We present you an article about the winning piece of scenery in the Freak Wars contest, written by its author, Manuel Canteras Campos.
All of this scenery is made with recycled materials from various sources in the Scratch Attack style (the best scratch scenery channel that can be found) and illuminated with LEDs and Arduino. The use of the latter is thanks to the information provided by the Custom Wargames channel (the genius of lights and impossible effects).
This set recreates a supposedly abandoned hospital that the members of the Fifth Reich used as a center for experimentation with mutards. It has an operating room, an experimentation room, a morgue, a cell to hold mutants, a control room, a helipad with a helicopter, an elevator, and a mutated hunter car.
OPERATING ROOM
The operating room, like the rest of the rooms, is made of foam board. The texture of the exterior wall is achieved with a mixture of white glue, very fine sand and a little water. The shelves that you see placed on the wall are calculator keys turned upside down. This allows you to have a large number of shelves with ease. The sink uses a thick flexible wire as a faucet. The sink itself is another calculator key emptied with a cutter and pliers and the drain is the body of a syringe needle. The handles for the hot water and cold water are cut-out pin heads. The stretcher is made with pieces of a blister pack cut and glued to give the desired shape and size. The IVs are hoods of injectable medications glued to a piece of wood, a plastic stick and a circular base that I took from disassembling a tipex. The closet on the right hanging on the wall is a piece of a toy that only had to be painted to simulate rust. The heart rate indicator consists of a television from Custom Wargames made of transparent resin and to which an acetate sheet has been glued with the drawing of the typical wave that indicates the heartbeat. To insert a flashing LED, you have to make a hole in the back of the television. It is not enough to put the LED on the back. It has to be inside the TV for the light to be realistic. The base of the TV is made from the body of a spool of thread and an arc-shaped piece from construction toys. All the doors in the building are flaps of 3 and ½ computer diskettes. The glass on the door is pieces of the protective plastic from my work table. The door signs are acetate sheets printed with a laser printer.
The most striking piece is the mutated x-ray viewer. The x-rays themselves are made in the same way as the door signs. The structure of the machine is made with construction toy parts, taking advantage of the fact that I found several translucent ones. To complete the furniture I used two small cabinets like the one hanging on the wall. The machine’s light comes from a USB bulb placed on the top of the furniture. This bulb gives much more light than one or more LEDs would give and gives a more realistic feeling.
Lastly, the neon tube on the ceiling is actually a rectangular mechanical pencil lead tube. Placing an LED on each side and introducing a cylinder of baking paper inside gives the very realistic sensation of a real neon tube.
EXPERIMENTATION ROOM
The bulbs are made from medication caps and hollow plastic tubes. The LEDs they have are blue and highlight the fluorescent pigments.
The barrels on the right and their contents (man with thumbs up and tentacles) are from Custom Wargames. The base on which they rest is a two-pin landline telephone connector. The center and top piece are pieces of various toys.
The central machine is made with a piece that simulated the cabin and engine of a car but placed vertically instead of horizontally. The spiral where the mutard’s head is placed is the spring of a battery holder. The mutant itself is a miniature zombie to which I added some homemade tentacles made of putty. The colored tubes are eye drops, an idea that I already used two years ago in the beverage dispenser in the HARD RAT set.
To the right of the room you can see some hanging tentacles made by hand with green putty and nailed with pins.
The liquid chamber is made using two small plastic sprayers. By cutting off the upper part where the spray button is and gluing the lower part of another similar sprayer to it to act as the roof of the capsule, it would be finished. It has two circular trims at the top and bottom that serve to cover the joining joints and give it stability.
The liquid is water in which I have dissolved a yellow highlighter. It is not necessary to place fluorescent LEDs on the base of this camera. The normal light of an LED itself shines so powerfully with the fluorescent liquid. I already used this idea in the Mutant Fountain/Garden drum from last year’s contest.
MORGUE
The morgues are made with pillboxes painted to simulate metal. The lamp is three identical medicine caps. The light comes from orange LEDs to combine with the blue of the room. The autopsy table lying flat is the plastic sheet that comes with a cream that already has the lines engraved on it and the base (which cannot be seen) is a plug from another cream.
