I may have gone a little bit overboard with this whole SketchUp preparation... hopefully it should make the resultant strip look a whole lot cooler though!
This is a (admittedly not very good) fly-through of the main locations within the mopad I'll be needing in the strip.
I've also made a lawgiver, based on the one I did in my most recent Dredd sketch, which my good pal Matt Soffe did a bang-up colouring job on here by the way.
I think, this lawgiver, with the lawmaster and the bonkers sized scene of Mega-City 1 from last week, rounds out the collection of reference models for Judge Dredd's world that I should need on this strip...
To go along with the Lawmaster I made a while ago in Google Sketch-Up, I've built a section of Mega-City One. I've invested some time making vehicles and zooms and bits and pieces to help me frame my panels for a Judge Dredd strip by Lee Robson that I've blogged a little about before.
Click image for a huge, zoom-able version
This is still a work in progress and I'll probably use different views than the one shown here, but that's the beauty of a simple 3D package, I make this once, then I can move things around for the best framing of each panel without having to reconstruct, redraw and redo all those little details again and again. Admittedly, I will to some extent, because I will only be using the exported images as under-lays for each of the panels.
I've known about Google sketchup for a while and I've done nothing about learning how to use it, despite having heard pretty good things... that changed last week when I saw an amazing job that Richard Smith did using it to model a spaceship called the Terrapin (see Richard's website for more of his illustration work). The Terrapin is for a strip he is working on for a forthcoming issue of FutureQuake and looks awesome and I was inspired to learn more!
After asking Richard whether he thought it was worth learning how to use Sketchup, (a resounding yes), I decided I would spend a bit of time trying to get to grips with it. There are some limitations but I managed to build Judge Dredd's Lawmaster (his bike) and I'm not unhappy with the results... I will build a few other things and hopefully it will help greatly with that Dredd strip I'm doing for Zarjaz with Lee Robson.
I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed with sketchup and for a FREE and EASY 3D package I can see no downside, especially when you can export animations that you can use to show others around the models you have built. So, can I recommend it? On Monday I had no idea how to create things in 3D that I could then use to plan scenes and things... and now I have a new and powerful tool in my skill set! So, I can strongly recommend it, well worth the time spent I think!
