Splash Mountain v2.0

Hi all! Not sure if I'll be doing Doorless Chambers or not...I'm having some difficulties with my prospective entry. But I am, however, definitely developing something new in the model...or something old, depending on how one sees it.

On April 10, 2007, I saved my first render of Splash Mountain. (Well...not really my first, since I'd kinda prototyped it a year earlier, but nothing had come of it.) By my best estimation, I continued work on this model till about the end of May, when my focus shifted to the adjacent Haunted Mansion. The model I developed during that time was fairly successful, but it had some issues.

First of all, the blueprints I was using weren't perfectly lined up. I allowed small discrepancies between their positions and sizes and rotations over the aerial photos. These became increasingly problematic in especially detailed areas.

Secondly, my own skills as a modeler were limited. I sometimes resorted to messy, unwise solutions where I didn't know any better. These made later modifications difficult.

Thirdly, I quite simply didn't know as much about Splash Mountain then as I do now. A trip to Anaheim City Hall, a conversation with Tony Baxter, and additional online research have since yielded a scattering of new bits of info.

I'd simply correct all these issues in the existing model, except, like I said, my old sloppiness is doing a pretty good job of discouraging me from that. So I finally decided to just rebuild Splash Mountain. From scratch. All over again. Nothing from the old version will be used...except perhaps copies of a few lighting fixtures or something.

That's the first render of the new version. Probably doesn't look a whole lot better than a less complete version of this, but trust me...it is and will be a big improvement. =) I'm being EXTREMELY careful about the blueprint alignments, for one...in fact, I've already discovered some problems in my new alignments, so I'm going back for yet another round of lining 'em up. Photoshop's Warp feature is coming in handy, since the blueprint photos have some irregular distortions.

Another great thing I've done is a complete flume replacement, using a technique called BevOb. This gives me a lot more flexibility, since I can change the path of the flume and its cross-section very independently and very easily. Also, it just plain looks nicer. If you examine some of my old renders, you'll notice the flume looks jagged, especially at sharp turns or changes in slope. No more of that!

Anyway, this'll be a slow-ish process, but it's always faster the second time. There's no doubt about it, though...Splash Mountain is TOUGH to model.

Doorless Chambers

Just wanted to let y'all know I'm going to be working up a Halloween treat as a participant in the first annual Doorless Chambers event, thanks to Robert Nava (aka Trader Sam). No, I can't show you anything until the event starts on Halloween, but I'm hoping the downloadable candy you'll be able to pick up from this digital house will at least be moderately scrumptious. I have sky-high expectations from many of the other participants, so hopefully mine'll at least sorta measure up. Click the image to learn more!

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.

Back-of-house berm

Hiya, folks! Not a tremendous amount to say about the subject of these two renders; I've already said pretty much everything I know about these areas, though I certainly welcome questions and/or new information. The only major new thing to talk about is the berm that separates these areas from the onstage areas of Disneyland—specifically, the Disneyland railroad tracks just before they enter a tunnel that leads toward Toontown Station. We Disneyland fanatics often speak of "the berm", but this is a perfect example of how there really is no single berm encircling the whole park. It's a series of many similar walls of earth that are punctuated by buildings and by paths under, through, or above them. In this case, you can see a bit of the latter: there's a footpath, probably a dirt path, leading up over that railroad tunnel and down into Big Thunder Ranch. While the horizontal scale of all this is more or less spot-on, I'm having to guess about the height of the berm based on photos, common sense, and the height of the berm near Indiana Jones, which I do know. (Incidentally, that area of the berm reaches 19 feet above the adjacent backstage ground level, give or take.)

Boy, and I said I didn't have much to say?! Here be the renders... ;D

There's a bit to say about my process, too. As I illustrated before, the aerial photos I use for the ground plane require modification to produce better results. We don't want to see flattened trees or vehicles or roof overhangs all over the ground, so I go in and use a combination of clone-stamping and digital painting to produce a reasonably accurate image of just the ground itself. It's an ongoing process for the whole park, but this particular area has more or less received the full treatment, and there's significant improvement over what you see in the earlier renders.

Now, trees are beautiful organisms. But they do tend to get in the way when it comes to analyzing stuff from the air. In general, the areas from which I have to remove a lot of stuff from the images are the areas I know the least about. After all, aerial photos are my first source of information whenever I add anything to the model. In some areas, they're my only source. So for example, when you look at the buildings toward the left of these renders...well, the shapes of the buildings should be correct, and I know a little about the stuff around them, but only a little. The level of detail will be much less than that of, say, the Pope house in the background, since I have some insider information about that building. But oh well.

Wow...for a short post, that certainly was a mouthful! Handful? Whatever. Anyway, comments are always appreciated. Remember, while I can see rudimentary figures about how many people visit this blog daily, I only know how many people are enjoying it (or at least finding it useful) by reading your lovely comments. =)

Whoop, two last things. First of all, I'd like to thank Google and Microsoft for not asking me to shut down this project due to the way I'm using their aerial photos. If you're considering it...just please don't. Come on. No one's gonna use this project as a substitute for your sites, and I'm not selling your images, and they're just non-artistic photos of things other people built, so...yeah. Anyway, the VERY last thing is...check out historicaerials.com! It's been of zero use for my project thus far, but I gotta say, I'm finding it really fascinating to look at my neighborhood back when it was just a grove of trees...and then when some of the houses were built...then when the school was built...and so on and so forth. Amazing stuff, honestly.

Okey doke, bye bye! Whew...

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.

Two Pope house renders

Not much time for a lot of text tonight, but then again, I've pretty much said all I have to say about the Owen Pope house, between this blog and the renders on Flickr and the YouTube videos. So I'm just gonna point out two new renders of the area if you haven't seen them already. You'll notice quite a bit of progress from the last one I posted, as well as between the two. I'm getting close to being done with the Pope house because...well, a lot of it is more or less finished, and I don't have as much information about the areas that aren't.

As always, I recommend clicking for full-sized versions and then hitting the Back to the Flickr photo page links so you can see medium-sized versions with explanatory notes hovering over them, pointing out things in a more convenient way.

Last but not least...please don't hesitate to leave comments! =D I make a point of reading every single one I see, and I reply to most of them. Suggestions, compliments, insults, whatever you got, as long as it's truthful. Er...actually, ixnay on the insults. Today hasn't been the best of days for me. :P

[EDIT: I thought I should also mention that I'm continuing to post my own piano recordings of film scores and Disneyland music to my YouTube channel. I'd also like to point out that I've recently organized the videos into playlists—Piano Recordings, Disneyland Virtual Tours, and Blender Tutorials etc.—so it's easier to find what you're looking for.]

First 3D Disneyland Photosynth test

Hi all! Photosynth is continuing to be very cool, and I've already done a proof-of-concept for creating a synth of my model. You'll be able to see it below if you're using Windows and if you download their viewer. (That second part is very easy.)



It's not very good, as far as synths go, but once I've rendered a lot more images, it'll work like a charm. Should allow anyone to explore my model in real-time, using fully-rendered images rather than the crappy preview one sees while actually working on the model.