#11 - Modelling - Derelict Town 2

In this post I will explain how I created the scenery for my derelict town. Firstly, I put up a fence around the garage building. I shaped a cube into a standard flat fence shape, used the multi-cut tool to cut out the point on the top, and then positioned it just touching the garage. Once it was in place, I used the duplicate special tool to add another 39 copies of this fence running straight away from the garage, leaving a reasonable amount of space for a garage parking area. To position them correctly I set the translate distance on the Z axis to 1.357, which is the depth of the original fence.

I then added one more fence in, rotated it 90 degrees, and then duplicated that another 120 times on the Z axis. Next, I began work on the road by creating two connections across the floor object, dragging them to the edge, then extruding the face between them downwards. I added a long, thin cuboid to the top, then duplicated that 14 times down the road, to look like road markings. I am unsure why the road appears black but for this purpose it is beneficial, as it gives the road a modern tarmac look.

The next step was to add in some general objects for scenery, such as the bins which I made from a cylinder (extruding the top face's center vertex down into the object), which I then positioned strewn around the area outside the garage. I also added a workbench/table in the corner of the house to add a little bit of presence to the building, despite it being derelict and abandoned. This is emphasised by the lack of objects on the table. I made the table using five cuboids, one for the surface and four for the legs, which were duplicated from the first leg and positioned aligned around the bottom surface of the first cuboid. I then grouped the five objects together and moved them into the building at once, increasing their size slightly as well. Looking back, it might have been easier to add divisions to the bottom of one cuboid, adjust them to make four squares in each corner, then extrude them out together. This way only one object would have been used and there would be no need for grouping.

I had quite a few issues when trying to add the second road going to the left past the garage. I tried to add two connections onto the floor object, then extrude the resulting face down, as I did with the first road, but for some reason the face wouldn't move down. I then tried adding the edges with the multi-cut tool, and it still did not work. Finally, I tried creating a road shaped cuboid, and used the boolean tool to cut out a chunk of the floor object, but that also didn't work. There was just always a face making the floor flat and even. After a good few minutes of deleting random edges and faces that must have appeared without me noticing or forgetting to delete them, I finally managed to get the floor to a point where it seemed to be just one object, then tried the boolean difference tool again and it worked. In the future, I need to make sure I'm deleting everything I'm not using, or anything that fails, so there is less to cause further failures. I expect that any of the three methods I originally tried to create the road would have worked at this point.

Now, the first version of my derelict town is complete. It looks similar enough to my sketch, and although there is lots of space still to add things, I am going to come back at a later date and create models such as benches, or trees, or even destroyed cars, which are too advanced for me to spend time creating right now. I could add in simple things but that would just involve recycling the same tools and techniques which I am already comfortable with, instead of moving on to more advanced things.