Tuscany Hill Village Terrain Build

This will be a stylised village but I need to think about the buildings that I need to include. My thinking is I need at least some of the following,

• Church. Italy is a deeply religious country and every village has at least one church. This really should be the dominant building and needs to have a tall bell tower
• Town hall
• Town square with well or fountain
• A tower. Towers are a feature of hill villages!
• A couple of bigger, ‘posher’ buildings
• A selection of two and three storied town houses of various sizes to create the ‘random’ look

That should be enough to get an Italian village feel.

To make these in MDF, I plan to make them as ‘flat pack’. This means disassembling the buildings into a jigsaw that, when put together will make a 3d building. I think, with some careful planning, I can design some basic principles that can be adapted to make the more complex buildings. Once I have the designs, I can send them to a lazer cutting service

3d Jig Saws

I found a company online (Razor Lab) that will take files and pass them through their laser cutter. To use this service, I need to use their standard material, 3mm thick mdf.

I had planned to start with a basic house to test some principles but cost of materials made it a better option to go for a bigger building. And I’m impatient and wanted to see what I could achieve. So I started with the church and found I had room on the material for a town well.

Basic Principles

mdf doesn’t really support curves, at least not with my limited level of ability and experience (I’m not 4Ground!). So I need to keep to straight lines and right angles where possible.

I’ll need joining points for each piece, so will need to build in tabs. I plan to keep these uniform across all of the models, that way, I can’t get confused. I also plan to design the floor layer to have the same corner tab configuration and size, again to reduce the risk of error.

I’m going to do all of this in the free software Inkscape. I like free…