Mystery project this Sunday

Hi all! It's a long time coming, but the mystery project should finally be up on the Ghost Relations Department blog this Sunday. It's basically complete, though I may do one or two more renders for good measure. Sorry it's taken so long, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out. That initial post on Brandon's blog will focus mostly on the end product, and it'll showcase renders of the completed mystery model, including a wallpaper image that combines 3D elements with parts I've painted digitally. There'll also be at least one new YouTube video shortly thereafter. Then I'll be posting all this material here on the Virtual Magic blog, in addition to work-in-progress renders that explain my process, since this mystery project was rather...different from what I'd previously done, as you'll see, and it thus presented unique challenges. Don't get your hopes TOO high, but I'm happy with how this has turned out, and I hope y'all will be, too. =)

For those of you who haven't already seen it on my Flickr photostream, I recently uploaded one render of the backside of Snow White and Pinocchio. I've actually completed more of this area since, but I haven't uploaded any more renders yet, since my main focus has been the mystery project. Anyway, you'll be seeing more of this later on.

I'm also working on lining up blueprints for Indiana Jones, as well as getting my photo reference organized, in the hopes that I can develop my model of the attraction to a much higher level of detail and accuracy. The blueprints are fantastic. Huge thanks go to Ryan Batcheller, who's showcasing a similar (and, in all likelihood, vastly superior) Indy project on his blog. He generously shared some of his prints of the queue, so those'll be very helpful.

On a side note...do any of you have backstage Disneyland dreams? I do. They're quite frustrating, actually, because my first thought upon waking up is something along the lines of, Oh, wow, that was so cool. I'm gonna have so much fun going through the photos I took! Then it slowly hits me that I don't have access to those photos, since they were taken with a camera that only exists inside my sleeping brain. At that point, I'm sad because, to my way of thinking, those photos contain a lot of valuable information that I could use if only I could look at them now, as a quasi-awake person. Only then do I, fully awake at last, realize that the photos wouldn't be useful anyway, since my slumbering mind concocted all the images in them. It's really quite a sobering revelation. XP (Furthermore, the images wouldn't even constitute realistic conjecture over what the backstage areas look like, since they nearly always contradict what I already know about those areas in real life. For example, the other night, I dreamt I was strolling around the northeast end of the outside of the Indiana Jones maintenance bay, an area I've actually walked through once in real life. Yet there was a strange cleft in the berm and other things were screwed up, too. I wish my brain would get it right.)

Again, I apologize how slow things have seemed for this project lately. I assure you, I really have been working quite hard. You just haven't seen any of it yet. =D If all goes well, it'll be worth the wait on Sunday when you finally get to see what I've spent the last couple months doing.