Realistic Scenery Vol.21

The first video for the year 2020 and it's a beauty! It's definitely my favorite river scene I've built so far...

Surprisingly it didn't take all that long to build, I think altogether I spent about 18 hours building the model but that includes making nearly 20 trees which was a whole day in itself!

Below you'll find the full tutorial video that is full of new tips, tricks and techniques that I haven't shown in previous videos.

I think the biggest takeaway from this diorama is the choice or resin that was used to create the water effect. 
Commonly Envirotex Lite or the Woodland Scenics Deep Pour Water is used to model rivers similar to this however they are only good for river depths up to 1cm deep... The river on this model was over 2cm at its deepest point!
The resin I used was AA Composites Deep Cast Clear Epoxy Resin and it is used for making wooden river tables. It was perfect because it has a low curing temperature and it can be poured to create very deep rivers.

If I were to use Envirotex Lite for this river it would certainly have cured much too hot and likely caused the surface to crack, I did some preliminary tests and found with deep pours of Envirotex it can melt plastic and foam as well as crack and introduce large heat bubbles as it cures.

The bear, photographer and fish were all 3D printed on the Nova 3D 'Elfin' printer, as you can see it did an amazing job on the HO scale photographer! Even the intricate detail on his face was printed well, I just need to work on my painting skills!

Talking about painting skills... I have a friend that is well worth checking out, Eric from Manscale Models on Facebook is an award winning model aircraft builder and his Facebook feed is packed full of tips and projects he's been working on: https://www.facebook.com/manscale/

One of my favorite techniques in this video is the fish, I spent ages trying to figure out how to submerge the fish under the water and it wasn't until a watched a video from HMS2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEgki4IYB5I where he made a small fish tank that I got the idea to make small stems to mount the individual fish onto.
It worked a treat and while the execution was different from HMS2 it was his video that sent me in the right direction.

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