World of Wonders - Making of Symbolica part 1

A short series of how we work on our new project: Symbolica. The making of is split into multiple posts including the different stages of our process. As usual, we’ll start with the buildings and a short dive into the history of them.

Interior and exterior

The building was first constructed outside the park. Based on a very old version of the facade and many reference pictures, Luca, Xander, Jochem and Joost started building on the exterior. This is also the version that is currently used in the park, besides some subtle changes like blockusages and some details, like the windows, which now have a glowing effect, and the doors to the preshow. With the exterior done, Xander made the layout of the interior, and Luca built the new scenes around it, but a lot has changed in the meantime.

Layout of the area

The building was finished and ready to be pasted to its permanent place. After doing some tests we noticed that the building didn't fit its surroundings. At the backside there wasn’t enough space to fit both the waterfall and the path.

Luckily we found another solution, by altering the shape of the Gondoletta lake, we achieved a great representation of the space between Symbolica and the path to Reizenrijk. To make these changes possible we needed to reform the islands in the lake to create more space at the backside of the building.

Break and recent changes

Ever since the building has remained mostly untouched, apart from a couple of small details. Only the interior needed an upgrade after two years of not working on it. With the vehicle models created we figured that they needed a lot more space if we didn’t want them to bump into walls. Joost improved the version from 2021 with some big details. One of the scenes that only needed some tweaking was the hallway of Panorama Salon, which is the part of the ride where you look over the city of Symbolica.