Dieselpunk Scrapyard

I wanted this scrapyard to be an art piece. It's inspired by the Tower of Babel: a towering pile of scrap with a walkway spiralling up toward a golden ladder above, a reference to Jacob's Ladder. The scrapyard stands for hell, and the ladder for the heaven above it.

This was my first environment in Blender. I'd hardly used it before, having worked in Maya, but I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and become more adaptable.

I knew I'd need to spawn a lot of meshes, and that a pile should be cone-shaped. So I scattered points inside a volume, turned the points into mesh instances, then converted the instances into real mesh. That's how I built the piles of scrap, even heaped up against the walls. For the crane and the walkways I used curve arrays, including one that spirals up the main pile. Almost all of it was built procedurally in Blender.

Optimisation. The scene ran badly in Unity because it was very unoptimised. It was a mistake I made once and learned from: every environment since, such as Mt Tmolus, has been well optimised.

I'm still proud of the Blender experimentation and the vision behind it. I see 3D modelling, and environments especially, as an art form in themselves, and this scene brings a lot of themes and ideas together.