Circle D Ranch and the environmental center

The last few days have been rather rough in some ways, but luckily, things in the modeling world have been going quite well. I haven't been working as much on my piano recordings for YouTube, which is kinda sad, but that affords more time for working on the model, and I've definitely been taking advantage of it. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not done with the piano videos. The POTC attraction and Splash Mountain are both likely candidates for the near future.) Lots of various backstage areas are becoming more and more complete. The flip side is...the file itself is getting increasingly difficult to manage. My layer organization system is not ideal, though it's been working fairly well...but navigating and rendering are becoming increasingly difficult for the computer. I've gotten to the point where if I'm doing a render of these back-of-house areas and I want Tomorrowland and so forth to show up in the distance, I have to render the foreground and background separately to avoid a crash. =( Not fun, though the compositing job in Photoshop that it necessitates is good practice and not horribly difficult.

Anyway, I'm rambling already. Here are a couple of new renders.

For these areas of Circle D Ranch and the environmental center, I've had to begin adding chain link fences of two varieties. The first is just simple chain link fencing; the second uses a layer of greenish privacy fabric to provide a denser barrier between areas. I'm accomplishing both with a combo of actual metal poles and flat planes with partially transparent textures, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Thank goodness for PNG format.

One thing I've been working on today and yesterday that's not visible in these renders is modifications to the ground plane image. For those of you who don't already know this, my ground plane uses modified aerial photos as a texture. For the most part, I just use the photos from Live Search Maps, but a few areas require the more recent but lower-quality images from Google Maps. These are all lined up beneath the model all the time, and they look pretty good, but using aerial photos for the ground engenders one very big problem—you can see trees, fences, vehicles, buildings, and even people, all plastered flat onto the ground. Highly unrealistic, as you can see in the renders above. So my task is to go in and modify that image in Photoshop, carefully clone-stamping and painting out all the unwanted details...anything that wouldn't be part of the ground in real life. The resulting transformation looks something like what you see on the right. Notice that I've left the middles of some of the building roofs, since the ground plane doesn't matter inside the buildings. Also, I haven't been working on the areas at the bottom of this image, so who knows what they'll look like eventually.

On a side note, here's my piano arrangement of Soarin' Over California.