Transportation facility, etc.

All righty! As I mentioned in my most recent post, I decided to start modeling the areas I photographed from Mickey and Friends. These back-of-house areas are what we might call hardcore backstage—in other words, they are crucial to the park functioning, but their coolness doesn't stem from any real proximity to onstage themed environments. I'm not as big a fan of these sorts of places; my fascination with backstage is, in its purest form, a curiosity about what lies directly outside onstage scenes. But there's a sort of guilt-by-association thing that happens. Since these structures are near the backstage areas that more intensely interest me, they draw my attention as well. And at the moment, they're screaming for some attention.

My first order of business was this pair of buildings. I got everything in the foreground of this render done in one day (August 4^th, to be specific), a fact I'm rather proud of. As always, I based the north/south and east/west scale on Live Search Maps' fantastic aerial photo of the park. Building outlines are pretty easy to make out. Getting the vertical scale approximately right required a lot of measurements on various images. Since I knew the IASW show building stood thirty feet tall above ground level (based on blueprints), I could use shadow lengths from the terraserver-usa photos to provide me with a basic height figure for the nearer building. After that, I used Live Search Maps' "bird's eye" photos to provide me with more information, both in terms of vertical scale and in terms of door placement and the like. These things don't show up from straight overhead, and I don't have detailed blueprints of this area. The photos I took from the parking structure were also of great help...not so much for specific measurements, but simply for providing me with more detail than the aerial photos do. A couple of photos I took from the sidewalk of Disneyland Drive were also helpful.

Work continued on the surrounding areas the following day. Again, I don't know a whole lot about these structures and regions, so I appreciate all the help I can get. New elements include the additional buildings, yellow bollards, and lighting poles in the parking lot. Unfortunately, many of the new buildings are hard or impossible to see in the photos I took, so the detail level on those suffers. Not to worry, though—there are several other significant buildings that were visible in those photos, and I have every intention of decking them out with lots of details.

More to come later, as always!