Birkenhof Bunker Valkenswaard

August 20, 2022

This building exists at the edge of my hometown. It was built as a communications bunker by the Germans during World War II. I wrote a separate blog post on the building’s history in a blog post here. Luckily, I was allowed to investigate the building in its current state and take some pictures. Many thanks for this to the wonderful Olga, and her father Hans Jonk, the current proprietors of the building. Together with these personal tours and a map that they have provided me with, and also with a little help of Google Street View and the OSM add-on for Blender,

I was able to create this reasonably accurate representation of the building in 3D. It’s not a super accurate, CAD-like architectural model, but all the general measurements are somewhat accurate. Or at least not very far off. After having built a replica of the old airfield, I realized that I rather enjoy building things that are real, local, and has some historic meaning. In the future I’ll be doing more of that, when I built a replica of the train station in my hometown from an era when we still had a railroad running through it. But more on that soon.

Yes, I’ve probably posted too many pictures in this gallery

This is one of those scenes that is never really completely finished to my own liking. I keep seeing things that can be improved, especially after having letting it rest for a while. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been adding and editing components to the scene many times. Up to a point that I had to become more careful with this because my workstation was letting me know that it was starting to have problems loading the scene and working on it became laggy. Now that’s not fun at all to work with, so I had to stop adding things, and instead focus on optimizing all the things already there.

I’ve managed to reduce the laggy response to a point that is workable again for me. From doing so, I actually learned several techniques on how to accomplish this. Mostly, I’ve simply been manually reducing the size of the textures and this helped a lot in reducing the load issues. I’ve tried to leave the ones that catch the eye intact, and focused on the ones that are not so important and definitely don’t need to be in 4K. These are now 1024px and some even below that. Another thing that really helped was to use a texture that was already loaded in the scene, instead of just adding new textures for every new model.

Once you see the insides of the bunker, you’ll notice that the scene is set in a time during the war. Everything you see inside the bunker is my personal interpretation of how it may perhaps, or could have actually looked when it was still in use during the war. Nobody knows what it actually looked like back then, so that leaves it open to interpretation. For example, the scene shows a storage room with several weapons in it, but no indication has ever been found that one was there. We don’t know anything on how the Germans decorated the interior. We do know many other interesting things on its history, but I saved all that for a separate blog post that is linked at the end of this post.

Here, as I often do in other scenes, again, I’ve added a head with the appearance of my real head to a character and placed in somewhere in the scene. Here, virtual me seems to be a Wehrmacht soldier who is on a smoke break. In those days, smoking was to people what breathing is to us now. After rendering this short animation was completed, I deleted my pretty self from the scene, cause apparently my virtual me consumes a lot of resources. Much like the real me, I suppose.

Now that you have seen what I’ve built, you may find it interesting to also read the blog post that I wrote about it, where I talk about the real history behind this building. I’ll reveal some fascinating facts for all those of you that are interested in history. But even if you’re not interested in history at all, you should still go and read it. Just click here.

I made most of the things in this scene myself in Blender, but there are several items that I downloaded from Sketchfab, just to make my life a bit easier. I’ve linked them below. There are also several items that I obtained from elsewhere, like the horse, the trees and the bikes for example. I just can’t remember from where exactly. Most of the vegetation is from the Botaniq add-on for Blender, but initially I used CG Geek’s Nature Asset Pack. (Realistic Nature Asset Pack)