Sketchup City

[su_liam]

Tom Patterson has a very nice explanation of Plan Oblique Relief here. Best of all, he has the setup files for Bryce(Bryce 5, but I know they worked in Bryce 6). The effect is very similar to isometric, although less pronounced.

The most important thing to remember is to set the camera very far above the terrain with a very narrow field of view. This is similar to the old Wenschow shading method. Basically, they used to build a plaster model of a terrain, carefully light it and take a photograph of it with what amounted to a telephoto lens from a great distance. One problem with this method was that important relief features that were inadvantageously oriented with respect to the overall lighting sometimes disappeared. When I was doing this with Bryce 6(what are they up to 9 by now?), I experimented with spotlights to bring out more advantageous shadowing.

Since your city seems to have very tall even lanky buildings, I don't think you would need much or any vertical exaggeration, but I think you could just about substitute your model into Patterson's scene definition with little alteration and good results. From there, you could just jigger things about to taste.

BTW: To make your water a bit less troublesome, try reducing the transparency of the material considerably and possibly bump up the diffuse value. You could try upping the reflection strength, but that might just give you an annoyingly perfect reflection of the sky. Combining moderate reflection, moderate transparency and fairly high diffuse might give good results. I've been wrestling with Blender lately so my Bryce Fu is weak...