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This would explain a lot of things... ;)
I had no idea they had turned that into a tourist attraction. I remember when they closed their doors! Talk about the sudden increase of people suddenly on the streets. The police couldn't keep up with some of the more violent offenders and when they were arrested, there was no place to put them! Everyone was more vigilant about making sure their doors were locked after that. I was going to college in Weston at the time and had a run in or two with some very scary inidividuals. Luckily most of the patients were nonviolent, just mostly depressed.
I shouldn't be surprised that they have ghost tours, though. West Virginians love their folk stories and ghosts and there are a lot of stories. There are lots of towns in that area that have some kind of ghost tour.
I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the eighties, and a lot of the patients in there were institutionalised. It had been the only home they'd known for decades and represented security to them rather than confinement, in a world that otherwise mostly seemed confusing. I often wonder how they all fared when 'care' in the community took over and the place was shut down. Oddly enough, it was during the daylight when the place seemed at it's most creepy, especially walking down long empty corridors to visit the boys in the maintenence department in the basement. You could almost hear old horrors echoing from the walls. On the other hand, night time meant all the nightlights going on, the residents settling down to sleep all fed and cared for, and the entire place taking on a cosy glow that still makes me feel warm inside when I remember it. It's kind of sad that it probably looks much like West Park now.
The place is very similar to West Park, especially on the inside.
Until then, there's this: http://www.daz3d.com/after-school-hangout
I have that wishlisted for that exact reason, but it needs a few other products so it's had to wait. Same for that rundown texture version of the lil' ones playground that came out awhile ago. They both scream perfect for more mature horror stories with no kids around at all.
Very good point..
I have read a lot on historic asylums, largely from the same POV as your own.. and a lot of it is pretty harrowing. The artbooks are fine and all, but once you've read about the lives within those old walls, it does give it an extra sense of.. despair? abandonment..? I don't know how to describe it truthfully. I'll stop there as I don't want to get too deep - sometimes WP stuff strikes a nerve with people, which personally I think can be a positive thing in art. Whenever I create a WP set though, I do so thinking more about the people, than the actual location.
Another thing I think might be good for the West Park series is a security check point. I imagine in these places that they didn't allow the inmates to roam freely around the building all day, so an area you could tack onto the end of a corridor with bars, a gate, and a small security/observation room would seem fitting.
Oh! Also, an old-style operating theatre! The kind thats surrounded by a glass observation area where people could look down into the room and observe the operation as it happened. Those are creepy as hell, even in todays hospitals.
You're right that Iray almost seems to be made for WP. It really gives it such a realistic feel and the sets and textures were made so well to begin with that you really don't need to alter much at all (if anything).
Two great films that I think might give you some inspiration Jack are Stonehearst Asylum and The Wolfman (both feature good representations of what I'd imagine a psychiatric hospital used to look like in the old days).
Oh, just thought of another idea - those circular lecture rooms where a psychiatrist would present their patient to their peers in the middle and everyone would sit around them in a circle observing (like a roman amphitheatre). Those are super creepy too.
In case it was missed, here's a preliminary effort at a clean version.
Metals are generally from Mec4D's PBS Vol 1 (though regular metals would probably work fine), tile is from filterforge Delft-style, and much of the rest is standard concrete (regular for walls/ceiling, polished for inside the pool)
Also Iray Worlds to provide a nice outside.
It's not perfect -- if I had more inclination to make officialish clean textures, I'd be sure to put in some of the baseboard/side details on the walls/floor, and I'd have to do something about the panels inside the pool. (Either use geometry editor to split them out to a new surface, or use the original textures to make my own pattern)
This is preliminary since I think it ought to have people of some kind.
This uses the standard promo camera (and Jack, I REALLY appreciate having 'just like the promos' settings/load).
Compare to the promo:
http://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/d/a/daz3d_westparkhydro_promo_01.jpg
Something with a similar mood http://www.daz3d.com/anatomy-theatre
Ah yes, thanks Richard - thats just the kind of thing I mean. Something like that in the WP style would be awesome. Preferably with a back wall with a large chalkboard on it.
Security in the place where I worked was non-existent, and whenever our most highly dangerous resident was on the warpath (the only dangerous resident we had, really, but even our big male Charge Nurse was scared of her) it involved hiding the long pole with the hook on the end of it that was used to open and close high windows, and all the staff congregating for much of the day around a table placed conveniently close to the main exit doors at the top of the ward. This was more for our benefit than anyone else's - running for help was probably the best we could've done if we couldn't contain her, and we were told on several occasions by the top brass that she couldn't be moved to a more secure ward until she'd actually killed someone. Nice. When she wasn't going through one of her 'turns', she was like a big 300lb baby, with the sweetest nature you can imagine.
The other residents were pretty much allowed the run of the hospital, and the odd one or two even ventured outside occasionally. We once got a call from the local Job Centre, asking if we could please retrieve one of our patients, who was having a lie down in the middle of their floor.
We did keep our own pigs out at the back of the hospital somewhere though (great for feeding the body parts to in all your horror stories, I imagine!), which we had to save all the food scraps for every day, and had a chapel just inside the front gate which could probably be made to look quite creepy. The grimmest part about the staff social club on the premises was the beer, but we evidently didn't keep our own chickens anywhere in the grounds as one of the most gruesome things to stick in my mind was probably The Eggs. The kitchen would send up most meals every day, but we were expected to sort out breakfasts, suppers and snacks with provisions they'd supply. Eggs were either stale, staler or extremely stale, and we were constantly complaining. It came to head one day when they didn't even make it as far as the ward kitchen - we could smell how bad they were. The lid came off the trolley, and they were absolutely alive with maggots. I can still picture this seething mass waiting on the windowsill of the day room for kitchen staff to come up and dispose of it, backed by the soundtrack of 'workhouse wails' which was often typical of the place. Eat your heart out, Hammer House of Horror :)
East Park Hydro?
Jack, have you ever seen the film, "Tillicut Follies"?
"Titicut Follies is a 1967 American documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman and filmed by John Marshall, about the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, a Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater, Massachusetts."
It is very disturbing. (The photo is the link to the video)
What did you use for the water, Will?
Petercat: I put a cube in, gave it a displacement pattern using a ripple map from FirstBastion's SciFi quarters (I just went to my Daz texture directory and searched for ripples), otherwise it's just water with a lowered refraction weight so the reflections show up.
Oh, and here are the final versions of clean hydro.
Textures are mainly concrete, tile from FilterForge, Mec4D metal shaders, some glossy roughness on the windows. The pool grates took some effort, since they aren't a separate material zone -- used the texture map as a template and placed some black/white to make a cutout opacity mask on a geoshell.
Thanks, Will. That helps. I'll have to do the same search, as I don't have SciFi Quarters.
You can probably find half-decent ripple shaders free online, from cgtextures.com, and similar.