Modeling the Details - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 54

For the block details, I subdivided some of
the blocks and then added extra features, such as
a crack down the middle, a chunk out of a corner,
and a split. I added loop cuts or subdivided specific
parts and moved vertices around to create cracks,
dents, and chips. Because the mesh won't be sub-
divided or deformed significantly, there's no need
to avoid triangles here; they won't cause problems.
To prevent the blocks from looking faceted, I
set their shading mode to Smooth and then added
an Edge Split modifier to split the mesh at certain
edges in order to produce separate surfaces (see
Figure 5-9). The Edge Split modifier breaks the
mesh into separate pieces so that when shaded
smooth or when further modifiers are applied,
the edge between the pieces is preserved. You can
set Edge Split to split the mesh either along edges
tagged as Sharp in Edit mode ( ctrl -E 4 Mark Sharp)
or along edges with sharp enough angles between
their faces. Using the angles only with a setting of
30° resulted in nice-looking blocks.

I created the other incidental blocks and paving
slabs in the same way as the walls, using the initial
block-in cubes as a guide for placement and then
deleting the old geometry once the new blocks were
placed. The final blocks are shown in Figure 5-10.

Statues
I modeled the statues in the corners by the door
of the Jungle Temple using fairly basic building
blocks and my concept art as a guide. Each part
began with a simple primitive—usually a cube or
cylinder—transformed, subdivided, and extruded
to create what I need.
As shown in Figure 5-11, each part is fairly
simple. To add beveled edges, I used the same
method that I used for the wall and floor blocks.
Adding some loop cuts around the ends of some
pieces (for example, to the “legs” and the ends
of the arms) allowed these edges to retain their
square shape and sharper corners when beveled,
without too much subdivision.

Figure 5-9: The final walls, with a Bevel and an Edge Split modifier to give them beveled edges and flat sides