Foamcore: The Emperor's Building Material

Maybe it's not in the fluff or part of a Dan Abnett pre-Heresy novel, but in my world of 40K, the Emperor has established foamcore as the de facto building material. Here's a few reasons why I use it so often...

1. It provides strength without weight. The stuff is super light-weight, but sturdy enough to support the weight of models and of the building structure.


2. It provides a realistic thickness when used for buildings. I've used cardboard and plasticard for buildings, but both look unrealistically thin (as unrealistic as a toy sci-fi building can look). I imagine buildings in the war-torn 41st millenium to be quite beefy and foamcore fits that look.

3. It's a great material to put battle damage on. With the cover of paper on the outside and foam on the inside, bullet and mortar damage can be made to look very convincing. A pin vise to create bullet holes looks great because of the depth that you can drill into the material without punching through to the other side. Using an x-acto to poke a hole and then spin around in an uneven circular motion create great mortar blasts. After it's painted, the foam can take on the look of destroyed concrete in the wall and the paper the ripped through wall covering.

4. Ruin walls benefit from the paper/foam layers. Similar to the battle damage idea, the walls on ruins can have lots of character due to the layers of material. I've done some ruins where I strip the outer layer of paper off and let most of the inside paper intact. Once painted, the exterior looks like concrete texture and the inside like walls with their covering (wallpaper, paint, etc.) coming off to reveal the concrete underneath.

5. It is an inexpensive material. I've been using the same full size sheet for the last two years. If I remember correctly, the sheet is a 2x4 sheet for around $3. In addition to buildings, I use scrap pieces as rubble and as part of some of my more elaborate bases.

Those are just a few reasons. As I said earlier, I tried using plasticard, but didn't find it to be as easy to manipulate and it was much more expensive. Cardboard is a free commodity (I've got two shelves filled with cereal and cracker boxes), but it doesn't provide as many of the building options as foamcore.