Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Tutorial - Plasma Cut Texture



Working on Orkifying a looted vehicle or want to add some repairs to battle damage on your vehicles?  You may want to give the illusion that a piece of metal was cut to size with a plasma cutter.  Here I will show you how I get that unique texture that a hand held plasma cutter will leave behind.

For this project you will need a hobby knife and some sheet styrene.  I prefer a thickness of 1mm or thicker for this.  You could use a thinner sheet but the texture we are trying to achieve will be less pronounced and harder to read.

Start by cutting off a piece of styrene to your desired size.  Perhaps you are covering a hole or adding additional armour to a tank.  Either way, make sure the piece is cut to the size and shape you want for the final piece as any resizing done later will negate all the work you did to create the texture.

Using your hobby knife, make a series of cuts running perpendicular to the styrene. I do this by tapping a fresh blade along the sides of the styrene. Do so with a slight angle and a random spacing. These cuts should not go very deep, perhaps a quarter of a millimeter. Continue this around the circumference of the piece.

Next, repeat the technique but with an opposite angle to your strokes.  As you do this you should start to see little pieces of styrene get cut away revealing slight grooves around the sides of the piece.

Repeat this process until you achieve the desired result.

Here are some examples of this technique applied to a looted Leman Russ I'm working on.




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