Piotr Krynski's Efficient Environment Design for Blender #5 The factory

 The First Tower

In this lesson, Piotr quickly builds a factory tower. He uses quick bash-style modelling. Everything was built by eye. He used a reference box to get the scale correct. Texture is just a metal map that isn't even UV unwrapped, because he knows this element is strictly a background object.

Moah towers

This lesson starts with Piotr appraising the first tower. It's 6000 vertices. Perfect for this kind of background element. There isn't a hard and fast rule. Piotr tells the story of a big scene he created that lagged very badly. Eventually, he had to hunt down the cause of the bad performance. It turned out that in a scene full of buildings that each consisted of a few thousand polygons, there was sheets of trash paper on the floor that had 200k polygons.

Greeble object

Took the walkway and used Hard Ops to create a loft style rotation with Rotation 360.

After dicing the object, the result is very cool and unexpected.

Creating some cables. Rather than using Cableator, Piotr demonstrates an old-school technique: create a plane on which to draw curves; this way, you can include a bit of sag, which is much more realistic.

Converts them to mesh. Joins them, then converts back into a curve object.

Correction: Piotr uses Curve Basher.

Texture time.

Piotr grabs some more large texture files and uses them as a kind of trim sheet. The results are so good, just from the creative placement of UV.

High skylight-style windows can be transformed into regular-style windows with careful UV placement.

More bashing, some kit-bashing using cables, pipes and machines on the 3D-rotated walkways. It's pretty impressive, but hard to put down instructions on how it's done. It's done with a very keen eye and some serious mastery of Blender's tools.

Cool! More cables!