3D Modeling is Cool

Feast your eyes on how Khatru's House 4 is supposed to look!

One of the people I follow on Twitter is El Goonish Shive creator Dan Shive. Last week while I was on vacation, he Tweeted that he was fiddling around with a program called Google SketchUp, which he hoped would make creating background layouts easier.

Today, while on break from my job hunt, I decided to check it out for myself, since one of the problems I have with drawing Khatru is that I'm rubbish at drawing things from any realistic perspective. The tilt of the floor behind my characters always makes it look like they're walking down a really steep hill. So I figured that this program might help.

And it shall! The above picture was created in about an hour (not counting the 20 minutes or so it took to figure out how to use the program and the ...other time it took to work out the mathematics of the rooms' dimensions). Ok, so maybe it took me longer than an hour. But if my plan succeeds, I'll have a perfect system for referencing the backgrounds. It's an investment towards straight lines and non-non-Euclidian geometry.

I'm very excited!