Schematic Maquette

Dinotopia: The World Beneath contains several views of Waterfall City, including this overview.

The challenge for me as a designer was how to keep the city visually consistent when it appears in various angles. To do this, I built a schematic maquette out of gray-painted styrofoam.

In a schematic maquette, you don’t have to sculpt every single building, just a few characteristic geometric forms. By looking at photos of those representative forms as you do your drawing, you can add details and multiply them into the full city.


The real benefit of such a schematic maquette is that you can swing it around at any angle and see how the light plays on it. This kind of model is a great help for entertainment designers or sequential artists who need to imagine a complex form consistently from a variety of angles.