Jan 2
Making Rubble Look Real
Here’s some tips to making a realistic looking pile of rubble!
Most of the work I’ve been doing on this tower is detailing the pile of rubble. I noticed that on this competition entry on TerraGenesis.com, they made a pile of rubble to cover the batteries for the LED lights. This is the pile that he made:
To me, this is a pretty ugly pile. I found that the reason is because the pieces of wood are on top of the gravel as opposed to in the pile. So I started making sure that my pile of rubble was very realistic. I’ve done about 4 hours of detailing work on my pile of rubble to make it look as real as possible. I’ve been filling in any deep crevices with glue and pieces of wood and foam. I filled the holes with glue and then covered it all with sand. After it dried, I shook off all the excess sand.
Here’s some pictures of the updates:
I also added a destroyed window frame to the rubble, You can see it still attached to a piece of wall in the rubble.
Here is a close up of the collapsed tower roof.
Here is a close up of the pile of rubble at the base of the building.
I hope this will help you to make great piles of rubble. =]
Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders
Not to be picky, but the image of the rubble you showed looks more like a pile of junk than rubble. If that’s true then wouldn’t there be layers formed as stuff was disposed of?
Hi Smyth,
A pile of Junk and a pile of Rubble would look very similar to each other if they were both made up of cement and wood.
If it was a pile of junk or garbage, sure there would be “layers” to a degree, but the small items would fill in the gaping holes.
I’m assuming you’re defending the first image in this post. When I saw that image, I thought it didn’t look realistic. Do you think it looks like a realistic pile of junk?
Yeah it’s a good pile of junk. Looks like a pile of gravel with some old metal chunks thrown on top. With rubble there will be an integration of detritus, but with a pile of junk there will be layers. In this case there’s just two: Gravel and Metal.
I’m totally new to all things miniaturized. I’ve got some mini’s and am making terrain and such. But, wouldn’t it be easier and more realistic to make a full scale house out of the foam and then chop it up with a knife and use the items chopped as the debris? That way you would have exactly what rubble would actually have fallen from the house when it was destroyed. You would shape them as you see fit and such since you’d like there to be some gravel made by the destruction as well as broken timbers and all kinds of happy good time rubble, but in all you would still only have exactly the proper amount of materials to make your broken home.