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Scaling Objects to Help making Vue Scenes

Monday, June 21st, 2010

I’ve been exchanging emails with Paul, a Vue user, who was having difficulty visualising how big objects should be in Vue. He uses real world measurements but his pictures didn’t look right because he was struggling to get the objects to be the right size and making the distances between them realistic. That was messing up the quality of the lighting and making things look a bit weird. He mentioned the Father Ted episode with the Cows…

“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…

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