Have you looked at the morph tool? It allows a lot of manipulation and extruding along 3d paths. A bit tricky to manipulate afterwards though, in my opinion.
Another option is profiled beams with Complex Profiles. Not sure if it was added in 17 or 18, but they can be curved now and they can slope.
I'm not sure, but you mention several blocks that need to be modelled. Perhaps take a look at your workflow and consider that at different scales / distances a model will not need that much detail. Billable hours and all.
We call it helicopter mode in our office, start up high, as you get lower and closer to the model or end product the details will get clearer.
If this is for artist impressions, I would set up my shots first with rough entourage. Once I'm happy with the angle and rough composition of the shots, start adding entourage (trees, more detail to environment) only on the parts that are visible in my shots. We had someone work in the office for a while that did all of this postproduction in Photoshop even.
You don't want to populate a city block full of detailed trees for example.
Just some food for thought
Edit: I think a lot of random bulged convincing surfaces you may have seen will have been done in software such as Rhinoceros, which is great for 3d visualisation, but will offer no building documentation etc
Erwin Edel, Project Lead, Leloup Architecten
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