CONTROL ROOM
The control room is made up of resin televisions from Custom Wargames and uses the same system as the heart rate monitor in the operating room. The difference is that the LEDs used come from electric candles whose tinkling simulates the interferences and deficiencies of the electric current.
The maps that give atmosphere on the walls are actually printed in black and white and hand-painted with inks because at that time I did not have the possibility of printing them in color. As a curiosity, I will mention that the guard’s chair is a car seat on whose base I glued the car’s steering wheel itself to give the sensation of a swivel chair.
MOUTHBUSTER CAR
Almost all of the car accessories are simple. The semicircles with teeth are cut tipex wheels as well as the bumper barrel. The back part is the part of a tractor on another scale and here it would be used as a holding area for the mutard after hunting it.
The most laborious thing was making the crossbow, since it is made from scratch. Toothpicks and a slightly thicker piece of wood to make the body, the piece of tape used to spread the product serves as a hold for the bolt, a plastic candy tube and a necklace bead serve as a support. The bolt wears a chain from a necklace. The support where the chain is tangled is a plastic stick and the sides again come from a medicine which I obtained and also used for the morgue table. It already comes with the two holders for the stick.
Printing the 5th Reich logo in black and white, you only had to paint it with rust to put it on the doors and give the last detail.
ELEVATOR
It is made with a piece of a cistern used as a tube to raise the cabin, two pieces of plastic joined with toothpicks to make the cabin itself and a crane on top to give the effect of a forklift converted into an elevator.
HELIPORT
On the roof of the building, between the elevator crane and the control room, there is a helipad where the muttard hunter helicopter lands.
The floor is made of a rubber kitchen mat and, underneath it, the cables for the four flashing lights on the landing strip are hidden, which is nothing more than the ventilation grille of a computer’s power supply. In one of the photos you can see the moment when I had to tear up the entire floor because an LED had burned out (these things happen).
The helicopter is modified from a very basic toy with corrugated cardboard, toothpicks, a piece that simulated a grill that I don’t remember its origin, a circular piece of a tipex, chains and metallic paint. The cell that the helicopter carries is made with two milk caps and toothpicks.
CELL FOR MUTARDS
The mutant cell is located at the back of the building. It’s where they store the mutants before doing the experiments. Barbed wire is strips of mosquito netting. If a single thread is cut, the remains of the transverse strips remain and give the sensation of being the barbs of the wire. It’s fast and effective.
Inside there are mattresses and boxes of Custom Wargames and a mutant in the corner who is marking in chalk on the wall the days he has been locked up and has prepared a gallows in case he can’t take it anymore. The door is made with corrugated cardboard, wood and mosquito netting.
LIGHTS
The lights are placed throughout the diorama in two different ways. While it is true that it takes time, it is not at all complicated if you control a couple of very basic concepts.
The fixed lights are all linked together by cables hidden or shown in the diorama, as long as their presence was justified. Lamps, spotlights and flickering television lights are part of the same circuit that ends in a USE cable to be able to connect to a battery or a socket with this input.
The second group of lights is made up of the four lights on the helipad and the blinking light in the operating room. Those are programmed to blink that way and for this I have used an Arduino motherboard (a type of small computer that can be programmed), which must be programmed to do these effects. You can watch the Custom Wargames video explaining how to use it. Everything that is needed appears in that video.
The motherboard is partially shown in the diorama. It can be seen in the photo of the helicopter cell inside a room. The Arduino itself has lights so I thought it was a good idea to use them on the scenery itself.
For the column of the building and to hide the cables I used several tubes of chocolate candy.
This is all. Thanks to Custom Wargames for the material for the scenery and for making us modeling fans not settle, teaching us that things can shine and move in a simple way. Thanks to Scratch Attack for organizing the contest and valuing my work, for being the most charismatic scenography channel in the world, for making what is already fun even more fun and for that accumulation of ideas that have inspired so many people between smiles and smiles. And, of course, a thousand thanks to Punkapocalyptic for designing this great game, for blowing our minds and encouraging us followers to feel included in the progress of the game itself by contributing ideas and work.
