To create Night Must Fall:
I first began, of course, with my readymade Actor's Guild Theatre With Grid In Place. Following this, I rough in the set pieces - "window boxes" to define the playing space to begin. I finally used the offset tool to good effect to put an rim of molding on the audience-facing side of the window box. While we didn't construct actual window frames, for fear of obstructing the view, I am considering adding them just for aesthetic's appeal. I am noticing, further, that I am not really sure how to round the edge of the moulding and it occurs to me thereafter that achieving the level of textured detail that we used in the original set may well be beyond me. Having decided that it looked a tad silly with only one face "moulded" I went ahead and pushed in the others by a 1/2", of a rectangle offset by 2" from the original face. In order to make it look as though the moulding had been added, I drew another of those offset rectangles and joint-lines at a 45 degree angle adjoining the two rectangles. I find, much to my dismay, that when I place the boxes it was impossible to highlight them to move them after they'd been placed inside the theatre. In an attempt to remedy this, I backtracked until before I placed the original 3' x 8' x 2' box. Turning it into a component unto itself, my theory went, would prevent it from bonding to the floor of the theatre.
Copying the original box until I had three, I rotated them and placed them parallel to the sections of audience three, creating a room of sorts.
Following creating the window boxes and thereby the perimiter of the room in which most of the action takes place, I started roughing out a fire place. Beginning with a simple rectangle Push-pulled to the correct dimension, I added a three tired mantle piece, a small-ish affair, the "terraces" eing an inch different. I had considered using the offset tool once again, but my desire for the piece to fit flush agains the flat (a pseudo-wall used in theatre for implying without actually building a wall) and my clever pre-rotation of the fireplace to sit at the same 45 degree angle as said flat, the drawing of a simple rectangle proved difficult, so using the Line and Push-pull tools tool, I created a series of boxes stacked boxes much more smoothly than I would otherwise had I bothered to wrestle with the offset tool. I briefly considered adding all the fancy things we'd cluttered atop the mantle piece, but that seemed like, perhaps, a project for another day, or perhaps a wander through the warehouse to see who'd already tackled the problem of creating roses in a virtual world. Instead, I have chosen to stick to the main geometrical shapes that decided much of my lighting in the first place. That having been said, I moved from the mantle to the actual body of the fire box, confessedly making it up as I went along, being forgetful of how it looked in the original. I chose to use cylendars to frame the box, instead of rectangles, just for varity's sake. I drew a set of circles along the bottom edge of the roomward face of the body of the fireplace and Push-pulled them up to the bottom surface of the mantle. I initally chose to make them overlapping circles with a radius of one inch. As I raised them to the level of mantle and sat in front of my own fireplace, I decided the finishing touch of an arch was necessary to finish off the fireplace before I placed it inside the theatre space. The arch is a simple matter of three clicks to define. I chose to define it a foot below the mantle, that seeming a proportionally appealing cut off. Having experimented with this, I decided I wanted the top of the bulge to be a foot below the mantle, rather than the origin points of the arch. I also discovered, in order to delete part of the face, that I had to inscribe a rectangle on the portion I didn't want and draw the arch above THAT instead. I Push-pull tooled the unnecessary section away and moved the fire place into place, after, of course, turning it into a compontent of and in itself so it didn't bond to the whole theatre. In order to center it on the flat I drew a line at the midpoint of the bottom of the flat and another two at the new midpoints. I lined the rearmost corner of the fireplace up with the endpoint of my 1/4 line (as opposed to centerline) and then erased the extranious lines. I did spend some time trying to create an umbrella to go with the umbrella stand I'd drawn, but decided it would be better not to dwell on that terribly long and moved on to adding the rest of the large set pieces such as the round table, the rolltop desk, and the liquor cabinet, which I'm sure had a better name. Handily, much as I did with Catholic School Girls, I found the more complicated things such as my rolltop desk in the Warehouse. The table I constructed out of a circle that I scaled into an oval.
As I was laying on some colours, for reference, I discovered that painting one face of a component per force saw the whole thing and any copies dyed that same colour. Luckily, I meant that.
