So, I had a bit of a crash course this afternoon with Kit regarding Maya and in particular Booleans. Very nice.
The couple of shapes I've picked out for my constructed model/environment will need such ideas and using one object as a cookie-cutter, so to speak, will make it infinitely more helpful.
Here I'm trying to recreate the basics of a shape that appears in my first render:
On a side note: Kit showed me particles too but we're gonna have a followup lesson on those later. I really shouldn't have dropped Maya after first year. :-o