My thought is to create a shadow box to display the disks floating over a 3d printed cityscape lit by a rising and setting sun. The finished shadow box can only have a limited depth, about 3 inches, or it won’t be able to hang on a wall. To fit an impressive cityscape into such limited depth, we’re going to use a trick called Forced Perspective. Forced Perspective distorts depths and distances to trick the eye into perceiving more depth than really exist.

Three transformations have to occur to distort the model’s perspective. First we need to squeeze the back side of the model around its center, making parallel lines converge at a vanishing point. After that we skew the model up along a curve or angle, creating the impression of elevation over the model. Finally we’ll compress the models depth, so the final result will fit in the shadow box. SketchUp’s scale tools aren’t really intended for this, so we’ll to use FredoScale, an excellent plugin available for free download through the SketchUp plugin warehouse.

I’ve always wanted to try this with a 3d printed model but haven’t actually done it before. To test the process, I created a small group of buildings and roads and unified them into a single object using the explode command and the Cleanup3 plugin. With Fredo Scale, I pinched in the back side of the model in and then skewed the model up. I used Sketchup’s own scale tools to compress the models depth.