Disney Imaginations 2019 Semifinalist
A few years ago in 2019 me and a few friends and classmates, Josh and Mitch decided to take part in the Disney Imaginations Contest representing UVU. They give a theme and you have to design a park/area around the theme in around 2 months. 2019’s theme was Wonders of the World, including the 7 modern and ancient wonders. We decided to take a crack at the Temple of Athena. Most past submissions were 2d design drawings, but we decided to try it in 3d, It was more in our skill set and we decided it would be fun to use VR to help in the layout and design. We ended up as semi-finalists, which I think surprised most of us. We are really happy with what made, so I’d like to talk about it!
My Stuff
I’ll mainly be talking about what I worked on here, which was setup in Unity, getting VR working, textures, and a few buildings.
VR
I think the most interesting/fun part about this project is that we used vr to help get the scale of everything right. VR itself was not allowed in the presentation to Disney, we had to submit a video and some pictures, but I think it really helped laying everything out. It was used pretty often for getting the size of smaller object right, like handrails and benches, but man is it cool seeing this thing “in person,” It’s huge! We used a number of measurements and references found online to get the size of the temple correct, and I remember just being blown away at its size. It’s amazing to think that someone could make something so big so long ago.
There is a VR lab at UVU and there are often demonstrations for people touring/visiting the campus so we got to show it off pretty regularly throughout the year. My favorite thing about that was just the difference in how kids and adults go through the space. Pretty much all the kids immediately started teleporting to the top of the statue as soon as they saw it, while adults almost never did. Never failed to make me laugh.
Textures
I made almost all the textures in this project and with a wide variety of methods too. Most were procedural made in Substance Designer, from the marble, the limestone with limestone brick variant, brass for the braziers, and the tapestries in the temple. I made the roof texture by modeling a section of it, and backing it into a texture. And I used photogrammetry to create tiling gravel and bark textures.
Buildings
I designed and built the small buildings to either side of the temple as well as the amphitheater in the back of the temple. There is a cafe, a bathroom, and a gift shop of both sides of the temple. They all had basic layouts drawn up, but the insides are empty for the most part (just needed the building part for the presentation). The ampitheater was pretty simple and has a small building behind it as well for prop storage or to act as a ready room.
Retrospect
So if there’s one thing I would go back and change it would the story/flow of the area. We had the pleasure of speaking with and presenting to an imagineer visiting the school a few days before the deadline. He gave us some great advice that we sadly did not have time to implement. Basically, the area looked cool but there wasn’t much of terms of actual theme park stuff. The things you could do were kinda minimal, there wasn’t a lot of interest that would keep people engaged. I would have liked to have more time to develop those things further, which I feel would have pushed us closer to getting at least a finalist spot.
Finally one of my favorite pictures. When we imported the statue model into Unity it was just a bit too big. You can also catch of glimpse of a Gundam that Josh made in the temple. We were using for scale and placeholder.
The project was conceived by the UVU’s Team and created for the 2019 Walt Disney Imagineering’s Imaginations Design Competition. This project is the sole property of Walt Disney Imagineering and all rights to use these ideas are exclusive to Walt Disney Imagineering. The competition is a way for students and recent graduates to showcase their talents and for Walt Disney Imagineering to identify new talent.
