Astro Lab

To give you the general idea of what I'm doing, here are a few pics of a work in progress. It's some kind of Astronomy lab campus with the huge dish and dome w/curved windows. Notice the lack of trees and foliage at this stage. 3D trees, even simple low polygon ones, bog down my poor 'ol computer. I put them, and the people, on separate layers that I can turn on and off to speed things up. The trees are really just to help me with shadows. When I've taken this as far as I can in Sketchup, I'll save certain angles to Photoshop and paint over them to make 2D renders.

Here's the curved entrance. It still needs planters, benches, maybe some tables and chairs on the balcony and some kind of fountain/sculpture thing.

I added this quaint little optical observatory to give the place a sense of history and to help emphasize the scale of the big dish.

The observatory leads to the elevated covered walkway and staircase. Again, needs lots of shrubs, planters, benches, etc. Where does the walkway lead to? I might connect it to a monorail terminal I'm designing (which I'll post soon.) But I might just be lazy and extend it off frame and let the viewers use their imagination.