The Disneyland Railroad Main Street Train Station may not have been the first model I worked on, but it definitely received the most attention to detail.
From the very beginning, I had much more reference material to work with, including personal photos and a blueprint copy that took me hours to scan and piece together. I set up reference planes inside of 3dStudioMax and worked on each section without giving much thought to true detail or how many elements were copies of each other. I learned a great many things about how to organize a scene, speed up my modeling without sacrificing detail, and render interesting viewpoints to attract new viewers on social media. Basically work smarter not harder.
Starting in 2014 I began to remodel several pieces of architecture using another program: SketchUp. This gave me a chance to use new tactics and tools to add even greater detail when appropriate (read: accuracy) and remove extra detail that only slowed down navigation and didn’t add anything to the render or animation.