I'm accomplishing the contours of the Jungle Cruise with the same technique I've been using for all such complex, smoothly curved land shapes. It's called SubSurf, for "subdivision surface", and it allows me to create a relatively small number of points to represent the earth's surface. For those who haven't worked on 3D models—curved shapes have to be approximated on the computer with lots of small, flat faces. The smaller the individual faces, the smoother the shape can appear. But handling lots of small faces is hard, so SubSurf is nice in that I can manipulate a small number of points that control a much larger number of faces. Anyway, the land is SubSurfed, but the water is just a flat, transparent, reflective plane that passes through that area. Where the land dips low enough, you can thus see the water, but the land goes over the water once it goes above that level. It's not an entirely accurate way of representing the real world, but it looks right as long as you're not trying to view it from underground...which wouldn't make sense in the first place. =P
5 comments:
Awesome stuff, as usual. Looking at the picture, I'm reminded of a curiosity that's plagued me since the attraction opened. In the temple queue, there are is a section that has "collapsed" holes in the ceiling from which roots and ropes are dangling. I was wondering where that would be in the photo. I've always wondered what the top-side really looks like.
That's long been a huge curiosity of mine! The whole Indy queue is a perplexing place—it's really quite difficult to figure out where you are without the help of blueprints and cast members.
In this particular render, the area you're talking about is located directly below the camouflage netting on the side of Pirates. As you can see, I haven't built the roof over that area; I'm still not totally clear on some of the details, and I'd rather not build something wrong and have to start over. What I do know is that the roof is very plain, with just the few holes in it with speakers and lights around them.
Then there's the bamboo canyon, which has a big, long hole all along the exit side of it, and then there are a few smaller holes, right about at the center of the image. I haven't built those yet. =(
Nice start. I didn't think you'd tackle the Jungle Cruise because, other than the main building, there are very few structural elements, just the set pieces.
Because of all of the trees, aerial and satellite photos are mostly useless, so this is one area that I've never really gotten a good handle on. Can't wait to see it virtually without trees.
Speaking of trees, will you be modeling those too? And how?
Finally, can you use this SubSurf technique for the Matterhorn, even though it's not totally smooth?
Thanks! :) I know exactly what you mean about the aerial photos. It is so hard to figure everything out in the areas thick with trees. That's part of my motivation for doing the Jungle Cruise area and so forth—I mean, obviously, I can only make the areas that I know something about...but it's one thing to see blueprints and hear cast member stories, and another thing altogether to see it in three dimensions and virtually walk through it.
It's funny you ask about creating the trees, since someone else just asked me the same question a few days ago. ^^ I highly doubt it...I mean, I tried a few months ago, just using flat photographs with transparent areas that rotate to face the camera, but it was too arduous a process for the time being. I may try again later. In the mean time, here's an example of what that looks like.
If and when I build the Matterhorn exterior for real, I'll almost certainly use SubSurf again. I'll just have to use more individual vertices so that I can accomplish some of the jaggedness, and then image textures can take care of the rest. That'll be a very difficult task to tackle, though, since the surface of the mountain has caves and holes and passages and so forth. It'll take a while to create, but I'll most likely develop the motivation to do so eventually. =P
Very cool stuff, Joe!
Post a Comment