Disneyland in 3D!

[Datameister]

That would be so great if you'd do that! Thanks so much in advance. The more photos, the better. Don't worry about photographing the little details--what I need is an understanding of that area's overall layout. So, if it does work out for you to take some shots, it'd be most helpful if they covered a wide variety of angles from a wide variety of positions. Just do what you can, though. Thanks again! I feel happy.

EDIT: Just a quick update. Today hasn't been particularly eventful in the modeling process; like I said before, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the not-so-former fast pass area. I did, however, put a slight bend in the concrete train tunnel, as indicated in a blueprint sent to me by GRD999. Now I'm working on the actual physical queue--the path leading toward the mansion. Also (and this has me rather excited), I think I've really nailed the depth of the HM basement. I believe the portrait gallery's floor level is 18 feet below the level of the facade porch, and 9.5 feet below the ground level backstage. Inside, I'm using heights for the different areas indicated in the other blueprint GRD999 sent me. It's working pretty well!

[Datameister]

This render isn't anything spectacularly new, but you can see some of the small but necessary adjustments I've been working on. The train tunnel is more accurate now; there's a path between the brick walls in the HM queue, next to which a small, currently gnomon-less sundial has taken up residence; the stuff under the mansion facade is all accurate now, both vertically and horizontally; a ground plane is starting to appear backstage, and it's actually at ground level; and, last but not least, you can see a temporary version of the railroad's water tower at left.



The next render will hopefully show the inside of the show building as it currently is.

[Hilsbro]

dude....you have put a lot of effort into all of this...and let me tell you...THIS ROCKS...I have never seen a 3D model of the 2 as detailed as this....come to think about it...I have yet to see a 3D model of the 2...keep on with the great work

[Datameister]

Thanks! I really appreciate the support. Thanks to the incredibly generous GRD999, I now have some crucial information about the height of the show building and the elements inside, so I'm working on adjusting everything to be really, truly accurate.

[Datameister]

Sorry, but as per usual of late--a truly unsettling grammatical construct--I have no bizarre, revealing, or otherwise interesting renders to post for tonight. I can, however, tell you that I've settled the height of the Haunted Mansion show building quite nicely. It's about 35 feet above the backstage ground level, with an addition ten feet or so below ground. The roof actually slants just slightly--a one-degree grade, but enough to be noticeable in the blueprints and enough for me to work it into the model. So the show building in the model is now shorter, and the acquisition of exact measurements has also allowed me to figure out the placement and dimensions of some doors, based on some photos from during Splash Mountain's construction. That's all worked out; now I have to go in and re-build the platform and caged ladder on the side of the SM show building. I also have to extensively rework the heights of various Splash Mountain elements, since I based the vertical scale of numerous parts of that attraction on the height of the HM show building. Now that I know that my model was a little on the tall side, I'll have to do some tweaking to get Splash to be correct.

Again, let me repeat--if ANYONE has blueprints, elevations, photos, whatever, please please PLEASE send them to me or post them here! The more information I have early on, the less time I'll have to spend correcting my mistakes later on. Innumerable thanks to GRD999 for sending me so much information on the Haunted Mansion! Without the information, I probably would have worked on more enjoyable stuff today...but it would have been wrong! So I'm very glad I got to do a little grunt work in order to get the elements set to truly correct positions.

Whew...I gotta go to bed. More work on the model will come tomorrow. Nighty night.

EDIT: Just because I'm masochistic like that, I think I may completely re-build the mansion facade from scratch at some point. We'll see. It's just been bugging the crap out of me lately because:

1. The walls have zero thickness, meaning the interior looks terrible.
2. At one point, I did some strange stretching and rotating to make it fit an aerial photo that was messed up in the first place. The facade ain't been the same since.
3. I now have more information and could probably do a much better job.

Luckily, the hardest part about making the mansion facade over a year ago was the conceptual part. Now that I thoroughly understand the shape of the darn thing, I think re-building it should be relatively painless. Probably won't start doing that just yet, though. I've got bigger fish to fry--or smaller yet tastier ones, as it were.

[goodguy20k]

I hear you on the zero thickness part. ::sigh:: Live and learn. My model's in like, rev 23.264.

Anyway, this is my first post, and I had to make it in the thread of the one who's inspired me to work on my own models. This whole project is amazing. (I don't know HOW you find all this info out about backstage stuff... I google, and google, and google, and find oh so little.

Keep up the awesome work!

[Datameister]

Hey there! Thanks for both the kind email and the post. I'm glad to hear that I've been able to inspire someone the way Ray Keim inspired me with Haunted Dimensions. Makes me feel a little bit closer to the legend. :P

Regarding backstage information...that's very, very difficult. It comes from a lot of different sources, typically in very small pieces. The starting place is always local.live.com for me. They have the clearest hi-res color aerial photo of Disneyland I've ever seen, so I use that as the final check for the placement of everything in my model. It provides information about where the outdoor backstage areas are, but it's not always clear what I'm looking at. So, I go into the "bird's eye" mode and look at aerial photos taken at an angle from all four directions. (A hint: there are actually multiple bird's eye photos of a given spot in the same direction. Try approaching the spot from different parts of the park.) These photos provide a lot of context and show me the sides of the buildings. That's the beginning of the process of understanding.

At that point, I know some things and I know that I don't know some others. I can identify problem areas and start asking questions around these parts. A number of people, some of whom have worked as CMs, have PMed me lots of help on the various backstage areas. I also use these photos for reference on the Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain--I didn't take them, but they've been extraordinarily helpful. Blueprints are rather hard to come by, but a lot of vigilance on eBay finally allowed me to buy an overhead layout for the Haunted Mansion, which has solved a lot of problems.

