Silhouettes
From Art Geek:
Silhouettes
Monday, Jan. 11 2010 UTCI finally figured out how to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, namely, to quickly make silhouetted, 2D figures (“components”) for things which would be painful (and pointless) to model in 3D. I’ve tried doing this numerous times in SketchUp, but the inference engine always moves points and lines where you don’t want them. Drawing that way is like having someone jerk the paper around underneath your pencil while you sketch.
Illustrator doesn’t do that, and you can export Illustrator paths in AutoCAD format and then import them into SketchUp. Make them forward-facing components, and, voilà!
In the following scene, only the block the woman is sitting on is a 3D object. The woman is traced from one of my figure drawings, and the bird is traced from a photo I took this morning on the Point (temperature, 1 degree F). Even the mountain is a freehand shape drawn in Illustrator — mountains and clouds and other distant forms are prime candidates for this sort of simplified treatment.
