The main halls
As you might know the Eiffel Tower had been main attraction at the World Exhibition of 1889, but of course it wasn't the only attraction. The southern part of the Champs de Mars included some huge halls and palaces, and there were a lot of smaller pavilions located around the Tower's legs.
Generally speaking the World Exhibition was located at three spots: the Champs de Mars, the Trocadero and around the Invalides. I concentrated on the Champs de Mars part and decided to ignore the others.
Let's have a look at the main halls first and start with an overview:
If you're interested in a more detailled Expo plan just have a look here.
Those halls were planned to be removed after the exhibition, so they were constructed quite simple. They mainly consist of a metal skeleton:
... blended by some iron sheets and of course lots of glass:
The skeletons are fit together from repeating modules, so it wasn't a great affair to model them half way detailled and work with instances. Have a closer look:
For the scaffolds I used a basic squarish mesh, subdivided as needed and added a Skin Modifier:
Should certainly be good enough to fill my background...
Creating those halls took me about a week or two - but at least half of the time was recherche work. I found a wonderful resource here, but unfortunately had almost finished when stepping on that.
Next we're gonna have a look at some of the smaller pavilions surrounding the tower.