Disneyland in 3D!

[Hilsbro]

that is pretty awesome dude...keep up the wonderful job

[Datameister]

Merci beaucoup! J'adore lire vos compliments.

</French>



Ummm...anyway, here's a render of the backside of the Haunted Mansion show building. I've made changes to the doors back here; the blueprints helped me solve the puzzle. The different local.live.com "bird's eye" photos of the back of this building seemed to be showing different configurations of doors; I eventually decided on a configuration to model, and I was wrong. Turns out there are two large sliding doors. In one of the photos, these had been repainted and opened slightly, making it look like there was just one little open doorway.

Fascinating, no? Anyway, bottom line is I've got the correct door setup now, with the exception of a door near the graveyard. I haven't modeled that yet because it looks like there's something rather complex outside it. I don't have any close-up photos or even verbal descriptions of this area, so if anyone can help, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Also, you can't really tell, but the HM and Splash show buildings both have properly thick walls in this render.



By the way, just because I'm a wonderful human being, I graciously raised the ground level to where it is backstage. Aren't I just the kindest soul you've ever met?

[Hilsbro]

I am glad you like reading our comments

Yep I can totaly tell that those are thick walls...lol
This is all looking SOO COOOL!!!!

I can't wait to see more

[Datameister]

Heh heh heh. Thanks!

Most of my work thus far has been on the actual modeling, of course, but I occasionally make tweaks to the actual rendering process that makes the model look the way it does. One thing I'd like to nail is getting the shadowy areas to have cooler colors. In real life, outdoor scenes are typically lit by two major light sources--the sun and the sky. The sun is basically a single point that sends out light rays that are basically parallel. The results are shadows with pretty sharp edges and lit areas that are rather warm-colored. The sky sends out a very dim bluish light in all directions, creating cool colors in the shadows. I haven't successfully replicated this in Blender yet, but I'm hoping to. It'd be nice.

[Hilsbro]

lol...I understand exactly what your saying....but I would never be able to do those kind of things...lol

[Datameister]

Hey, you never know till you try it, fail at it, give up at it, decide to give it a second chance, and surprise yourself by at least partially succeeding...

I think I'm finally starting to understand the north garden of the Haunted Mansion. It's been a troublesome area in the model. As I currently understand it, there's the exit crypt, which is kind of an L-shape. The ramp ascends from underneath the north pet cemetery, which is just a small bit of slightly raised flat land with five headstones in it--a dog, a cat, a squirrel, a frog, and a plain pedestal. The roof of the exit crypt protrudes a little from this, and then emerges at the front end. (The mansion and its grounds are raised slightly above the pathway between it and ROA, and all this is, of course, even farther above the actual ground level backstage, which is above the bottom floor of the HM show building. Confused yet?) To complicate things, there's an emergency exit that resembles the exit crypt, I believe, right next door, and my model originally reflected an incorrect understanding of this area. Now things are starting to look right.

The real difficulty in all this is...I have no memory of the exit crypt. Seriously. I don't think I've ever looked behind me as I was exiting the Haunted Mansion, and I think my eyes have always skipped right from the mansion facade to the path up to Splash Mountain...I've never really paid any attention to the crypt, and I've never set foot over in the secluded north garden. Apparently, you can ask a CM to let you back there...of course, I'll be doing that next time I get to visit the park. I'll be taking oodles of photos.

[Datameister]

This is a lot like another render I recently posted, but it's closer to the mansion, and I've done a little bit of work since. Notice the step-like concrete structure coming off the end of the train tunnel, as well as the landscaping around the exit crypt and north garden. This render also shows more clearly the way the brickwork in the queue actually rises periodically; the outdoor queue is slightly sloped, so the brickwork has to "jump" upward at numerous points to catch up.

[Datameister]

Progress inside the mansion show building is chugging along at a snail's pace, if you'll tolerate my mixed metaphor. I decided that it'd be better to build not the track, but the floors that are level with the track. I now have all the track level flooring done from the end of the loading area through half of the attic. (EDIT: The loading area and portrait gallery now have floors, too.) I'm holding off on the graveyard because I don't know the lay of the land too well--I've seen elevation plans for WDW's HM graveyard, but I don't know if Disneyland's was built to the exact same specs.

I'm still having a lot of trouble with the vertical scale. I know that the Doombuggy track is right at ground level for the corridor of doors, ballroom, and attic, so that gives me a point of reference. Everything lower than that--the graveyard, crypt, backstage turn, and loading area--is below the ground level of backstage. The question is, how far does it go down? I've seen photos and blueprints that all seem to point toward a roughly accurate guess. But the bigger problem is how tall the show building is. If I scale the WDW ballroom blueprints to my model and set the track at ground level, the very top of the ballroom is only halfway up the aboveground part of the building. There's a lot of space above, and according to GRD999, there's only five feet or so between the ballroom ceiling and the show building roof. So, either my building is too tall or the WDW ballroom is not built to the same specs as the Disneyland one. Now, I was under the impression that the elements for the DL and WDW mansions were built at the same time, though WDW's mansion wasn't assembled for another year or two. I know there are substantial differences in the layout of the whole beginning/end of the WDW attraction, but I thought areas like the ballroom were identical. Does anyone know if this blueprint holds true for Disneyland, too? Better yet, does anyone know the exact measurement for how tall the HM show building is?

