A sewer/reservoir set for Bear Town designed in SketchUp.

For the past several weeks I've been playing with the new free version of Google's SketchUp to design some of Bear Town's sets and environments and so far I'm very impressed. It's not without it's limitations, but it's a great way to quickly visualize ideas in 3D.

I designed the sewer/reservoir set above in SketchUp. It will be used as a set for a couple of scenes in Bear Town and it will most likely be realized as a digital set. I'm also working on the film's main 3D cityscape and I've been using SketchUp to play with rough designs for various buildings:


I've uploaded larger versions of all of these to the Conceptual Art Photoset on Flickr.

One thing that is particularly annoying is that although SketchUp will import a variety of common 3D file types, at the moment export options in the free version are limited to Google Earth files and image files (the pro version can export to .3ds, .dxf, .max and many other popular formats). Thankfully, a Blender user named J.M. Soler has written a script to import SketchUp's Google Earth files in to Blender which has solved that problem.

Posted by Andrew at 2:11 PM | Permalink

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