When I first had my idea of my meadow tiles it was extremely simple: basic empty hex tiles with bumps for stepping stones. But that would be a rather barren grassy waste-land, nice for a very scary adventure I guess but very boring in the long run.

the basic idea of the picket fence tiles

I had some ideas for other things to create, but I am still developing my Blender skills and most of them are still a bit too challenging and I do want to give myself reachable goals. So I started to think: what can I make that only requires basic shapes?

Simple: a fence!

picket fences, freshly printed

I did some google-research about meadow fences and it turns out meadows have a serious lack of fences. They do have those stone walls made from lots and lots of stones stack on each other, but I wanted a fence. So I decided that ‘English Country Garden’ is very suitable to be added to my ‘Meadow’ stuff, and started creating a white picket fence. Don’t ask me why, I like those little white picket fences.

Shaping the fences was not too hard; some horizontal beams with pointy tops and a vertical beam, and there you go: picket fence.

picket fences need gates

The most challenging part was putting them on the tiles properly. The straight lines need to connect in order to look like a complete fence and not loose bits. All the corner-variations needed to be there, and every time I thought ‘I got them’ I found a new corner-type I lacked. And then there was the 2-tile diagonal horror that needed a mirrored version which was a lot of fiddling around to get that right.

When I finally thought I was done I remembered that little fences need little gates. Those were fun to make!

And then I thought I was done and suddenly thought that in order for the gates to look good with the stepping stones tiles I also needed gates with stepping stones.

But now at last I have my little picket fence tiles. I have just uploaded my picket fence tiles and they can be downloaded from MyMiniFactory.

goats in a picket fence field

This does not mean I am done with the meadow theme, I have a list of things I want to make. I do not know if I will actually make everything from the list, but I really, really want labyrinth-hedges and a duck-pond.

And a gazeebo.

By Diona

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.