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So, I've found a new toy and I am absoulutely in love with it.
For years, I've wanted to find an easy to use 3-D modeling program I could work up designs for props and settings of all sorts, for use in my artwork. I'm a believer in the (possibly apocryphal) philosophy of the late Wally Wood, who is supposed to have said, "Never draw what you can trace, never trace what you can copy, and never copy what you can cut out and paste up." I'm going to add a fourth piece of advice to that, never sketch out, what you can SketchUp. Yes, I'm talking about Google SketchUp and, no, I ain't making a dime from Google (though donations are appreciated).
Google SketchUp is a simple, fast, easy-to-learn 3-D Modeling program that allows people like you and me to bring out visions to life in a way that usually requires expensive and hard-to-learn CAD software. It's amazingly versatile, in that you can choose the level of realism in your final design, all the way up to photo-realistic. You can build a building and place it in Google Earth, but that's way beyond my meager skill level.
The reason I was looking for something of this type is simple. I'm a lazy artist. Shocking, I know, but there it is...at least I'm honest, right? Now, the truth is, there's nothing lazy about using models to get things right in your artwork, but some people are under the impression that in order to be a true artist, you have to reinvent the wheel with ever work. I say, "Hell, no!"
One of the things that has always bothered me in comics is that, sometimes, an artist will draw a prop, or a car, or a plane, building, spaceship, whatever...in one scene, and for the rest of the comic, the item is drawn badly or the various views don't match the original shot in detail or form. Hey, it's hard to keep a 3-D model in your freakin' head.
Well, SketchUp allows you to build the model and view it, print it, whatever, so that you always get the angles right. You can build a room and place your characters in a scene and from whatever angle you want to shoot it, the room is shown correctly, in the correct perspective, too.
Of course, when I first downloaded the free program, 3-4 weeks ago, my attempts were laughable. I wanted to do a cool looking spaceship and I needed lateral symmetry to make it work and I had to go through a lot of crap before I learned how to do half an object, then copy it, paste it, and flip it. After that, piece of cake! Still, there are challenges and I'm learning with every new model.
Of course, I played around with different designs, but one idea kept popping into my head, so I worked on it. As anyone who reads this column probably knows, I'm a Legion of Superheroes fan. Got my first taste in the 70s, with Dave Cockrum and Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes #217 is the first comic I ever "collected". By that, I mean, it's the comic that made me go looking for others of the same title. It also introduced me to Mike Grell's art, which, you could say, is what inspired me to keep drawing well past the point where most guys start playing ball and chasing girls (I did a bit of both, and still kept drawing).
One of the things I loved was the spaceship designs of Cockrum and Grell. The sleek, modern styling was so different from the clunky, pointy rockets, or dated flying saucers, you saw in most comics. Dave Cockrum took the coolest bits of the various Star Trek ships and Frankensteined them into the Legion cruiser. Before Star Wars came along and cluttered up starship design with a lot of extraneous bits of piping and chunky boxes, sleek was in.
So, I've always wanted to build a model of the Cockrum cruiser, but my model building skills are virtually non-existent. Once I started figuring out this program, it was inevitable that I'd try to do a Legion cruiser.
My first attempt got me partway there. I was happy with the front part and the gooseneck, but the rear section was too boxy and I couldn't figure out how to taper cylinders.
The proportions were there, so I kept fiddling with it and came up with a slightly modified version that I like. It needs some styling on other sections, but I'll probably use it, somewhere.
The modified version was the first to include the emblem.
I kept learning, I read some of the Help topics and figured out how to work on half the object and mirror it, to give me the symmetry I was missing. With this version, I was almost there. I reused the disk and gooseneck from the first try model and built the rear section from scratch. The "spoiler" is wrong, and there should be another dome in the top of the rear section, but I had to fight with the dome in front and didn't want to repeat that battle. Also missing are the thick, black accent lines that wrap around the disk and the small gun turrets flanking the stripes. I hadn't figured out how to make those "cuts", but it was only a matter of time...
So, I keet running things over in my head, ways to make the program do the work for me, to put those stripes on the hull. In the end, it was simple, just use another shape to intersect with the main object. I built a rectangle in the right size and pulled it into a box intersecting the disk. I used the "Intersect" command to join them, then deleted all the box lines, leaving only the secion linked to the disk. It's even easier to do than it sounds.
Based on a combination of Cockrum and Grell depictions of the cruiser.
One of the coolest things you can do is view your model in "xray", so here's a couple of shots of the cruiser.
And just for giggles, and able 85% from memory, here's the 90s version of the cruiser.
To download SketchUp, go here: http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download.html
Be sure to check out the 3D Warehouse, where lots of people are sharing their models.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/
My page there should be at:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=60f978bd910d92058810c27397333ef3
I have a bunch of models up of other things, as well. Mostly future tech stuff for a project I'm working on.
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