WIP Wednesday: Hovertrain Car Colors

It’s WIP Wednesday here at 3DRPG Studios in sunny Chandler, AZ, and today, we’re going to share our progress on the color scheme for The Forgotten Rails hovertrain cars. Not gonna lie — this step has been quite the challenge. Hopefully, by sharing our notes and examples, we’re saving you some valuable TTRPG crafting time. All aboard!

When it comes to finalizing a DnD terrain’s paint scheme, seeing is believing. Thus, we’ve done many tests and had many spirited debates about what looks best. However, we can all agree that one’s craft time is limited, so we have to balance aesthetics with time (and money).

DM Ben wants his hovertrain terrain to be modular. Meaning for any given encounter, he wants to see all his completed hovertrain cars and then choose which ones fit the narrative. Let’s take a moment to blame Aether Studios here! They have some much frickin’ good content that we printed a lot of cars…and we could keep going! This pic here isn’t even all the train cars we’ve done!

As we shared last week, we have a lot of fun and engaging hovertrain cars, FDM printed and assembled. Now we simply need to stop second-guessing ourselves and just run with a couple of preferred paint schemes (metal vs. wood). 

Let’s set The Forgotten Rails scene: their mighty hovertrains are gigantic, mechanized beasts whose propulsion-style engines kick up a lot of dirt and grime as they roar through the Sword Coast. Naturally, those outdoor elements can adhere to the train cars. It’s not quite as bad as a Coal miner because that wouldn’t be good for business. 😉

Still, think of it like the trains from the wild, wild West days. Dirt, dust, grease, rust, and all manners of yuck “stick” to the train cars. Things were just messy in general back then. This is, after all, a new frontier!

Disclaimer: We’re showing you our novice secondary train car paint job alongside professional painter Laughing Bear Games’ brilliant engine paint scheme. That’s like pairing one of our painted miniatures with the Mona Lisa! Go easy on us, please. We’re using every millimeter of the Arm’s Length Rule here. 😉

First, let’s review the first type of car: the panel car exterior. We liked the idea of a solid color but with an indiscriminate pattern to the look. At first, we were pretty disappointed with this approach, but it turned out that it was because we were judging the paint job without a black wash over it. The solid green looked so flat and dull without it. Once that darker wash was applied, we exhaled and became fans. However, This car took a while and had many steps, so we expect this scheme to evolve over time. We’re all about efficiency here at 3DRPG.

Next, we have the industrial car style. This one is rather steampunk-ish, with all sorts of mechanized gears and cogs. The trick here was to pick a small number of ancillary parts and paint them a nice contrasting copper color. Not too shabby! This hovertrain car example conveys that grimy-feel rather well. It makes sense, though, right? Their lumbering bottom engines kick up all sorts of dust and soot as they hover across the Realm.

Lastly, here’s a combination of the two: panels and mechanized. Do we love it? Not exactly, but we’re cool with it. This one looks like a hovertrain that has successfully traveled many, many hard-fought miles (like Baldur’s-Gate-to-Neverwinter-far). We did a few test pieces with a dark red (vs. the green here), and we plan to mix that one in future train cars.

One thing we learned from our ongoing train research is that all the cars on the train rarely match unless it’s a purely commercial train like Amtrack. The Forgotten Rails is a mixed transit system. One car will hold passengers while another will carry a dead whale carcass, and yet another will move large amounts of dwarven ale. Basically, it’s a hop-on whenever you can sort of hop on a rail line.

Regarding the train car interiors, we’ll continue to simplify the paint scheme (to ensure we ultimately paint everything in a timely manner). Having a large hovertrain pile of shame would make us super sad, as the 3DRPG team has worked tirelessly to bring this hovertrain setting to life! Consequently, we are carrying over that same metal color from the exterior and applying it to the interior (with those same subtle copper touches, too).

Our other floor color will be wood. Larger floor areas will use a nifty scheme we learned on Milestone Heroes’ Discord, but it requires several steps and isn’t as easy to apply in tight spaces. So, we’ll pick and choose which wood color, depending on the train car layout. And we didn’t even mention all the numerous cool hovertrain car doors Aether Studios offers, but we’ll share those in a future post!

So, is it all perfect? Of course not. The key to painting is picking a scheme you’re comfortable with and meshes with your free-time availability and hobby budget. This step of the project can be paralyzing, but we’re here to talk you off the ledge and encourage you to start testing different colors on practice pieces. Then, keep refining until you’re happy with it.

Even better, if you’re not into the experimentation process, we’ll be sharing (yet another) paint guide that shows all the steps, names all the paint products we used, and includes some extra tips and tricks to get these Aether Studios 3D prints onto the game table lickety-split!

Until next time!