Universal Studios fire

Hi, all. Again, no renders today, I'm sad to say. =( Work continues on the mystery model, and it should accelerate in a few days from now, hopefully gearing up for a "release" in one week. Maybe two.

My main reason in writing was just to mention the unfortunate fire at Universal Studios that started a little before 5 this morning. For those of you who hadn't heard, the King Kong scene from the tram tour was decimated, with only the shell of the building remaining. The roof fell during the blaze, and everything inside is just gone. Pretty crazy. Also destroyed were the Video Vault (nothing irreplaceable was damaged), several "neighborhoods" around New York street, and some or all of the courthouse square that's been used in everything from Back to the Future to Bruce Almighty. Definitely a sad day, though I'm enormously pleased that there were no fatalities, though a few firefighters are being treated for burns and such—plenty of prayer definitely in order for them. (Thank you to all those who've participated in the successful efforts to contain the fire!)

As I was studying and comparing aerial photos of Universal Studios from before and after the blaze, I got to thinking that it might be a nice (if highly unconventional) tribute to some of the destroyed structures if I built 3D models of them. I've certainly become curious after all this, so I'm thinking once my mystery project is finished, I may spend some time replicating the King Kong show building and possibly the courthouse. (I still can't find any pictorial evidence of the courthouse's destruction, oddly enough. I've seen many photos of the surrounding square being leveled, and the nearby areas up in flames, and all that jazz, but I can't find any photos of the courthouse itself destroyed. In fact, some photos show surrounding areas consumed in fireballs but the courthouse still standing, so I've still got a glimmer of hope left. That being said, if anyone's seen photos of the courthouse burned to the ground, I'd be grimly obliged if you'd let me know.)

For anyone who'd like to know more about which areas were affected, I've annotated an aerial photo here. I can't guarantee the accuracy, but the only thing I'm not really sure about is which building is the Video Vault. All I know is that the building I labeled Video Vault??? was one of the ones that burned, and the Video Vault is the only other building I know of that was damaged.

EDIT: A slight update—according to Universal's site, the courthouse and buildings along the north side of the square are indeed still standing. Some fire damage, but the structures are still there. Woo hoo! =D

EDIT AGAIN: Now I've seen post-fire photos for myself, so I'm fully convinced. Check 'em out here. There's the courthouse, still standing! Some fire damage along the south side, but the main facade appears unscathed, which is definitely good news.

My arachnidan alter-ego

Hi all! It'll be a short post today, I'm afraid, and still with no renders to show. =( The project you haven't seen yet is turning out quite nicely, and I'm hoping to have it ready for posting a week from Sunday. Time will tell...I'm quite busy at the moment with real-world obligations, but those will all be dying down soon, so if I can't finish by mid-June, I should be able to finish soon after that. Now, I don't want y'all to get your hopes up too much about this side project. I happen to like it; I'm really enjoying the process of figuring it all out, and the model itself has been enlightening thus far. But there's no guarantee y'all will find it as interesting as I do. In fact, a few months ago, I probably wouldn't have found this all that intriguing. But...heck, maybe you'll be smarter than I was back then. ;D

Anyway, my main reason in posting today was as a follow-up to the poem. When I received it back in class, inscribed on it was the following:

Something of a sonnet riddle - or the spider's life allegorized as an amusement park?

So yes—I'm apparently a spider, symbolically speaking. =P

Poetry

Hello world. I'm sad to say I don't know how much I'll be able to get done over the next few weeks; the term's wrapping up, and I've got work to do, so my time for modeling will be limited, I think. I'm tentatively hoping to reveal the mystery project a week from this coming Sunday on ghostrelationsdept.blogspot.com, but that may not come to fruition quite so soon. =(

Most of the work I'll be doing is of no interest or relevance, but I am taking this one poetry class, and one of the requirements is to write a sonnet, ballad, sestina, or villanelle...and what better to stump the professor with than a sonnet about the backstage/onstage dichotomy of Disneyland? XD And so I now present, for your reading pleasure, "Unspoiled", with a complimentary illustrative photo.

A glint of metal over shady hill
Or flicker strange through stands of greenery,
Of buildings built for no man’s eye—these will
I seek till I am finally set free.
Set free to wander halls so dazzlingly dull,
Or sunlit streets past pirates’ rowdy night.
The louvers, doors, and ladders call my soul
To that strange place that lies beyond my sight.
But phantoms and mountains and joyrides twixt stars—
How can I ignore these marvels, these thrills?
Through vine-strangled temples in runaway cars
We joltingly jostle beyond those dark hills.
These sights I must not e’er forget—
Such wonders are unrivaled yet.

© 2008 Joe Cardello



Is it terrible? Perhaps. I'm not the best judge of its quality. Feel free to tell me honestly what you think, though you should bear in mind that the work is intentionally riddle-like and that I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

An IASW/BTMRR/POTC 3fer

It's not unheard of for me to post two renders simultaneously, though it is a bit rare. What you'll almost never see me do is post three at once. But I'm just feeling so bad about keeping you all in the dark about this other project of mine (which is currently idling like a troop transport in a dark room) that I decided to push forward and get some eclectic work done in the model proper. And so, without further ado, je vous presente three renders of various things I've been working on.

If I'm not mistaken, a few Disneyland rooftops received some new jewelry sometime in 2006 or early 2007. As a result, the show buildings for It's a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion sport additional traffic pads and fans. I'd known about these for a while, thanks to photos like this that I'd taken from the Grand Californian, and I'd even seen blueprints of the additions at Anaheim City Hall, but I didn't have in my possession any good visual layouts of the new stuff. Luckily, Google Earth's Disneyland photo was recently updated to a better one taken on October 23, 2007, and it clearly shows all the layouts. So I've been going through and making the changes.

