Carthay Circle Restaurant

Although the concept is simple, I wanted to challenge myself to deliver an image in a different style. The goal was to mimic a diorama or miniature. I also wanted to make sure I paid attention to all the small details as is the charm with Disney Imagineering and dioramas.

As the standard, a reference library was built before starting. A resource I decided to tap into (which turns out - super useful!) is Google Maps. Being able to move around virtually and check different angles and zoom in on what I wanted helped a lot with spatial awareness and scale. I’d much rather be there in-person of course, but this was a close second.

Samples from my reference library

Getting the right amount of detail here was important to me. I wanted enough details to make sure the personality of the building shone through, but not too much where it might break the illusion of it being a diorama. I made the decision to make the vegetation to look almost plasticky, in fear that it might break that illusion. I added the backdrop ramp to add to the smaller sense of scale.

I wanted it to feel like you could step right into the scene and picture yourself interacting with its elements, from walking up to the ticket booth, to reading the menus posted, and opening up the front doors.

Since a lot of the model is architectural with flat planes, it was easy to keep them optimized. Collapsing edges here, merging points there–I did my best to keep triangles at a low.

3d modeling in Maya

I optimized the UVS on assets that didn't use procedurals to ensure texture space efficiency, minimize any distortion and to produce higher-quality results while using less computer resources. The materials were created and tweaked inside of Maya using the Arnold default surface shaders as starting points. For the custom textures, I used a mix of Photoshop and Maya to create what I needed.

Creating the materials

Custom textures

Although I am very familiar with Maya, using Arnold as the main render solution was new to me. I took this opportunity to expand my knowledge and learn how Arnold works. It wasn’t too much of an issue since most of the key lightning principles were unchanged.

Considering this was an architectural piece with high potential for interesting lighting, I wanted to explore the scene in both day time and night time. The building has a lot of beautiful lanterns, light fixtures, and popcorn lights on the facade–these would really pop with a night setting.

For day time, the lighting set up was simple. I created a softbox setup with a 3 lights illuminating the model and adjusted the scene’s global illumination to make sure details could be seen and nothing gets too lost in the darkest of shadows.

As for night time, I have a little global illumination going on, but area lights and emissive materials are doing the heavy lifting. You can see in the screenshot below that everything that is red are lights used for the night scene - the popcorn lights, the bulbs in the lanterns, and the lights behind the windows.

Day Lighting Setup

Night Lighting Setup

Lighting testing progression

Along with learning how to light in Arnold, of course, I’d have to learn about the render settings and especially about the camera. This is one of the issues I ran into for this project. I have a pretty strong knowledge base for other render systems, but it took a bit of time to get used to Arnold and figure out its inner workings.

I leveraged my photography knowledge in this instance to help create the look of a diorama. To create the look of a miniature model, I modified the virtual camera’s settings to mimic that of a tilt-shift lens. For most shots, I also had the camera at a higher perspective than that of a regular person’s. But what would really sell the effect would be to maximize the front and back out-of-focus areas.

Render and camera settings