Here is a piece of terrain that I made as the centerpiece of a 3 part 40k campaign that Rich and I ran years ago for 4th edition (yes, that's a while ago!). It was called "And those without sight shall see".
I will try to post some of the scenario rules and campaign maps over the next few days, and even some of the battle pictures.
Obviously, it was all about the warp gate. This was made with foam core, pink foam, bits, plasticard, and polystyrene tubing. I don't have any WIP photos (sorry guys!)
Of course, the most fun was painting the actual gate! What a blast.
Here's the gate with some scratch sculpted Sisters of Battle. There are some regular Sisters, as well as some Seraphim. I did a blog post on them a while back, so you can do a search on them using the search function on the left hand column.
As you can see, you can do a lot of nice effects without getting too fancy. I didn't have very long to make this piece of terrain. It does help having a mat cutter, especially for cutting the foam core. However, you can find foam core cutters, which you could also use with one of those metal rulers...
We played out this campaign with Chaos (Rich) vs my Demonhunters. The final battle was a pure bloodbath, as all 40k fights seems to be!
The Sisters were sculpted from scratch with green stuff. The iron halos were done by bending some poly styrene flat tubing (an interesting experiment!).
So, I will try to gather up those images and the scenario rules, etc. I think Cathy and Rich played out the same campaign with her Dark Angels vs his Chaos. It went quite differently!!