WIP: Birdseye

[Chashio]

Chashio: those notes aren't meant to be legible. Not yet, anyway. They were just done for my own reference.

Darn. They looked interesting.

To be honest, I don't really like the way sketchup looks with this; it's a bit too digital (and I'm not very good at it). My plan was, after modelling the city, to trace over it and redraw it from, that's right, a birdseye view. That way I can make sure all the perspective and proportions are accurate, while the whole thing has a hand-drawn feel.

Yeah, I started (never finished) doing a little town map like this, setting up the basic shapes in sketchup and tracing and detailing in photoshop. It worked pretty well except sketchup is a bear to work with when every building has a different shape and roof slope... I was practicing 'off-grid' isometric layouts.

And Chashio, I know what you mean about the city on a slant. The Bridge of Birdseye is relatively flat, but the rock is meant to be really steep. If there are any Sketchup jockeys out there who know how to make terrain in Sketchup, I'd really appreciate some tips.

One way to do this might be to have a flat plane to pull your buildings from and have a slanted plane above it that the buildings stick up through. Another is to take a section of terrain from google earth. There should be a button in the top menu that lets you do that, but it only allows you to take a small area of terrain (with the free version of sketchup, don't know about pro).

At least for now, I've decided to try a more traditional means of modeling things. I made some play-dough today... we'll see how it goes.