This render simply shows the similar modifications to the POTC roofs, as well as the removal of that stupid front wall I had in place. In real life, there's a wall covering the top half of the aboveground opening, visible as a wall of the Dream Suite courtyard or, from the inside, the wall behind the island near the entrance.

One element of my model that's actually been in existence for some time now but never received any public attention is the track for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. I had the basic path in place, but not in such a way that it was visible in renders. I was having trouble with getting the turns to be banked and so forth, not to mention my frustration with my lack of definitive information on the track heights, so I'd basically given up for a while there. But I recently learned that the height of the track at the base of lift 2 should be somewhere in the ballpark of 140' above sea level, which was a start, and I finally figured out how to make the banked turns. This is the result, though it's missing the loading area and maintenance tracks since all of those require difficult geometry where the track splits. (In other news, I added quite a bit of Los Angeles smog to this render to make the track stand out more from the background. =P)

I'm sorry to keep this secret project so...well, secret, but I assure you I'll be sharing PLENTY once it's finally ready. It's not incredibly exciting, so don't get your hopes too high, but I'm enjoying it, and I hope most of you will, too. In fact, I think I'll go work on it right now. :)

Mystery project, new photos and It's a Small World

Hi all! Sorry about the long period there without updates. If you haven't noticed already in my "Current Focuses" box, I've got a little mystery project going. It's very much related to the main 3D Disneyland project, but it's in a somewhat different vein. It'll actually show up first on the Ghost Relations Department blog first, since its creator was the one who gave me the idea in the first place. If you haven't read every single post there already, make sure you do that! Really an amazing read from one of the leading Haunted Mansion authorities. Anyway, once my little mystery project is about finished, I'll send the renders over to him so he can post them along with explanations of what we're looking at, and then they'll show up here soon after, probably with more of a focus on my process.

The next item to attend to is a series of new photos I took at Disneyland this past Saturday. They're all up on Flickr, but I'll post a few highlights here. Just don't expect the same old lovely photos you see most people taking! I specialize in the photos no one else thinks to take, yet are still essential reference for my project. Here are a few of my favorites from the day.







Those are: the first Pirates show building from the bamboo canyon of the Indy queue, along with a backstage catwalk over the latter; an extremely obscure area of land between the Haunted Mansion pet cemetery and Splash Mountain, back behind the latter's extended queue; and a rare view of the first abominable snowman on the Tomorrowland side of the Matterhorn. I've also got a full trip report posted on MiceChat, which you can feel free to read if you'd like, and if you're a real-world friend of mine, the "people photos" are up on Facebook.

Now, I know if I were one of you, I'd be thirsting for a render right about now, since that's how I get with other people's similar projects. I'm afraid I can't unveil any of the mystery project yet, but here's a little work I've done on the inside of It's a Small World. You can see the flume, some of the interior walls, and the layout of rooms near the maintenance area in the foreground. Less easy to spot is the fact that I've adjusted the walls to slightly more accurate positions and added a few more doors.

Indiana Jones front mural

Boy, I never thought I'd actually finish the texture image for this front mural! There are no photos of the bottom...oh, two-thirds of it or so. That area is completely obscured by foliage that will hopefully grow as tall as the building someday. So I was left with the difficult challenge of filling in the areas with stuff that looked right. It was considerably more difficult than the east mural, which only covers half of the wall—and the wall is only two-thirds as long in the first place! So I had a lot of Photoshopping to do. Luckily, I managed to get it working. One good trick I discovered was to paint flat colors into the areas, blocking out the large-scale color shifts, and then use the healing brush (instead of the clone stamp tool) to copy the basic textures without changing the colors or overall brightness of the big areas of color. The bigger, darker spots were achieved partially through photos and partially through shapes I created myself. I'm pretty happy with the result.

A far less interesting change visible in this render is the modification of the backs of the mural tops. Before, they were just a plain green color, but they're now dark gray, with metal support structures as dictated by the aerial photos.

I've also been making ongoing changes to the aerial photo you see for the ground, getting rid of trees and so forth. =)

(By the way—feel free to leave comments! I always appreciate suggestions, advice, new information, or even a simple hello. I promise to read your comments and, in all likelihood, reply to them.)

Indy show building murals and details

Because part of the Indiana Jones show building is readily visible from the tram stop, an attempt at disguising it was made a few years back, around the time DCA was built. The murals that now adorn 2.5 sides of the building (half of the east mural was removed in the last year) are faded, abstract views of the jungle, partially obscured by real vegetation growing in front of them. Does the tactic work? Maybe partially. In a brief, unscientific survey of some moderate Disneyland fans, most didn't immediately think of the building when asked about the tram stop. When prodded further, they referred to it as "that big beige wall" and so forth, noting that it was kind of ugly but that it didn't particularly bother them.

I'm not sure where I stand on the mural issue, but they're there, whether we like it or not. And so I'm adding them to the model, at long last. Getting the texture images set up in Photoshop is a tricky task for two reasons. Firstly, in photos, the foliage typically makes it impossible to see at least the lower half of the murals, so I have to clone stamp a bunch of existing areas into the regions I can't see.
Secondly, the building is big, which means lots of perspective distortion in most photos, so I have to correct for that. Luckily, I've managed to get it all working for the half-mural on the east wall, as you can see in this latest render.

The bit of the south mural that you think you can see, though...don't be fooled. I just Photoshopped that bit to make it look like I'd done that side, too. The front is a very, very tricky beast that I've tried before and will have to try again, perhaps multiple times, before I get it working.

This render also showcases some other details on and around the show building. I've cleaned up the aerial photo used for the ground, added various machinery and such, made the lights on the building glow a little, and so forth. This render also gives a better idea of how backstage runs into the berm, upon which travel the railroad tracks and beyond which lies the Jungle Cruise.