Stage your diorama from the viewer's actual position
Blocks
No blocks yet. Add one to start blocking out the scene.
Getting started
- Set the scale and base. Pick your ratio in Scene setup, then enter the base you're building on.
- Add a block. Enter its real-world width, depth, and height. Stage divides by the ratio for you.
- Place it. Drag it in the view, or type its position on the base. Both write to the same numbers.
- Choose where it will be seen. Pick a viewing position, or enter your own eye height, surface height, and distance.
- Export when you want it at the bench. PDF gives you every viewing position you've looked at, plus the dimensions.
Scene setup
Selected: 1:87.1 (HO)
Model railway
Automotive
Aircraft
Military
Naval
Architecture
Figures
Dollhouse
New to a ratio like this one? See Reading scale ratios. To convert a specific real-world dimension first, use the Scale Calculator.
Viewing position
Your own eye height above the floor. Seated is roughly 1200 mm.
Height of the surface the diorama sits on, above the floor.
Eye relative to base surface: 670.000 mm
Overlays
Reference lines only, drawn over the image. They don't affect the scene.
Export
PDF opens your browser's print dialog with a bench sheet covering every viewing position you've visited this session, plus the full block table.
Ratio 1:87.1 · Base 300 × 300 mm ·
| Label | Real (mm) | Scaled (mm) | Position (mm) | Rotation |
|---|
What viewing angle changes
A diorama is almost always built in one position and displayed in another. You work on it flat on a bench, leaning over it, looking down from perhaps 400 mm at a steep angle. Then it goes on a shelf, and someone stands two feet away looking at it nearly edge-on.
Two things change, and both are geometry rather than taste.
Foreshortening. Depth compresses as the viewing angle flattens, and the amount is not subtle. Leaning over a workbench, two figures 400 mm apart in real depth at 1:35 separate on screen by around a third of a figure's height — clearly distinct. Move the same scene to a chest-height shelf and that separation drops to about an eighth. The spacing you set while looking down is roughly three times what the viewer will actually see, and that ratio holds for any gap at those two positions.
Occlusion. Anything in front hides more of what's behind it as the angle drops. Groundwork, low walls, and vehicle bodies that sit clear of each other on the bench begin to stack. This is the failure people notice after the piece is finished and mounted, when it is expensive to fix.
There is a third, less obvious one: the surface of the base stops being visible. Detail worked into the groundwork — texture, debris, tracks — is fully visible from above and nearly invisible at a grazing angle. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to know before you spend a weekend on it.
Shelf, table, and case
The differences between common display positions are larger than they sound.
A competition table sits around 900 mm. A standing adult's eye is around 1570 mm, so the viewer looks down from about 670 mm above the surface, from a metre or less away. The base surface is fully in view. Groundwork reads. Silhouettes against the background matter less, because there is not much background in frame.
A high shelf at 1700 mm puts the surface above eye level. The viewer looks up. The base surface is barely visible at all, the scene reads almost entirely as silhouette, and anything low is hidden by whatever is in front of it. Height and outline carry the whole composition.
A display case at seated height is different again — around 750 mm with the viewer's eye near 1200 mm, usually closer than either of the above, so the scene fills more of the field of view and small detail is genuinely legible.
None of these is the right one. Which applies depends on where the piece ends up, which is worth deciding before the groundwork goes down rather than after.
How Stage works
Blocks are entered at real-world dimensions and divided by the scene ratio, the same arithmetic the Scale Calculator does. Positions are set on the base, in the base's own millimetres. Every value is editable as a number and every drag writes back to those numbers — the table and the 3D view are the same data.
The viewing position takes three figures: the height of the surface the piece sits on, your own eye height above the floor, and how far back you stand. The camera is placed at that position in correct perspective.
Zoom moves the camera rather than changing the lens, and the viewing distance in millimetres is shown at all times. This matters more than it sounds: changing the field of view from a fixed point produces a magnified version of the distant view, foreshortening and all. Moving the camera produces the image someone standing there would actually see.
Export produces a bench sheet with the scene from each viewing position you have used, plus a table of every block's real and scaled dimensions.
About the overlays
Four toggles: thirds, phi, centre, and horizon. They draw lines over the image and nothing else. Nothing is scored, nothing is flagged, and no arrangement is called correct.
Thirds, phi, and centre are fixed to the frame. They are there because some builders find them useful for noticing where things have landed, not because there is a rule underneath them.
The horizon line is the one derived from your input: it marks the height of your own eye, projected into the scene. It shows exactly what sits above and below the viewer's eye level, which is usually the more useful of the four.
What Stage does not do
Stage has proxy volumes and dimensions. It has no colour, no contrast, no texture, and no paint. It therefore says nothing about what will draw the eye, what will read as cluttered, or which element competes with which — any such judgment would be built on information the tool does not have.
It does not place anything for you, and it does not evaluate what you have placed.
It does not store your work. There are no accounts and no server; a session is exported rather than saved.