Getting that out of the way, I have an idea that will hopefully improve my creative process. I was thinking as I was walking home today that I often struggle with the stage in my work that involves taking an imagined space in my head and first sketching it out on paper, before I start doing anything in Photoshop. When it comes to sketching, I'm good at meticulous detail but I often struggle with perspective and scale, and drawing out an environment by hand is something that just doesn't come natural to me.
Instead of sketching, I realized that an easier way of getting the right perspective for a space would be to map it out in three dimensions on the computer using a map editing program. There's a map editor my friend showed me a few years ago that we've been using off and on since: Cube 2 - Sauerbraten. On the surface it looks like a generic freeware first-person shooter, but the game also offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use editing mode. In the editing mode you can build almost anything, large or small, from the size of a massive skyscraper down to a barstool for example. In addition, it can render accurate shadows from anything you create relative to multiple light sources of any chosen positioning. On top of that, it's only slightly more complicated than Lego.
My plan is to build a rough layout of the major elements of my imagined scene in Sauerbraten, and using that choose a specific point of view that encompasses what I want out of the scene. From this vantage I will take a screenshot, making a bitmap image which I can then bring into photoshop and overlay with my image fragments to eventually create the photo-realistic scene.
After having the idea, I arrived home to discover that someone else has already begun making work using nearly the exact same process. Belgian architectural photographer Filip Dujardin, evidently having gotten tired of photographing other people's architectural designs, decided to construct his own on the computer. He models a design using Google's 3D modeling tool, SketchUp, and chooses a perspective and converts it into a 2D line drawing. Importing the drawing into Photoshop, he then gives his model texture based on source images he has taken of a specific building. Here's what some of his stuff looks like:
Cool stuff, a bit sterile for my taste but good nonetheless. I've downloaded SketchUp and I'll try it out, though I think Cube 2 will be my best bet. I'll put together a map and have some first images to show pretty soon.