Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
The Cart Behind the Horse's Ass : About inconsiderate twits who leave their
shopping carts in the middle of their vacated parking spaces
I Wish You Would Shut Your Trap : About the overuse of speed traps
Step 3: Episode Models
Goal : To create an initial SketchUp model or models for each episode.
Input : Visualization of actual locations in which each encounter occurred.
Tool : SketchUp 6.
Note: Steps 3-6 apply to each of the topic's 112 episodes.
Virtually every Road Rage episode depicts an actual experience by me; there-
fore, most of the topic's illustrations and their supporting SketchUp models
depict actual locations in Massachusetts, my state of residence.
This first model was created for the Wrong Turn on Red episode, and it repre-
sents an actual intersection near my home. Although the gas pumps were
imported from SketchUp's 3D warehouse, the rest of the scene was drawn
from scratch. A few things to note are as follows:
• Grayscale:Since the topic'sinteriorwasprintedinblackandwhite,most
components within models were drawn in gray scale (an exception in this
case was the traffic lights).
• Whitebackground:Theoriginalintentwastohavemostillustrationsfade
into white paper stock; therefore, for simplicity, a white ground color was
used in most scenes.
• Softenededges:Inorderforlinestoappearpaintedon,eachedgehad
to be softened one at a time. Otherwise, all the white lines appearing in
this scene would have had black edges, which would not have reflected a
realistic view.
Note: Once these edges are softened, it is necessary to use the View > Hidden
Geometry menu to select them. Use caution, though, because depending on
your computing power, viewing hidden geometry in a complex model can be
terribly slow and may even lock up your computer.
Tip
You will notice at the top of Figure 13.1 that the road comes to an abrupt
stop. This is because after drawing a few initial scenes, I realized that
significant portions of them were extraneous. If the camera angle and
distance was going to crop that portion of the model anyway, why extend
it? Once I learned that lesson - to only draw what would be viewable in the
final image - model creation speed improved dramatically. When a road
edge like this ended up being viewable by a lower camera angle, it would
either be extended beyond the edge of the scene or masked with fog
(Window > Fog) so that it faded to white before the edge could be seen.
 
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