In this article, we’ll share how we created the junkyard location and the challenges we faced throughout the process. We won’t go into detail about building the entire location or working with meshes, as this was already covered in the Megacity and Temple.

We started by studying references—photos of real car junkyards. This helped us understand how cars are arranged, what types of damage they sustain, and how they look over time. This approach allowed us to achieve maximum naturalness.

After gathering the necessary references, we realized that we needed to create a large number of damaged cars. Before starting, it was crucial to think about how to quickly generate many vehicles.

To create a damaged car, you first need to make a complete one and then break it down. Skipping this step can distort proportions, making the damaged vehicle look unrealistic. We also added variations in the color of parts like doors and hoods.

It’s important to create several body types (Sedan, Sport Utility Vehicle, Hatchback, Coupe, Crossover, Station Wagon, etc.) to ensure the cars have significantly different shapes, making the junkyard look realistic. For each body type, we created at least two damage versions: one heavily damaged and one with lighter damage (based on modifications of a single model, let’s see what we got)

We also removed and rotated parts like doors, hoods, and wheels, which allowed us to create more car variations from a single base. We made several color options, both for entire cars and individual parts, and added various rust marks. This gave us many visually distinct models from a single body type.

We took one of the damaged car variations and made three versions of it.

Then we created three more for each of those. In the end, we had nine unique models from a single body!

But the work didn’t stop there. After studying the references, we arranged the cars in rows in parking spaces and created piles of cars. We made several versions of the piles and mixed them together (the following example shows two pile variants):

For even more variety, we added individual car bodies — like a bright red car in the middle of a pile.

This approach allowed us to create a realistic and optimized scene where the viewer doesn’t notice repeating objects. Of course, we could have made each “pile” completely unique, but our method struck the right balance between workflow efficiency and visual quality.