3D scale model parts for practical shooting stage design

[Irving]

Seems like this should be done on top of a large sheet of graph paper to get repeatable results. Further, couldn't this much more easily be done in something like Google Sketch-up? You could view everything from the shooting positions to see what can and can't be seen, and once the measurements are where you want, then you can change the background for more pretty presentation.

After reading the article closer, it's probably a lot more fun to design a stage this way, but I doubt that it'd be faster than using a program once one takes the time to learn the program and builds stages often.