Martes

2 hours ago, 3DShipWright said:

what the missing piece looks like...

Exactly like it's neighbour to the right.

You missed the diagonal estain - if I remember the name correctly - under it though. The transom pieces do not go into the vertical pair, but rather connected to it and supported by vertical frames from below (at least in French contemporary methods, without cant frames aft). Otherwise it is even more complicated

Thanks to Nate ( @3DShipWright ), who has generously provided me with a wonderful render of the ship's boat.

It allowed to update the boat texture, giving them much more realistic look:

Indy is a popular ship, after all

On 12/22/2023 at 5:09 PM, 3DShipWright said:

just curious if you've tried anything like that

Most of the stern decorations are, in fact, renderings of 3d objects, including counter rails and window frames, and others are taken either from photos or plans and recolored. The only curves I draw by hand are the boundaries of the sternboard and the taffrail.

Ironically, I replaced the glass texture with solid fill at some point, though, because it looked better at this resolution and was easier to reproduce on the hull texture, which is even more compressed - the sterns are usually 256 x 128 pixels for frigates or 256 x 256 for two-deckers, and the frigate hulls until very recently were only 512 x 256. I shifted to 1024 x 256 on the new 74 and razee series and since the game handles them well, will be updating at least the larger frigates gradually, but it all takes time.

@The Art of Age of Sail, I was looking for materials about the Indefatigable around 2017 and your reconstruction was almost the first I encountered then, so I clearly remember it.

I think the model in Naval Action/Ultimate Admiral computer games is also based on your project.

And some more in same setting, in company with the Belle Poule:

1 hour ago, Theodosius said:

I don't know this brand, but it's a 'funny', äh, 'coincidence', that the last one was Speedy, and now Indy, just two models, where another brand (vanguard models) came out earlier with full plans and research...

The kit appears to be based on a reconstruction that had been around since at least in 2017, when I found it, probably done even earlier.

Some stills from running a rather silly gunnery run - just shooting up some boats - with the Hyperion. Hopefully they might convey the ship's dynamic:

The Warspite is complete:

And sails:

Now that I have a razee-74 short, I did a razee-74 stretch:

The 180 ft hull fitted with Symonds-style elliptical stern with classic quarter galleries and elegantly raked aft, based on the plans of the Warspite rebuild of 1840.

The texture is not completely finalized and polished at places (you will probably notice that some details are still missing or not completely fitted), but the model already conveys the appearance of the ship.

It took several additional iterations to get the head rails angles right and in the same style as other models, and finally the small ships are ready:

The bomb vessel

And the corvette

At the same time, I changed the shading of the upper deck gunports on the two-decker razee:

and shifted the first armed gun port on the frigate variant slightly forward:

The last one was a difficult decision, since some ships had the port shifted from it's original position on the 74 and some hadn't. But it just looks better.

https://archive.org/details/cyclopaediaoru03rees/page/n375/mode/2up

This page and forward.

You can download the original JP2 there.

Note, though, that the 74 is somewhat different in different editions, but that's the best I found on the net for now.

Small corrections to the corvette and bomb vessel models - raised the beakhead rails angle and the bulwarks a little and made properly visible mortar muzzles.

3 hours ago, 3DShipWright said:

There's a whole lot of performance optimization that needs to be done before I can realize that dream

There is this advantage in low-detail models and especially rigs.

But something went wrong with the attachment. I see it in the gallery on the main page, and the correct link to image is this:

I can suppose that many differences (the flat gratings?) are a trace of mercantile shipbuilding and handling practices.

There was an interesting quote in a book about HMS Resolute, that one local newspaper wrote that when the ship was brought into American harbour it was percieved with much interest, because everything was not like in the States.

4 hours ago, 3DShipWright said:

The standing rigging that belays to the eyebolts at the base of the masts are on the gundeck on Confederacy and others, not the quarterdeck.

Went to check the plan, and yes, you're right, they are there.

Those crazy colonial shipbuilders!

The hatches should be (somewhat) curved upwards and edges chamfered a little:

And I am very puzzled about those wells around the masts. They kind of shouldn't be there.

