Rivendell: Build Log

As my largest and most complex micro yet, the build process for Rivendell was especially interesting. I started off by just messing around with various building designs, trying to figure out if and how I could capture the Elven aesthetic in micro-scale. These two images were my main source of inspiration, particularly the left sides. I spent a day working without any success, the next couple days went better as I was able to put together the sections shown below.

All of the above sections were based off of specific buildings or portions of buildings in Rivendell. I continued working on buildings, developing them more and combining their pieces in a place holder fashion to see how things fit together.

Things moved along well at this point, with the main difficulties being getting the models sturdy enough to work with on their makeshift stands. Due to using a few rarer colors for roofs, I used black as a temporary color when needed. As you can see, I used a variety of column designs, and switched from studs up to studs down often throughout various buildings.

Now that I had the main buildings roughed out well, I would need to start fitting them into the landscape. The bridge is the only building set at an angle to the base, and the water section that goes with it also ended up being angled.

I started the landscape with the waterfalls by the bridge, and was pretty pleased with how they turned out. The bottom 2 studs of the waterfall are rotated off of the top section, in order to try and give the waterfalls more of a flowing appearance.

Here is how I attached that portion. It ended up working nicely, and is quite sturdy.

Since the water is angled, I used some SNOT slopes to cover gaps between the standard base sections.

Building the landscape after the buildings made things rather challenging at times. Especially trying to keep the model quite solid while still figuring out the landscape shape, waterfall locations, and so on. Instead of building up like normal, at this point I was really building down and out from under the buildings.

After this main front building was incorporated into the landscape, things got a little simpler as it was easier to figure out where all the other buildings fit, and the landscape style was already established. I left plenty of studs exposed for tree connection points later on.

I used some large filler plates to establish the model’s footprint, with the back building complex up on stilts so I could see how it fit.

The large staircase leading up to the back right building has the river flowing right underneath it, which was a little tricky to plan, but ended up working out nicely.

The SNOT grill brick staircase design has been used often before in micro creations, but I was happy with how smoothly I was able to incorporate them, and they’re held snugly in place.

Lots more rockwork building to do on the other side. It went very quickly at this point though.  It also gives a nice view of the angled water section over by the bridge.

And now the landscape is completely roughed out, and just waiting on parts for the trees.

A simple cheese slope roof for the main part of the back building allowed me to incorporate a pattern with dark tan and sand blue. You may also notice that the left back tower was modified slightly, as I decided bley tiles looked better than the white tiles previously used.

The next step was to add the black base. Fortunately the back side of Rivendell is a flat wall, which allowed me to stand the model up on it’s back to work on the base.

Finished base in place! Fairly standard SNOT construction with slopes made it easy to match the landscape shape.

Then some parts arrived for the trees!

After I knew how many parts for trees I had to work with, I finished the landscape with more dark green and olive green accents where needed.