Using SketchUp for 2D art
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I do a news letter for a group of Vietnam era combat photographers. Every year they have a seminar/meeting. They were going to hold it in San Antonio the home of the Alamo but hotel prices got too high and the available times slipped into the heat of the Texas summer. So they changed plan when they were offered a military rate by a cruise company. Dince I don't really make any money putting their newsletter together, I need a quick and efficient way to compose the cover art for the newsletter. I could have done it old school and taken a lot of time doing an illustration, but SketchUp allowed me to explore a lot of spatial relationships between the Alamo and the cruise ship and then snapshot the preferred result.
Considering theis was a quicky assembled from 3D warehouse components, I was quite pleased with the results. I had to fix the construction of the ships bow in photoshop but the models were really quite good out of the box. It was just a matter of establishing the right relationships and then picking the best camera angle and viewpoint.
Roger Hawkins, ASMP
http://www.azcreative.com
http://www.daspo.com
http://www.combatcamera.org
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Well, quite interesting idea and way of using that material!
Actually there are some good points in applying SU for such kind of things!(What was the problem with the bow?)
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The modeler didn't fully understand the shape and tried to do it with a lot of straight lines that did not really fit. Don't get me wrong it was generally a nice model but the bow looked like a bunch of toothpics glued together.
Nautical architects, as you may know, lay down a set of frames evenly spaced along a keel and then skin the resulting form. If I had built the model from scratch I think I would have used a similar approach when I neared the compound curves of the bow.
A few minutes with the photoshop airbrush fixed the problem.
There were two minor problems with the Alamo. One, the modler did the flagpole, but didn't want to mess with doing a flag. Two, The shadows were two deep on the photoapplied textures but again when in photShop I just dodged the shadows and lightened things up bit.
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I see. Well, I've been "playing around" with boat hulls a little bit in SU and yes of course, the "best" way to model them is something similar they are made in reality; keel / ribs / planks (stitching...)
Anyway, it finally came together quite nice, congrats!
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