Back-of-house berm

Hiya, folks! Not a tremendous amount to say about the subject of these two renders; I've already said pretty much everything I know about these areas, though I certainly welcome questions and/or new information. The only major new thing to talk about is the berm that separates these areas from the onstage areas of Disneyland—specifically, the Disneyland railroad tracks just before they enter a tunnel that leads toward Toontown Station. We Disneyland fanatics often speak of "the berm", but this is a perfect example of how there really is no single berm encircling the whole park. It's a series of many similar walls of earth that are punctuated by buildings and by paths under, through, or above them. In this case, you can see a bit of the latter: there's a footpath, probably a dirt path, leading up over that railroad tunnel and down into Big Thunder Ranch. While the horizontal scale of all this is more or less spot-on, I'm having to guess about the height of the berm based on photos, common sense, and the height of the berm near Indiana Jones, which I do know. (Incidentally, that area of the berm reaches 19 feet above the adjacent backstage ground level, give or take.)

Boy, and I said I didn't have much to say?! Here be the renders... ;D

There's a bit to say about my process, too. As I illustrated before, the aerial photos I use for the ground plane require modification to produce better results. We don't want to see flattened trees or vehicles or roof overhangs all over the ground, so I go in and use a combination of clone-stamping and digital painting to produce a reasonably accurate image of just the ground itself. It's an ongoing process for the whole park, but this particular area has more or less received the full treatment, and there's significant improvement over what you see in the earlier renders.

Now, trees are beautiful organisms. But they do tend to get in the way when it comes to analyzing stuff from the air. In general, the areas from which I have to remove a lot of stuff from the images are the areas I know the least about. After all, aerial photos are my first source of information whenever I add anything to the model. In some areas, they're my only source. So for example, when you look at the buildings toward the left of these renders...well, the shapes of the buildings should be correct, and I know a little about the stuff around them, but only a little. The level of detail will be much less than that of, say, the Pope house in the background, since I have some insider information about that building. But oh well.

Wow...for a short post, that certainly was a mouthful! Handful? Whatever. Anyway, comments are always appreciated. Remember, while I can see rudimentary figures about how many people visit this blog daily, I only know how many people are enjoying it (or at least finding it useful) by reading your lovely comments. =)

Whoop, two last things. First of all, I'd like to thank Google and Microsoft for not asking me to shut down this project due to the way I'm using their aerial photos. If you're considering it...just please don't. Come on. No one's gonna use this project as a substitute for your sites, and I'm not selling your images, and they're just non-artistic photos of things other people built, so...yeah. Anyway, the VERY last thing is...check out historicaerials.com! It's been of zero use for my project thus far, but I gotta say, I'm finding it really fascinating to look at my neighborhood back when it was just a grove of trees...and then when some of the houses were built...then when the school was built...and so on and so forth. Amazing stuff, honestly.

Okey doke, bye bye! Whew...