a green/green tree and blue/green tree in 3 sizes; 5 3/4, 4 3/4 and 3 inch tall versions. I only had time to put together one tree texture so all the versions use the same texture but I’m very happy with how they turned out as I don’t think there are any snow covered pine trees out there in the war gaming paper tree world. I did make the little 1/3 base circle bits separate so if you like you can easily integrate my trees with one of the commercial snow terrain sets around the place.

Three Sizes of Snow Covered Pine Trees

I’ll be including my Snow Tundra tiles in hoard 104 but they are available below  for download as well. I’ve included both a Cameo and SD cutfiles,  Unfortunately I cant test the Cameo file so use with caution, if they do work okay please let me know in the comments below.

The below is a zip file but I’ve had to rename it as an odt so right click save as and then rename the extension .zip once downloaded.

All Zipped – Sirrob01 Snow Tile Final

I’ve only put the cutfiles in the zip as I have rename those anyways but below are just the PDF’s.

PDF – Snow Tiles and Pine Trees

PDF Instructions – Pine Tree Instructions

Enjoy 🙂