More Soarin'

Well, what the heck. I'm still working on Soarin'. My first order of business after the last post was adding the pairs of columns that support each theater. I then textured the screen with the blue lighting scheme Disney uses during loading and unloading. I had to reproduce that look, since there aren't any photos of the whole screen due to its insane size, and the light is poor in there anyway. So I collected reference photos and then put together this image in Photoshop from scratch:



Pretty close, n'est-ce pas? I UV-mapped this to the domed screens and set up their material so that lights in the model wouldn't affect it. (With this setup, you can also see the image from the back of the screen, which is how the screen actually is in real life, or so I'm told.) I also added the black walls that surround the screen, and rudimentary versions of the walls of part of the queue between the two screens. The floor of the loading areas received some preliminary texturing - a shiny, off-white concrete look - and I also built the lower floor next to and under the screens, which I believe is a shiny black. You can see all these changes in this render:



But that's not all, folks. See, I started getting this hankering to add a rather important part of the attraction: the ride vehicles themselves. Although the US patent office has some pretty interesting schematics of the hang gliders, they're not quite the same as the ones Disney built for the attractions, so I found appropriate photos and more or less traced over them in 3D. Now all the vehicles sit in place as they should. I did cheat a little, though...two of the rows in each theater are supposed to have nine seats instead of ten, but to keep things simpler, I just squeezed those same ten seats to be a little narrower. I'm lazy! =P

The other changes visible in this render are the safety railing along the front of the loading area and a large grid texture applied on top of the concrete-looking floor. Luckily, I was able to reuse a grid image I'd made for some other texture in the main model, so, in the words of a certain famous button, "that was easy!"



What won't be easy, however, is adding all the machinery above the vehicles that lifts them up toward the screen. No idea if I'll even make an attempt at that. However, I would like to set up a basic animation so that the vehicles will levitate up into their appropriate positions. More on that as things progress.