Camera Drone - Prop Design For Film

From "Star Wars",  "Guardians Of The Galaxy", "Avengers Age Of Ultron" to the Bond movie "Spectre" this workflow has proven to be a fast and efficient way to design and concept, not only for a 2D production visual but also with the intention of it being built for filming. In this tutorial you I will guide you in real time with live commentary though my method of designing hard-surface industrial forms in the shape of this cool camera drone using SketchUp.

I go over designing directly in SketchUp, working with parallel projections to ensure correct visual proportions without the need for measurements. I cover booleaning into curved geometry to create slick surface details and smooth panel lines that are not often seen in SketchUp models, also demonstrating the power of arrays and components to make the software do the bulk of the time consuming modeling, I like to make sure I don't model anything twice! 

I also cover how I use Keyshot to generate fast photo-real renders and demonstrate how I bring them to life in Photoshop resulting in three cinematic, concept key frames.

This tutorial is aimed at beginners to intermediate users of SketchUp

I use SketchUp Pro in this demo but it can all be done with the free version.

Plugins Used: Round Corner, Add Centerpoint and Joint Push Pull. Plugins can easily be installed from www.sketchucation.com, I go over these plugins in my intro video.

Tutorial includes:

Tutorial video (8 parts covering SketchUp, Keyshot and Photoshop)

The original SketchUp Camera Drone model, I also provide a second version with internal details that I used for animation.

The Keyshot file

3 Layered Photoshop PSD files of the final concept artwork

All textured and decals used