TDA, Indy, back of house, etc.

Guten tag! I must apologize to you fine folks about the delay in posting...I've been in the process of moving a lot of my crap, and work on the model has been a little bit slow. Nevertheless, I am getting stuff done, and I'd like to take the time to explain it now. If you follow my Flickr account, consider yourself forewarned—you won't be seeing any new renders today, but you will receive explanations of three I've posted in recent times, as well as a graphic explaining my new layer system.

These back-of-house areas are continuing to shape up nicely. The berm is growing, though I haven't done much work on it since I posted this render. In about a month, I may be fortunate enough to go exploring back there a bit in real life, so I'm holding off on doing too much work there till after I've got fresh memories of the area. As you can see, this train tunnel passes beneath the berm for a while, allowing a backstage footpath to go above it and a larger "underpass" to go beneath it just to the east. This is all right behind the Owen Pope house, just west of Toontown Station.

This may seem random...I haven't done much work on the Indiana Jones show building in a while, but a MiceChat member pointed out to me the candy canelike object back there, so I decided to add it and post a ground-level render of the area. I've been lucky enough to walk back here, so I can confirm that it really does look like this, except with lots of trees and bamboo and bushes on the berm...and of course a good deal more texture to everything. And cast members walking around.

The randomness never ceases! One day, I did a test render in which I noticed my single gray wall standing in for the Team Disney Anaheim building. It suddenly annoyed me, so I proceeded to begin modeling the building in earnest. You may know it as the blue-green wall with windows in it right next to I5; the other side is yellow, as you can see. It has a lot of very fanciful curves, thanks to famed architect Frank Gehry, though most of these haven't been added to the model yet. Anyway, as quickly as I became interested in modeling TDA, I lost interest again, but I'm sure I'll return to work on it in the future. That's how these things always work.

The last few days, I've just been adding small details—chain link fences and bollards and so forth—to the back of house. Nothing too exciting...but they're there. =P I've also been reorganizing the layers of the model because frankly, my computer is having an increasingly difficult time managing the entire model. The navigation starts to lag, I have to wait a long time when switching layers, sometimes the aerial photos and blueprints start disappearing (which means I have to restart Blender), and on occasion, the whole thing just crashes. My layer organization before was not ideal...I was kinda flying by the seat of my pants, and things were getting less and less systematic. So I finally accepted the fact that this model's just gonna keep getting more and more complex, necessitating a better system, and I quickly diagrammed a 10-layer system that should work nicely for a long while. Blender's other ten layers will be there for temporarily storing unused blueprints and so forth, and at some point in the future I may begin using those for the model itself as well.

So far, so good.