This is how we built the junkyard location, and where it got annoying. We won’t rehash how to build a whole location or work with meshes, since we covered that in the Megacity and Temple write-ups.
We started by gathering reference photos of real car junkyards. They show how cars get stacked and parked, what kinds of damage they take, and how they age. We wanted the place to feel like an actual junkyard, not a tidy parking lot.
Once we had enough references, it was obvious we’d need a lot of wrecked cars, which meant figuring out how to make vehicles fast before modeling a single one.
Here’s the part people skip: you build a whole car first, then wreck it. Go straight to the damaged version and the proportions tend to drift, so it ends up looking fake. We also varied the colors on parts like doors and hoods.
You want a few body types too (sedan, SUV, hatchback, coupe, crossover, wagon) so the silhouettes read as clearly different. For each one we did at least two damage passes off a single model: one badly smashed, one lightly dented. Here’s what we ended up with.
We also removed and rotated doors, hoods, and wheels to squeeze more variations out of one base. Add a few color options, some for the whole car and some per part, throw in some rust, and one body type covers a lot of cars that don’t look alike.
So we took one damaged variant and created three variations from it.
Then we created three more variations from each of those. That gave us nine unique models from a single vehicle body.
The piles came next. Looking back at the references, we lined cars up in rows in the parking spaces and built stacks, made a few versions, and mixed them together (the example below shows two).
For extra variety we dropped in loose bodies, like a bright red car placed in the middle of a pile.
The result is a scene that holds up visually while staying inexpensive to render. The repeated assets are difficult to spot, even though many of them come from the same base models. We could’ve made every pile unique, but this got us 90% of the look for a fraction of the work.
