Set Design
During the recent work lull I decided to focus on my CAD skills so I would be ready to work at full speed when I’m hired. While designing these sets and doing the drawings, I sought the advice of a few different Art Directors, construction leads, and foremen and used that advice to refine my work methods and style.
Click the images to see full-sized PDF files.
Awkward Mansion
This is a complex set intended to give me LOTS of time working with various architectural features. I chose the weird base plan to help me master the management of custom grids. These drawings aren’t finished. Right now it’s a snapshot in time a few weeks into the development of a complex set.
Photorealistic Vizualization
Every once in a while we need to see a photorealistic visualization to help make decisions about the set design or its surface treatments. I prefer to do these inside of AutoCAD to save time. It allows us to make any necessary changes, quickly see the results, and have them automatically reflected in all of the plans, sections, and elevations.
Lighting Simulation
For a set that will be used for a variety of different scenes, sometime we’ll need to see it under different lighting conditions to confirm that it will perform the way we want. A more in-depth lighting simulation will let us see how the various surface treatments affect the shot under different conditions.
3-Story Victorian Railcar Flat
Story: COVID times in San Francisco. I wanted this set to to feel tight to enhance the story that a few very different characters are trapped together in a large but narrow house.
Guard Shack
Guest House
Props
One of my specialties is in using math to design forms that are then produced by CNC.
Parametric Design
I designed the 3-story victorian house set in order to hone my parametric design skills. These houses contain LOTS of complex geometry.
These detailed jobs can be GREATLY sped up by creating some scripts to automate the repetitive stuff. In this first example, we can generate the initial set design by quickly laying down colored lines and writing a script to interpret those lines as walls, doors and windows. Placements, heights, thicknesses, etc. can all be changed on the fly, seeing the results in realtime.
Parametric Trim
Next is one of the defining features of these victorian flats - the trim. I wrote a similar set of scripts to take profiles from the trim catalog and apply them to another set of colored lines with extra parameters to help get the orientation correct. Once the guide lines are set up, these profiles can be quickly changed and visualized to meet the needs of the design team.
