“Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These (Father Ted points to some plastic cows on the table) are very small; those (he points at some cows out of the window) are far away…”

I’d suggested he use a cube and make it about the right size for a real world object and then size the model to match. Similarly using a cube sized to a distance to help lay out things. He wasn’t really comfortable with that. It was helping but it was slowing him down.

Then I realised he was a football fan so to help him get a sense of scale in his scenes I made him a quick football pitch model. Nothing fancy just two squashed cubes. He knows how big a football pitch should look and can size and space objects using it as a guide. Once he’s happy he can delete it and render the scene.

Since it worked for him I’ve expanded the set to include thirty-four sports grounds and pitches and posted them here tonight for anyone to download. I’ve made a page for them Vue Scaling Objects.

If there is interest I’ll do some more packs: vehicles, people, plants, buildings, planets and animals all strike me as possibly being useful. Leave a comment if you’d like any of those or something else saying which one(s) you’d find helpful…

I’ve created this set from scans of slides I made for the Kaffeine Krew (a projected effects group I was part of in the early ’90s) to add interest in otherwise unlit spaces in discos using slide projectors.  We’d load a carousel of slides into a projector and set it up well out of reach of punters and could then leave it running for hours on a slow auto change to add a little bit of variety.  The slides were originally made by photographing fabric and other things with bold patterns then photocopying the prints onto overhead transparency sheets which were then chopped up into appropriate sized rectangles and mounted in slides for use.  While some of the slides also had offcuts of coloured filters added to change the colour of the light we usually put a piece of coloured filter over the slide projector’s lens so the colour would remain constant.

I’ve a tutorial on using gels to add interest to Vue lighting in the works but I thought I’d start releasing the materials now because I’ve not finished the tutorial but I’ve loads of gels that I can release.  They are free for use in both commercial and none commercial work but please read the read me file for full copyright and other information.

Download: impworks_stripes.zip (17.5MB)