Scenery - Sand bags

Creating Sand Bags

As mentioned in an earlier post I wanted to create sand bangs along with oil drums to put in and around the airstrip.

Like most of the scenery objects before I wanted to keep the poly count minimal because it will be going into a large virtual environment after. 

When researching the sandbags I noticed that when piled on top of each other they create this effect:

 

I knew I would be creating the sand bags with the box tool but knew it would take a little reshaping to  create the look of the ends being pointed and flexible. 

I didn't want all the sandbags to look the same but knew I didn't have enough time to create 100+ sandbags - so I create two. I researched and downloaded two textures, one darker than the other to create a distinct difference. 

I start the modelling process by creating a simple box in a rectangular shape. Converting the sandbag to a convertible poly I selected the corner vertex's and used the 'select and uniform' tool to pull the vertex's together to create this effect:

I repeated this method on all corners and then applied the sandbag texture. To make the sandbags look different I made them different sizes and the corners pointing in different directions.

I could have spent a little more time making the sandbags look more realistic but with the help of the texture it creates shadow and depth to the bags to help with this problem. 

Time spent: 45 minutes