Advent Calendar 25

MERRY XMAS EVERYONE!

For those celebrating, have a happy happy holiday!

For everyone else, we can still treat you to a new advent calendar door, right?

Recently I was interviewed on the Third Floor Wars podcast about Carnevale, and all things TTCombat. It’s a pretty good listen if you’ve got a little time in the kitchen cooking today!

Anyway, in that episode, I mentioned a BIG Carnevale MDF build I’ve been working on in secret for a little while. And… well, you want to see?

I’ve made the Rialto Bridge!

Well… sort of. It’s still very much WIP. This was designed to be a big show piece that I started at the end of last year. But then… well we haven’t had much in the way of shows this year, so it’s been sat in the wings!

Want some step by steps?

The first stage was to measure out the Rialto Bridge. It’s pretty well documented, so I was able to figure out some pretty good measurements. Then I translated those into both X and Y axis layouts to start building.

The first step was to block out the basics. This is where we start most builds, no matter how ludicrously big!

Next up is starting to detail. Figuring out how much space goes between each step was pretty tricky! I’ve decided to try to make the bridge as modular as possible, able to be taken apart for storage and transport.

One of the nice things about this bridge is that it has four way symmetry! That means I only had to design one corner of it, then I can mirror everything for the three other corners. Handy!

At this stage all the buildings are done, and I was working on how exactly they’re supported. Each of these buildings is separate, making 12 in total.

This bit took a while. Like… quite a while. At least I only have to do half though!

You can also just about see some of the supports underneath the buildings. This thing is going to be reallllly heavy, so needs some decent support at the bottom.

The final part is the centre of the bridge, with the large archways. This was probably the trickiest bit to make look real-life accurate. Whenever we design from historical settings (if you can really call Carnevale “historical” anymore) is trying to match everything up. MDF has a certain level of abstraction, as there are things you just cannot do with the material. And making miniatures has another level of abstraction, so it’s a bit of a tug of war between making things realistic and making them so you won’t have to spend 100 hours building tiny fiddly pieces on the thing!

And that’s where we are!

Actually, that’s not quite true, I’m a little way further than that at the moment, but you’ll have to wait until next year to see the changes.

The biggest change since these pictures is the size. Unfortunately after finishing this off, I realised I’d wildly overestimated the size it should be in game! It’s a pretty faithful scaling down of the bridge, but in order to actually be playable and look good with the miniatures, it has to be a fair bit smaller.

For reference, this one turned out at just over 5ft long, but it’s getting resized so that the whole bridge will be approximately 4’x2′, the perfect size for a game of Escape the Fog!

We’ll be sure to show more progress as the build continues next year. Hopefully we’ll have some shows to attend, and then we can actually cut, assemble, and bring this beast along with us!

And that’s it for today! From all of us here at TTCombat, we wish you all the happiest of holidays, however you choose to spend them. We’re taking a TTCommunity break now until the new year, when we’ll be back with… well with a lot of the stuff we’ve been teasing for the last few weeks!

Oh, for those of you hoping for a Blood on the Water spoiler, how about a sketch of the book cover?

We put BotW on hold throughout most of 2020 lockdown, but we’ve been quietly working behind the scenes, so should have more to share with you next year. We’ll have another 50 WIP Wednesdays to fill, after all!

Happy holidays, and we’ll see you all in 2021.