Future World Directional Sign in Blender

I was in the mood to model with Blender today, so I recreated a typical directional sign found in Future World at EPCOT. What I find interesting about this excercise is that the entire model is basically made out of primitives (cylinders, cubes, etc.) But when put together, the design looks really cool, thanks to the brilliant Disney Imagineers.

Future World Directional Sign
Future World Directional Sign

There are a few techniques worth mentioning, however. Refer to the figure below.

Slicing an Object
Slicing an Object

The outer frame is a cylinder, that was simply extruded around a corner. One end of the cylinder was rotated 45 degrees around the Y-axis, then extruded down the Z-axis.

The lattice work is made up of elongated cubes. All of them originally overhung the outer frame. I couldn’t find any kind of “slicing” operation, so I created another elongated cube to act as my slicing object. I positioned it where I wanted the slice to occur, then performed a Boolean Difference operation with each piece of lattice.

The outer cylinders, that will eventually hold the arrows that point to the associated attractions, are actually made up of three cylinders. I began with the first cylinder and deleted its end faces, so I basically just had a hollow ring. I duplicated the ring, then scaled it down to make an inner ring. On each end of this dual cylinder, I made faces between the inner and outer rings. I then created a third cylinder, kept its faces intact, and scaled it to fit inside the inner ring.

PayPal, ASP.NET and PDT

I am working on a client’s site, which requires subcribing to a newsletter via PayPal. Other requirements include:

  • The site lives within the DotNetNuke content management system
  • A custom DNN module must be written with C# and ASP.NET to handle post-processing of the transaction data

After reading through the documentation at PayPal’s developer site, I thought I had a handle on how to write the code. I was wrong, and thankfully several forums and a handy tool later, the code appeared to be working (although I was consitently getting a FAIL response from PayPal’s PDT interface). After scouring the docs and forums again for a solution to the FAIL problem, I finally realized that maybe the reason for the FAIL was that the payment was not going through.

I’m testing this process within PayPal’s sandbox, so I went into the settings to find out if I had set something wrong. And of course I did. I had previously set up a few accounts manually, obviously not quite understanding how to get everything setup properly. The email addresses were not verified, for one thing. Luckily, PayPal has an option to setup preconfigured buyer and seller accounts.

PayPal Sandbox
PayPal Sandbox

After I setup a couple of preconfigured accounts, everything worked beautifully. I’ve never seen this mentioned in any of the forums, so hopefully, this will be what some of you are looking for.