Today I’m trying to finalize my stage layout, so I moved almost everything downstairs to the dining table again.

Here I have enough room to measure, mark and align each substage on 60° and 30° angles to form a near-perfect hexagon. I didn’t have a good protractor so I just printed one I found online, then marked each substage with pencil lines and red dots that are easy to line up.

The idea is to optimize for sight lines from my main camera track, and possibly one or more reverse angles. Once I make everything aesthetically and ergonomically happy, I’ll begin gluing things down and running the modular wiring connectors discretely out various holes in those upside-down gray serving trays.

I also solved my stool height problem by ordering these metal bed risers that are adjustable for height. Four of the substages will have these “stools” fixed in position so when I animate the scene, I don’t have to worry about them moving or being the wrong height for when a character plays an instrument. Some of the keyboards are shorter than they should be at 1:6 scale, so rather than putting them up on risers I can just vary their stool height and it’ll be less noticeable.