Tyranid terrain

[Evil Eye]

The FW Tyranid terrain pieces are as we all know rather spectacular but unfortunately also rather hard to acquire due to being out of production for years now, and only available from nefarious recasters. As a Tyranid player it'd be neat to have some nice looking bio structures to plonk down on the board, so this is a thread for us to share ideas and resources for making/acquiring suitably grotesque Tyranid terrain.

 

For pre-made stuff there's the Micro Art Studios foam terrain pieces. I've seen these in person and they look awesome, and are decently priced too. My only concern is that being foam I don't know if certain paints would react badly with them. I also found a 3D printing person on Etsy who makes really nice resin modular terrain, though naturally it is more expensive.

 

As far as pre-made stuff that isn't meant for wargaming but could fit in nicely, there's a few options. The old Heroclix Marro Hives are extremely Tyranidesque, though they are a little hard to get a hold of nowadays. Likewise there's those Mega Bloks Dragon egg things, which were used as Mycetic Spores before the advent of the Tyrannocyte and would make excellent bio-structures IMO. Semi related, the NECA Alien figures, due to their large size, gribbly sculpting, (relatively) low prices and extreme fragility are quite good sources of parts for kitbashed terrain.

 

One material I think could be very useful for making repulsive biological growths is expanding foam, which tends to form a very nice fleshy texture when it sets. Likewise, dried seed heads (lotus and poppy especially) make for excellent materials for scatter terrain.

Anyway, what do you guys think?

[Mendi Warrior]

Best to avoid spray paint with foam and test on a spare before going all in. I'm sure Micro Art Studios can give advice regarding which paints to use with their foam terrain pieces, I wouldn't hesitate to ask.

 

To the ones you listed, I would add the following two:

 

- The Tyranid infestation/hive nodes from the Battle for Macragge set for inspiration or to pimp larger pieces.

 

- For inspiration only, the material advertised during the Bio-Craft kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hitestudios/bio-craft-supersized-sci-fi-gaming-terrain-or-3d-s

 

Strictly DIY, a long time ago, I saw some Tyranid terrain made using a glue gun. A google search returned this link to a tutorial on dakkadakka, which I think is probably what a saw back then https://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/How_to_make_Tyranid_Buildings_with_a_Hot_Glue_Gun_%28Tutorial%29

It seems pretty effective and should not be too expensive except in terms of time. Insulation foam can probably be used as a basis too.

[Kallas]

For foam, one thing you could do is give it a good coating of PVA glue. Water it down and use it almost like a paint; get the whole thing covered decently (though not too thickly, of course) and then you can spray it to your heart's content!

[Arson Fire]

PVA glue and superglue react together to create veiny organic looking textures.  You can use this to easily add alien growths to objects.

Here's a pretty good video I found the other day demonstrating this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzIna2jRNgs

[logan_grimnar18]

Here's a link to some I found. To me, they look nearly identical to the ones GW uses in their alien forest tables

 

https://craftworlddesigns.com/shop?olsPage=products%2Falien-such-as-tyranid-terrain-warhammer-40k-capillary-tower-terrain-spires