Ray Keim looked at Disney’s Haunted Mansion and apparently decided the reasonable response was to reverse-engineer the building into pieces people could print, cut, fold, and glue together at home.
Haunted Dimensions began in 2004 as a showcase for Keim’s 3D mansion illustrations and grew into a collection of free architectural paper models. The project is old-Web craftsmanship in a particularly literal form: the website distributes files that leave the screen and become physical objects.
Keim’s first major Haunted Mansion paper model was based on the Liberty Square version at Walt Disney World.
He built the mansion digitally in NewTek LightWave, then deconstructed and flattened the 3D geometry into printable parts. Photoshop handled textures and details. The pieces had to fit ordinary 8.5-by-11-inch paper, so the problem was not merely making the building look correct on a screen. The geometry had to survive scissors, folds, tabs, glue, and a human being trying to understand which tiny roof went where.
The finished instruction set ran eleven pages with fifty illustrated assembly steps. The model was released in June 2005.
Six months for another haunted house
Keim followed it with the New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion from Disneyland. That version took roughly six months to develop and was released in June 2006.
A Phantom Manor model followed later, along with galleries showing finished builds submitted by people around the world.
That gallery is part of what makes the site worth keeping. This was not merely a portfolio where people looked at nice renders and left. Visitors printed the work, built it, photographed the result, and sent it back.
Keim has written that he wanted the Internet to remain a place where people could share ideas, art, and enjoyment. The models were offered free, with donations optional.
The technical process also captures a useful period in hobby publishing. Before desktop 3D printing became common, a detailed digital model could become a physical replica through a printer, card stock, and an alarming number of folds.
No proprietary app was required to enjoy the final object. No account needed to remain active. If you downloaded the model, you had the model.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because independent websites often preserve not just finished art, but the strange working methods people invented to make the Web useful for their particular obsession.
In this case the obsession comes with glue tabs.