North African House

Dio72 is a new range of diorama items that has just been released by Reality in Scale. For the moment the range covers buildings for all the major theatres of World War II.
This set represents a building with a main door that has a horseshoe arch, also called the Moorish arch, originally developed by the Visigoths and later by the Umayyads. This style could be seen all over the Caliphate and adjacent areas, and was adopted by the successor Muslim emirates of the peninsula, as well as by the Almoravids, Almohads and the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. In addition to their use across the Islamic world, horseshoe arches became popular in Western countries at the time of the Moorish Revival. (Source: Wikipedia.)
For the modeler this means that this building can be used from Spain to the Middle East, giving it a large appeal.

The set contains 4 pieces, three cast in grey and one in brown resin. It seems Reality in Scale is using resin casting technology that is state of the art, as - even though the brown part is a massive block - no warping is present on the parts, not a single air bubble was found and detail is very crisp. Apart from removing three casting blocks on the grey parts, there will be no clean-up required whatsoever, meaning that, after priming, painting can start straightaway.

While the grey parts have detail on both sides, the brown part is solid, with a flat back. In our scale, diorama items that have detail on both sides are rather rare, with companies using open molds. Most of the time this results in a visible back-side of the walls, where the texture is rough and devoid of detail. Basically, this mean that you only get half a building and that you have to scratch the other side yourself. Dio72 has opted for another formula, where the building is solid, with a clean backside, making it ideal as a backdrop of a scene, without actually integrating the interior of the building in the scene.

All in all, a very nice set.

Sample kit kindly provided by Dio72.

Article Last Updated: 11 May 2013