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aka “How to Integrate SketchUp and Poser Models into a Photoshop Scene”

What follows is a step-by-step tutorial for how I created the most frequently viewed digital piece in my Epilogue Gallery: Lost City of the Amazons. Herein you will learn how to create customized Photoshop paint brushes in order to paint leafy foliage, how to generate a rainbow effect using built-in Photoshop tools and filters, and how to integrate SketchUp and Poser models into a Photoshop scene. The versions of the software used: Photoshop 7, SketchUp 5, & Poser 5.

This is how I jot down most of my ideas for pictures - very crudely! The only reason I do these small thumbnail sketches is so that I won’t forget what my initial idea for the composition was. About all you can make out here is a suave, feminine stick figure in the foreground and some sort of vaguely shaped teddy bear thing in the background. The vague teddy bear thing is supposed to be a Stone Temple Daggit, an ancient ruin guarding of the Lost City of the Amazons. I’m pretty sure there should also be a waterfall separating the damsel in the foreground from the ruins in the background. One of the reasons lost cities remain lost is that they’ve been built in remote locations difficult to reach.

Right now the only good place to put a waterfall is in the lower left portion of the picture. I’m not sure what will lie behind the waterfall - maybe cliffs, maybe steps leading up to the ruins - I haven’t made up my mind at this point. I do know that the woman in the foreground should be wearing a very short skirt (for some reason this is very important to me). I also want there to be a second Stone Temple Daggit way off in the distance, but facing away from the city. The temple guardians should be facing unknown dangers outside their inner sanctum (rather than facing inwards). Knowing that these ruins will have to be drawn in perspective gives me ample reason to model them in 3D, and so I turn to one of my nearest and dearest new friends: Google SketchUp.

I love SketchUp! I love it so much I may even marry it some day! I’ve worked with 3D Studio Max and other top notch rendering packages, but none have had the simplicity or elegance of the 3D modeling interface that is SketchUp! SketchUp is not a particularly good (or complicated) rendering program, but it is far and away the quickest and easiest-to-learn 3D modeler I have ever used. Here is my “final” render using the SketchUp program:

What you see before you is a nearly raw SketchUp render with only a few edges retraced in Photoshop. Notice that all of the shadows are completely uniform - no gradations, no nuances of any kind within the shadows. We’ll have to fix that later. But look at the pretty stone texture - all drawn to scale and wrapping around objects provocatively! That’s a stock texture that came with the SketchUp program, as did the model of the bridge. I wasn’t really planning to put a bridge in this picture, but come to think of it, a broken bridge in the middle of the river would help to explain why the city has been lost for so long. Plus the bridge conveniently blocks our view of the rest of the city. Brilliant!

More importantly, I was able to copy and paste a second version of the original Stone Temple Daggit into the background without having to remodel the whole thing. After that task was accomplished, all I had to do was re-orient the model and pick a new viewpoint. Picking your viewpoint is one of the most crucial first steps in almost any illustration project, and the miracle that is SketchUp allows you to finesse the angle and the point-of-view before you lock yourself in to a particular perspective. So now I don’t have to lie awake at night and wonder if the temple in the background is to scale or if it’s drawn in the correct perspective – SketchUp draws those angles for me! But the unexpected addition of the bridge does throw a bit of a wrench into the works…