GRD999 has been extraordinarily helpful, sending me two additional blueprints as well as a fascinating photo taken from the control tower of the Haunted Mansion. Hats off to him for making my work a lot easier--and, more importantly, a lot more accurate. He's fixed a number of my false assumptions. Big thanks also go to idreamofjeani for lots of help with the complex structure that is Splash Mountain!

[Datameister]

Ah, so I had a fun moment while re-building the interior walls of the Haunted Mansion for the third time. I ventured down into the portrait gallery, looked back at the two doors leading out of the stretching rooms, and looked up. I hadn't put any ground plane in, so I looked right through to the underside of the mansion facade. Pretty weird that it's so close, huh?



It's rather hard to tell what you're looking at, I know. The wall along the lower left is the side of the hall with the changing portraits on it; the wall on the lower right is the one with the windows, two of which you can see in this render. That opening at the bottom left is a door to a backstage area. The stretching rooms are clearly visible in the center; I haven't built the walls around them yet. They stretch upwards right into the mansion facade itself, which occupies the whole top of the render. The part of the facade furthest to the right is where you walk onto the porch if you've been through the extended queue; the big columns are on the other side of the mansion, not visible in this render. In the upper left corner, you can see the concrete of the railroad tunnel where it hides inside the berm.

[BassBone]

Ho-lee gosh! You are amazing! This gets better and better.

[Datameister]

Why, thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it. I was starting to get concerned that no one was reading the thread anymore.

Today I've been working more on the Doombuggy track. I think I've finally found some form of height information, thanks to GRD999. One of the blueprints he sent me contains height measurements for various areas. Since the blueprint is "for general information only," I'm not sure they're totally correct...but I'm gonna run with it for now, since it's the best I've got. I made the model about 2.5 times bigger today--which doesn't affect the appearance, but it makes it so that each grid unit in Blender corresponds to a foot in real life, meaning I can use exact measurements in the model. I had also planned to work on some of Splash Mountain's back building interior today, but that didn't pan out. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to render shadows better, as I mentioned a few posts ago, but that didn't work out like I wanted it to.

Perhaps I can post a render before bed--or in the morning, at the very least.

[Datameister]

All right, just to prove I've been doing something to the model, here's a not-terribly-interesting render of the flooring so far.



The gray walls at right are the stuff underground, directly below the Haunted Mansion facade. You can see the stretching galleries quite clearly; the portrait hall opens up directly toward us, then turns to its right (our left) and heads toward the loading area. (At that point, you can see the two indentations in the wall where the watching busts are. We're looking at the back side of the effect.) The floor for the track then goes up a ramp and travels left across the screen. You can see the not-so-endless hallway, including the two steps leading up to it. A little ways past there, an emergency exit stretches toward us from the track; the track is right at ground level at that point. Then comes the circular track for Leota's room, and then the straightaway of the ballroom mezzanine, with another emergency exit right behind. (This is the one that always reflects an annoying TIXE in the glass of the ballroom. ) Then comes the first half of the attic, where the blueprints are confusing me muchly. Anyone who has photos of the floor and/or track and the attic would be doing me a huge favor by posting them.

[Hilsbro]

that is really cool .....I like how the render looks...lol

[Datameister]

The fast pass area is continuing to be an insane puzzle, though I think I finally understand that area. It's amazing how many photos of that little microcosm I've hunted down, only to somewhat understand it now. If there were no trees or foliage in that area, it'd be easy; I'd use aerial photos to understand the layout. But there are so many large trees overhead that it's impossible to see what's underneath in the aerial photos. Anyway, all I have to show for my hours of making strange faces at the monitor is a dumb-looking overhead sketch that seems to fit in with all the information I have. But tonight I may actually model some of this...see if it all works. The ultimate test is to put the virtual camera in the right spots and see if the 3D view matches up with the photos I've collected. Anyway, if anyone has any photos of the former fast pass area or its surroundings, PLEASE POST THEM!!!

I don't get to visit Disneyland too often, so my memories of less-than-iconic parts of the park tend to be somewhat limited. Everything around the Haunted Mansion--the cemeteries (human and pet), the walls, the ramps, the trees, the statuettes--has always confused me, and my memories of the layout don't stick too well. It's been interesting to re-discover all this.

[BassBone]

Originally Posted by Datameister

The fast pass area is continuing to be an insane puzzle, though I think I finally understand that area. It's amazing how many photos of that little microcosm I've hunted down, only to somewhat understand it now. If there were no trees or foliage in that area, it'd be easy; I'd use aerial photos to understand the layout. But there are so many large trees overhead that it's impossible to see what's underneath in the aerial photos. Anyway, all I have to show for my hours of making strange faces at the monitor is a dumb-looking overhead sketch that seems to fit in with all the information I have. But tonight I may actually model some of this...see if it all works. The ultimate test is to put the virtual camera in the right spots and see if the 3D view matches up with the photos I've collected. Anyway, if anyone has any photos of the former fast pass area or its surroundings, PLEASE POST THEM!!!

I don't get to visit Disneyland too often, so my memories of less-than-iconic parts of the park tend to be somewhat limited. Everything around the Haunted Mansion--the cemeteries (human and pet), the walls, the ramps, the trees, the statuettes--has always confused me, and my memories of the layout don't stick too well. It's been interesting to re-discover all this.

I'll try and make a trip there tomorrow and get some pics. It's not the former fast pass area. It's still a fast pass area, just used only for Haunted Mansion Holiday.