I went backstage!

Hi all! No renders for ya today, unfortunately, but some recent developments have given me a wealth of new information to work with. You can read all about it here, but the long and short of it is that I got a chance to roadie for my old high school's band when they performed at Disneyland on Saturday. They did a great job, and I had the additional pleasure of getting to go backstage with them. =D I made a lot of useful observations about the rehearsal hall, the Mickey's house show building, several backstage warehouses, and the route from that area to the Plaza Gardens stage. Earlier in the day, I took some of the sorts of backstage-from-onstage shots I normally do, and I also explored the Haunted Mansion's "chicken exit", which is essentially a backstage area that guests aren't forbidden from entering. So yes, make sure you read the MiceChat trip report, and feel free to check out my new photos on Flickr as well! Hopefully I'll have some renders of all the new details to post in the near future.

New Live Search Maps photos

Hi all! Sorry, no new 3D work to show today, though I've certainly been working on the model. I just wanted to direct your attention to Live Search Maps. I would certainly hope most of you have already seen the site...I mean, it is the single greatest contributor of information to my project...but what you may not be aware of is the new batch of "Bird's Eye" oblique aerial photos that's showing up now. These seem to have been taken sometime in the middle of 2008, making them the most recent aerial photos of the park I've seen. I started this MiceChat thread about it, including some links to features that weren't visible in the previous batch.

So yes, this is definitely cause for excitement. I mean, you can even see some of the Indy queue building under all the trees! (Check out this shot and this one.) But...there's a dark side to this recent development.

The old photos are gone.

Sorta.

Before, there were numerous batches of Bird's Eye photos of the park available, taken in various years, with various levels of image quality, various resolutions, various camera positions, and various times of day. All of these worked together to provide a more complete view of the park than what would normally have been available. But you won't find many of these on the site anymore. While the current photos are absolutely awesome, it's still a real shame to have all those old ones missing.

If you, like me, would love to see the old photos return in addition to the current ones, please send feedback to Microsoft! Because...I'm pleased to say...the photos are not actually GONE gone. They still exist on Microsoft's servers, and you can still access them...if you have the URL for each photo. Luckily, I bookmarked some of the most helpful ones, mostly along the west side of the park, and I've found a few after the fact, too. So here are all the old links I have...if you have some, PLEASE share them! =D (The initial letter indicates which direction the camera is facing, of course, and I've indicated which shots are newer, though they're all older than what you currently see on the site.)

• W New Orleans Square - old but high-res
  
• W Critter Country - old but high-res
  
• N west half of the park - newer but lower-res
  
• N western backstage areas - newer but lower-res
  
• E west half of the park - newer but lower-res
  
• E from Splash to Innoventions - old but high-res
  
• E southwest quadrant - newer but lower-res
  
• E western backstage areas - old, but nice view of doors on HM show building
  
• E from Pirates to a very yucky Space Mountain - old, but high-res
  
• N Splash Mountain and ROA - old, but high-res
  
• S DCA and a little of DL's southwest quadrant - newer, and actually not too bad resolution-wise
  
• S part of west side - old and ugly!
  
• W old but amazingly high-res shot of Indy show building
  
• E whole park - newer, but very low-res and generally weird
  
• N western parts of both parks - newer, but low-res
  
• N Fantasyland, Toontown, and back of house - newer, but low-res
  
• S town square and DCA - newer, but low-res
  
• N Tomorrowland to back of house - old, but higher-res
  
• N Main Street to Toontown - newer, but low-res
  

Goodness, I hope all that time I spent typing those up wasn't a waste. =P You'll notice, of course, that all these old photos disappear if you try to navigate to adjacent photos, change directions, or zoom. And I tried to see if there was any pattern in the URLs, so I could perhaps generate URLs for other photos of the park...but no luck. The key is the &scene= parameter near the end...but if you just change one digit, you end up in the midwest or something. =(

So yeah...thank Microsoft for the new photos...but demand that the old ones come back, too! :D

Splash Mountain updates aplenty

Wow...it's been a while! I'm not sure exactly why I've taken so long to get a new post up, but those of you who also follow my progress on Flickr are aware that I've got no less than 11 renders there that I've yet to talk about here on the blog! =O I know, right? Because there are simply so many, I'm not going to talk in depth about each and every single one individually, though I'd be more than happy to answer specific questions.

My main focuses over the course of the last month have been, in approximately chronological order: adding basic structural elements like walls and so forth, developing details along the backside of the train tunnel between HM and Splash, modeling the queue building, adding elements located just south and north of the show building, and adding the steel I-beams that constitute part of the infrastructure of the front building. As always, go ahead and click on the thumbnails for full-sized versions, and once you've savored the hi-res yumminess, click Back to the Flickr photo page links so you can view versions with notes that point out interesting tidbits in the images.

This first render from a month ago shows the inside of the show building. Note how convoluted the track layout is—you end up unwittingly passing over and under other scenes quite a bit.


Here are some details on the backside of the train tunnel. If you've got photos or video of this area, I'd really love to see 'em! Same goes for any hidden area of the park, really. =P


These walls (ostensibly made of concrete) aren't visible in real life; the rockwork covers them up. But they're there!


I next started working like mad on the queue building, adding a lot of details that never made it into my first attempt, as you can see in the next four renders. I apologize for the stone texture...it's not my best work. The model itself, however, should be quite accurate thus far, thanks to fairly detailed blueprints and a collection of photo reference from my camera and many others'.





I actually wish I'd rendered this shot a bit later, so that you could see all the steel framework in here. But oh well. It still does a pretty good job of showing all the stuff that surrounds the big lift hill.


I wish I'd waited to do this one, too, since I added the trash compactor and other details around this area shortly after creating this shot. You can see the flume inside the show building, thanks to the magic of Photoshop. Remember that the whole wall on the left is covered by rockwork, even though most of it is behind a backstage gate.


Here's that steel taking shape. Almost all the positions of the vertical I-beams are provided by the blueprints, but their heights and the positioning of the horizontal beams are made possible by these absolutely fabulous construction photos. (You know what I'm gonna say, Mojave...come on... ;D) Also notice the presence of a berm next to the show building...as far as I can tell, it's there purely so trees can be planted outside the park and make Critter Country feel bigger.


Last but not least, this render was from today. I've used Photoshop again to add an appropriately ghostly Haunted Mansion show building (and its contents) into the mix.


Thanks for reading! Hope this was enlightening, and as always, please feel free to comment. =)