Stretching the Sketch Up Muscles

Sketch-Up is as fun and interesting as advertised, certainly a wonderful tool for all types of creative planning and mapping. However, as with most worthwhile technology, there is a learning curve that I am still working with.

My first rendering is of the SAC auditorium. There is a fashion show scheduled there in about 3 weeks, and I signed up as part of the design team. So I measured and mapped out the space, and now I can go back in and see how different elements will work, including sets, props, and projections.

This theatre space design has a translucent orb as the focus. The idea is for performance activity to happen within the sphere, but the orb itself would also be a place for projections. I like the idea that some of the media can be visible from outside the theatre, for a broader audience.

The lesson from this design is that chairs are evil. Chairs are the only reason that I can come up with why this plan (and the first one) started to get impossibly slow for sketch up to run. I have a pretty decent machine, but working with so many chairs was very frustrating.

I like the idea of a panoramic vantage point along the stage - which opens up great potential for projections, and a different scale of immersion for the audience member.

Waiting for my sketch-up pro version to digitally arrive to me - let's see if at the least it can help me work with these elements quicker.

-Jose