Indiana Jones queue interior & another never-built Haunted Mansion

With that mystery project completed and all, I've begun to work in earnest on Indiana Jones. Since at least two folks out there are currently working on re-creating the inside (one and two), I figured I'd start with another area that is just as insanely detailed—the queue, specifically the themed interior. Up to this point, I'd mainly been working on the outside, for a few reasons.

1. The outside isn't themed, which makes visible and exciting progress a lot simpler and quicker to achieve.
2. For a long time, I didn't have detailed blueprints of the inside.
3. For a long time, I didn't have enough photo reference of the inside.
4. Doing indoor areas frightens me. When I'm modeling stuff that's outside, I can use my excruciatingly simple lighting rig (one "sun" lamp, with ambient occlusion turned on) and everything turns out fine. But ambient occlusion—a method for getting the right look to the shaded areas, basically—doesn't work inside other objects, such as buildings. So I have to create new lights and set them up correctly and try to approximate the lovely look of AO.

But the time seemed right. I now had the right photos and blueprints, and I felt like I was up for a challenge. This was my first render of the interior.

Yes, I did start in the middle of the queue, not at either end. This was a fun area I felt pretty confident about, and it would allow me to solidify and practice techniques that would be used in more difficult ways in other parts of the queue. This is the tail end of the bamboo canyon before the bat caves. Looks like this in real life. (In both the photo and the render, we're looking back up, as if we were exiting, not standing in line.) As you can see, I got the arches in place and textured the walls and so forth, though the textures are far from complete in this render. I realized I needed a better stone brick texture, and the floor needed a dark, tiled look. Also to come were the countless bamboo poles, roots coming through holes in the ceiling, and so forth.

The second render shows a lot of progress, though it's darker and harder to see (and we're looking down in the opposite direction). Tree roots are protruding from the nearest hole in the roof, a ladder's visible off to the right, EXIT signs have showed up, and yes, the bamboo is beginning to proliferate. Much, much more would come, though, which I'd be able to show you right now if Blender had not crashed while rendering overnight. =( I'll have to post a new render soon.

But that's not all, folks! While Brandon of the Ghost Relations Department was giving me resources and suggestions for the "mystery project" a couple months ago, he also sent me a photo of another Haunted Mansion concept that was never constructed in the park. Unfortunately, neither of us has permission to share that drawing at this point, so you'll just have to trust us for now. I've locked a camera into my model so that it points in the exact same direction as the imaginary camera in the drawing, and I'm building a model of this design based on what's there. This is different from the mystery project in that I've only got one drawing to base the model on. There's a lot that's unknown. I can make guesses based on the fact that this was planned for Edison Square (off of Main Street, near the Plaza Inn) and that it was to be a haunted house walkthrough with a Hardy Boys tie-in. But the backside will be mostly from my own imagination, making this little project far more speculative than the mystery project. Anyways, here's the first render of this Haunted Mansion design, looking at it from the exact same angle used in the drawing. Much more to come at a later point...