One of the biggest issues when it comes to 3D modeling is achieving a certain look that we have in our heads. There are many good tutorials out there on the subject, however, I’ve had some people ask me how I achieve some of my looks for my environments, so I thought I’d give it a bit of go. There are many ways to do things, and this is just the way that I go about doing it.

(In the beginning, these tuts are going to be text and picture. I will create video tutorials later on, when I have more time to do so.)

A model that I seem to do a lot of in my scenes is a street, most of which are the bulging, rounded hilltop style, as in the image below, from “Trick or RETREAT!!”, Halloween 2014.

In this tutorial, I will simply be covering the road and the sidewalk. Any additional objects can be left for other tutorials.

To start with, I add a plane to a blank Blender scene, and tab into edit mode. I then select all the vertices, and scale it up about by 2 Blender units, just to increase the size a bit. Then I scale it along the y axis to elongate the plane along that axis, because the street is not going to be square, about 2 Blender units as well.

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I then subdivide the road at least 3 times, to add geometry in order to start shaping the bubble shape, as well as the hump at the center of the road, with proportional editing enabled.

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Next, add more edge loops in between the horizontal edge loops, select the new edge loops, and raise them on the z axis, to round out the mesh.

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Select the edge of the long side of the mesh, duplicate, and extrude up along the z a bit.

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Here, we have the makings of the sidewalk. Press ctrl “L” (on mac) to select the whole piece, then press “P” and “selection” to make it a separate object. You now a road and sidewalk.

For now we will leave the road as it is. Now, tab into edit mode on the sidewalk mesh, and select the all the vertices. Extrude along the x axis, until you get something that is about as wide as a which ever type of sidewalk that you like.

We can go ahead and delete those bottom faces, since they won’t be seen, and they will just create extra geometry to unwrap later.

On both the road and the sidewalk, you can add a mirror modifier to make things easier. Here I will only do it on the sidewalk, since it’s going to be the same (initially) on both sides of the street. Next, select the front faces of the sidewalk mesh, duplicate, and extrude along the x axis, until you get something the width of a curb.

We now have the bulging road look emerging.

In the next part, we will continue by adding detail to the road, and then move on to texturing, and how to get the asphalt to show properly across a large surface when rendered.

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