Another tip--any time you find a really valuable resource, save it to your hard drive. It feels so terrible to go online one day and find that a huge source of information is simply gone. Sometimes it will come back, but often it's just gone forever. So keep Googling, ask questions here at Micechat, spend hours pouring over lots of aerial photos, and keep a weather eye on eBay. You never know what might turn up. Just don't expect to find out everything at once! My efforts to understand backstage have been mostly limited to Splash, POTC, HM, Indy, and the areas around them. I'm only beginning to truly understand all
of that...and that's less than a quarter of the park, though it's the most important quarter, IMO.

Okay--now for a small update. I don't like lighting and rendering actual indoor scenes, so here's a screenshot out of Blender inside the under-construction HM show building. Just a fun shot; the floors are in place for many areas, but the walls are mostly limited to the queue.

We're at the top of the hill that leads out of the loading area. That's the entrance to endless hallway on our right. See the vertical wall covering half of the entrance? The bottom of that wall is where the ceiling will be for the corridor of doors. The CoD itself stretches away from us, into the frame, on the left side. The conservatory floor is at the bottom left. A little ways down the corridor, notice that an emergency exit snakes its way to a door in the side of the building. Then comes the three-quarter-circle of the seance room, where lo and behold, there's actually a wall in place! You can see how far below the track the actual floor is--more than ten feet. Then comes the ballroom balcony, which heads off to the right until it is hidden by the nearby endless hallway. Notice that the ballroom "balcony" is actually only a couple of feet above ground level, and the ballroom floor below is actually eight feet below ground level. Also notice the two large warehouse-style doors behind the balcony; these open into a large storage area behind the ballroom and attic. (For a view from this room into the attic, check out the third photo on this page.)

EDIT: One more thing. Just so you know, the ceiling you are seeing doesn't correspond to the top of the show building. There's an attic-like area above the whole ride, perhaps eight feet tall, between this ceiling and the actual roof. So the actual building is ten feet or so taller than that, since the green outer walls actually stretch a foot or two higher than the light-colored roof.

[goodguy20k]

I know what you mean. My "references" folder is growing rapidly. (Right-click, save image as. )

Soarin' has been a very interesting challenge. It's the first model I've done in Blender. (I've had a few years experience in 3D work. (I work as a movie animator when I'm not doing college work. )) I wanted a project to learn the ins and outs of Blender, and then I came across your work, and went, "Why not?"

One thing I'm seriously wondering about doing is trying to make an overall "terrain" model. Starting off with topo-maps and such, and then refining it. We'll see if I'm really that brave.

This really inspires me to take a LOT MORE PICTURES next trip I make.
Castmember: "May I help you?"
Me: "Sure, smile!"
Castmember: "Err... Why would you want a picture of this small, mostly hidden wall?"
Me: "Because it's small, and mostly hidden!"
:P

EDIT: By the way, what units do you use for size? I'm just kinda through whatever looked good into mine, but I'm curious what you do. (Of course, you have blueprints, so you can be much more accurate. )

[Datameister]

I know I said I wouldn't work on the new-and-improved mansion facade anytime soon, but I gave in and started working on it today. After spending awhile lining up elevation plans and blueprints in Blender, I built the vertical exterior walls and the first-floor patios. Still got lots more to do...

EDIT: Whoops, you posted before I did, Daniel.

The terrain idea has been very intimidating to me. I've avoiding creating a finalized ground plane, partly because the ground levels vary so much in the park. Another reason is the challenge of texturing. I've got a small part of my terrain in place, backstage behind the Haunted Mansion, but not much else.

I know what you mean about the photo-taking! Next time I go, I'll be snapping shots of the most seemingly-irrelevant details. I'm sure I'll get comments like that one. :P

Units? Ah. I just got that all figured out a few days ago. For the longest time, I wasn't using any sort of unit system. Then I decided to scale the entire model so I could use the grid for feet. So here's what I did. I went into Google Earth--fantastic program, by the way--and used the Measure tool to figure out the length of a certain area. I think I used the back wall of the HM show building. Then I used my own method of measuring to obtain a unit length of the corresponding wall in Blender:

1. Create a new object. Doesn't matter what kind.
2. Delete all the vertices in Edit mode. Don't delete the object, though!
3. In overhead view (numpad 7), ctrl-right-click at the beginning of the wall. This creates a single vertex.
4. Hit g to start moving the vertex; move the mouse so the vertex moves to the end of the wall. The unit length shows at the bottom left corner of the window.

Once I had the unit length, it was just a matter of calculating the conversion factor. I scaled the entire model up by a factor of 2.2-ish, and voila! Each grid unit now magically equates to one real-world foot. This is very, very handy, and I wish I'd done it earlier. I also moved the model vertically so that the x-y plane is right at ground level, backstage behind the Haunted Mansion. I think that's around the "natural" ground level of the area.

[goodguy20k]

I assume you mean with the medium grid. (Changes with zoom, showing small, medium, and large depending on how far out you are.)

Very cool method. I'll give it a shot.

[Datameister]

Right you are. The small grid is tenths of a foot, and the large grid is tens of feet. All three sizes are very useful!

[Walt's Ghost]

Do you know any good blender tutorials?

[Datameister]

I didn't realize that was physically possible. >.>

No, seriously, Blender tutorials are almost always bad or out-of-date. That's the one aspect of using the program I've been consistently disappointed in. You can try the Wikibook, which is probably the best resource I've seen. You might try searching for specific questions, or check out elysiun.com. Helpful Blender tutorials are rather difficult to find, I'm afraid.

That being said, I'm a friendly guy who likes to pretend that he can use the program...so if you need any specific help, don't be afraid to post here or send me a PM.

[DisneyMan]

Once again Datameister the latest rendering looks awesome! Keep up the great work!!!!

-mark

[Datameister]

Thanks!