Monday 15 October 2012

Scenery: Lock up garages

Introduction

Lock up garages are a common sight in UK towns, often near the slightly older suburbs or housing estates.  They are typically arranged as a detached block, not directly connected to any house and can be found in back lanes or small areas of what would otherwise be waste land.  I don't know if such buildings are found anywhere else in the world, though perhaps any overseas readers could tell me one way or the other.


Originally they were intended for local residents whose properties were too small to have their own garage, but now they might be rented for other purposes.  I've seen local building & construction firms store spare lumber in a lockup, as well as hobbyists who keep a sailing boat or occasionally-used motorbike safe.  Lockups are even used occasionally to store the corpse after a particularly gruesome murder, though that's very much one of the less common things to put in them!

28mm Lockup

This is my paper and foamcore model of a lock up garage.  It's mounted on a 7" square tile and could easily be extended by adding other similar units to the sides and/or facing the doors.  This model is a kitbash; it draws heavily on the Armoury from Worldworks Games (the old Armoury kit, not the newer TerrainlinX one; though that might work as well).

The inside of the model is divided into 3 separate units.  For these, I just resized the walls and door from the repair shop that comes in the Worldworks Armoury kit.  If I was being adventurous then I could have decorated them with shelves, toolboxes and other such clutter, but I suppose I was lazy in this respect.  The floors are simple concrete textures; I cannot remember if they too are from the Armoury kit or from elsewhere.

The outside walls are also taken from the Armoury kit.  In this case, I've chosen to resize a plain brick texture for the sides and rear, though it would be entirely appropriate to have graffiti on some or all instead.

The front wall is probably the most heavily-modified piece.  It started as a plain brick wall, but I've added 3 door frames from the Armoury's garage, somewhat resized.  However, I wanted to make this block look old and tatty and so I didn't want the doors  themselves to be identical.  2 are from the Armoury kit, though one has been lightened up a bit.  The third door is a texture that I found on the internet and resized & cropped appropriately.  I found that searching Google for "metal siding" was the best way of finding such images, though even then it took some effort to find exactly what I wanted.

The Roof

I made the roof for all 3 garages as a single piece; I felt it would have looked messy to create separate covers for each.  This piece is somewhat complicated because I've given it a slight slope from front to back.  Fortunately, my trigonometry is good and it wasn't too hard for me to work out the correct measurements and angles; if I'd been less confident then a flat roof would have been easy and would have worked almost as well.

The sides of the roof are covered with a pattern from a Worldworks kit (can't remember which), somewhat extended and reshaped.  I think they were some form of roof edging originally, so they work well for this purpose.  The roof itself uses more "metal siding" textures.

Gameplay

In games of All Things Zombie, I class each garage as a separate building for the purposes of discovering items or people.  Probably this is a bit generous; it's not that likely that you'd find people in such a storage area.  However, you might find all manner of common stuff, such as building materials (for barricades), cars (possibly part-dismantled!), large tools or who knows what else?

22 comments:

  1. They are brilliant and very useful for a Brit Apocalypse.

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    1. And it would seem from other replies that they could be used stateside as well!

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  2. What a fantastic conversion, Colgar! That is very impressive work, my friend!

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    1. Coming from you, that means a lot! Thanks, Vampifan.

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  3. Here is the US (as far as I've seen) we have such storage areas and they're used for much the same kind of thing. But they are usually built specifically to be rented out.

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    1. We also have commercial "self storage" units in the UK; I think that they would probably be found in a light industrial zone (and might look a lot newer & more uniform as well?)

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  4. What a great bit of scenery - very impressive.

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  5. This was really well done! I thought it was a kit by one of the publishers it's so smoothly put together.

    The storage units are incredibly popular here in the States as well.

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    1. Oddly enough, I discovered just today that there *are* (pre-printed) card kits of units similar to this, but they're aimed at the model railway scene and aren't quite the right size for my purposes. For example: http://www.kingswaymodels.com/page19.htm

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  6. Splendid bit of building - well done that man!

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    1. Thanks again. Though now I'm wondering if 3 lock ups is enough. Maybe I should make some more?

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    2. You should definitely make more.

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    3. I agree! Make more and post them to your followers as a thankyou gift! ;)

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    4. Hah! Nice try, but making up even one of these for each follower would take all my model-making effort for quite some time. Much as I appreciate you all, that's more than I can manage.

      More seriously, if it were just a matter of making the source document for this model available then I would already have done that. However, I don't own the copyright to the original Worldworks kit or to the metal textures it uses. I'm pretty sure that WWG would be upset if I gave away their work, even in modified form!

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    5. WWG has a kit bash program. You can send in your kitbashes, they sell them at reduced prices, and I believe the artist gets a bit of a reward for it.

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    6. That's true, Varangian. Unfortunately, the metal textures that I've used for the roof and one of the doors are neither my own nor do they belong to WWG. Whilst I have no qualms about using them for my own builds, I don't think that it would be right for me (or WWG!) to sell the work of a 3rd party without their knowledge or permission.

      I suppose that I could rework the model to use only WWG's textures (or my own) and then submit it as a kitbash. However that's work which I hadn't anticipated right now. Hmm.

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  7. Really nice and useful scenery, well done!

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    1. Thanks. Seems that I need to build some more, though :-) !

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  8. Hi Hugh, I agree with your stance on copyrighted material, especially where small companies like WWG are concerned.

    On a tangent though, were you aware that Ainsty do a resin 3 garage block? I have one, but it's in storage at the moment :( when I finish my move, I'll put some pics of it on my blog

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    1. No, I didn't know about the block from Ainsty (listed on their web site as "3 Unit Gagage Block Lock Up" [sic]). It's very nice, of course - but expensive to field in large numbers.

      Also, I wasn't aware thwat Ainsty now have some figures in their catalogue. In particular, the "Spy Fi" range has several sets of minions with alternate heads. These are extremely similar to the ones from Crooked Dice, but are much cheaper.

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    2. I'd seen that they did figs, but wasn't aware of the price difference! Thanks for letting me know

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