Hex Terrain Tiles

***UPDATE 2024-09-12: I added some river pieces that will go along hexsides instead of through the center of a hex.  These river pieces have “awesome” in the name.  There's a curved section, a Y-intersection, and a river mouth.

***UPDATE 2021-02-19 I added a blaze hex marker. It's a fiery ring, scaled to allow it to fit within a 4" / 100mm hex, with a hollow center to allow terrain or miniatures to fit within. "And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire..."

***UPDATE 2020-10-12 I added several different stone bridge hexes for crossing the river!

***UPDATE 2020-09-30 I added a rubble hex and a cobblestone hex (10mm scale). I also added a hexagonal stone tower that precisely fits a 4" hex (again 10mm scale).

***UPDATE 2020-08-26 I added hill hexagons with a 1" (25mm) height.

A first pass at making some terrain to go with the Kallistra wargaming tiles that I have. I cannot endorse their hex tiles enough. They're my favorite wargaming terrain product:

https://www.kallistra.co.uk/

The hex terrain is 100mm from flat edge to flat edge. I plan to make river/road hexes, slopes, and any other single-hex terrain that takes my fancy. Feel free to make requests.

I will add additional slope hexagons to this collection (for 1, 2, and 3 "high sides" slopes). The first set of slopes will mate to a single hex tile height. I may later make slopes to match up with higher tile stacks, if there's demand.

I will also add various river/road curves, junctions, and end caps. May also make some single-hex hills, ponds, marshes, etc.

How I Designed This

Making the Slopes

The only software program I used was Blender, which is free. I started by making a basic hexagon tile template. I created a "cylinder," but I limited it's number of sides to 6, creating a regular hexagon. I adjusted its dimensions so that the hexagon would be 100mm (~ 4 inches, "units" in Blender terms) from flat edge to flat edge, and 3mm high.

I then did some planning, thinking about how hill/slope tiles would need to tessellate (interconnect together). Each slope hex would need a certain number of "high" sides and a certain number of "low" sides. I thought of every possible combination and orientation and listed them out on paper. These ranged from "0," where all of the hex sides are low, but the middle is high, to "6," where all sides are high, and therefore the tile is just a thicker hexagon. For tiles with 2 through 4 high sides, there are multiple different possible configurations. For example, if 2 sides are high, the two high sides could be directly adjacent, could have one hex side between them, or could be directly opposite one another (3 different configurations). I made a design for each of these configurations.

One of the "gotchas" of the process was figuring out that I needed to determine whether each vertex (i.e. corner) of the hexagon was "high" or "low," and whether the midpoint of each hex side should be high or low. I kept the number of vertices describing the tile to the absolute minimum at this point. This point is complex and a little tough to explain in writing.

To give each hex a plateau effect, so that there would be a flatter area in the center of each slope, I described a smaller hexagon shape of points in the center of each hex tile. The vertices of this central hex were each halfway between the center point and the vertices at the outside of the hex tile. For each tile, I made this central, smaller hexagonal region "high." I then went around the edge of the tile, and depending on which slope configuration I was creating, I raised the vertices along the top of the outside edge of the hex (at each "point" of the hexagon, and at the center of each hex side). See the screenshot I've attached for an example of what one of these basic tiles would look like. The basic design of the hex tile is important, and I would need to includes some drawings or screenshots of the file in-progress to really explain it well.

After creating and saving each of the basic slope shapes, the next step was to "rough-up" the surface of each tile. I used the Subdivide tool in Blender to make the top surface of each hex tile more complicated (i.e. give the top surface many more faces to work with). Then I used Blender's sculpting tool to randomly draw all over the top surface of the tile. This had an effect similar to slathering sculpting putty all over the surface. Then I used the flatten sculpting brush to smooth out the random mess I'd made, making the slope look organic. I particularly focused on sculpting over and smoothing out the hard line edges.

Another "gotcha" I encountered was caused by this sculpting step. My sculpting process ended up affecting the bottom surface of each tile, causing the bottom to no longer be totally flat. This caused an issue with printing, as the bottom surface of each tile wasn't flush with the print bed. The result was that the corners of the tiles tended to "peel upwards" when printing. I discovered this issue and manually reset the bottoms of each tile to be totally flat.

Category: Games