There are several sufficiently plausible movement models that - most importantly - do not involve calculation of all the forces acting on the ship, and still produce plausible effect. And require very little computational resources compared to raytracing the wind on the sails. :)

@Jsk, I know of Virtual Sailor (and it's successor Vehicle Simulator), but in a sense I think all those projects are a dead end.

A couple of years ago I did experiment a little with Unity - check these posts and several down:

https://modelshipworld.com/topic/20250-age-of-sail-2-3d-ship-models-for-pc-wargame/?do=findComment&comment=745551

https://modelshipworld.com/topic/20250-age-of-sail-2-3d-ship-models-for-pc-wargame/?do=findComment&comment=746608

And it's much more convenient. Ceto, the ocean and floating system, is open source, GIS import is almost native, lots of things there are done already and quite easy to integrate, the scripting concepts are relatively simple, I lack only one thing - time. It's kind of either models or coding.

As I said sometimes, what interests me besides the tactical layer, is a ship as a mechanical system, not a representation as a single object. And that means flexible multi-part rigging, cables, boats, anchors, etc.

By the way, if you haven't already, take a look at the Painted Ocean:
https://thapen.itch.io/painted-ocean

Thanks!

Oh, I can rant for hours how they ruined the Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail (which was the closest in concept), and why it is bad, but it won't help.

Drop the AAA, I really need one or two people familiar enough with Unity and with some time on their hands to make it into something working (sigh). It would still look good and feel real. Even simple anti-aliasing with 1080p resolution, as on the last screenshots, does wonders.

In-game tests for Hyperion:

My latest ship is, as in the case with variants of cutting the 74, not exact representation of a specific ship, but rather an implementation of a design concept, with the result being something between the Pyramus and the Hyperion.

I have taken the hull of the Belle Poule and subjected it to the same 'anglicizing' procedure that turned the Magicienne into Hyperion, reducing the tumblehome and replacing the stern, but, contrary to the Pyramus, I did not change the layout of the forecastle, so both ships share practically the same profile, and only the breadth of the upperworks betraying the difference.

Ironically, even the reduction of tumblehome was framed as "combine the topsides of La Nymphe with underwater lines of the La Belle Poule" when these projects were concieved.

What I got is a compact 36-gun frigate, slightly wall-sided, relatively shallow and a bit cramped. They were said to be fast but leewardly, and had less stowage capacity for long voyages, but despite a lot of complaints about those ships, their post-war careers - both for Pyramus and Hyperion - were surprisingly active and spanned well into 1830s.

A stunning beauty!

3 hours ago, HAIIAPHNK said:

Whether the slopes of the balconies do not look erroneous. I have already written that I can not explain for what reason Beren broke the vertical directions? Why in his sketch they don't go straight? So I took the risk of doing it differently. Suddenly someone knows the reason and will see that I "tweaked" Beren for nothing?

If I am not mistaken, the design of the decorations in France was independent of the design of the ship and it is possible that Beren never saw the ship's building plan when he made his sketches and was not aware of the exact angles of the wales. We can never know. On the other hand the builder, probably, had a relatively free hand at implementing the design when mounting the decorations on the hull, and could change sizes and angles of details to fit the ship at hand.

We can compare (keeping in mind that the ship was substantially rebuilt before she was captured) the decorations design for Le Ferme and the English lines as taken off.

The angles are very different.

There are several examples of a similar style of stern on a contemporary models - but all of them belong to a somewhat later period (click for large version of each image).

1. Le Tonnant at Rochefort Museum

2. Le Magnanime at RMG:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-66430

And three depictions of L'Invincible:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Invincible_74_guns_commanded_by_Sir_John_Bentley_Kt_in_the_years_1749-1752_RMG_PU8491.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:To_the_Honble_Peter_Warren...This_plate_is_most_humbly_Dedicated...An_Exact_View_of_his_Majesty's_ship_Invincible,_of_74_Guns,_one_of_the_six_French_men_of_war_taken_the_3rd_May_1747_by_the_British_Fleet..._RMG_PZ5887.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Invincible_French_Ship_of_War_mounting_74_Guns,_Captured_from_France,_May_3d_1747,_by_Vice_Admiral_Anson_and_Rear_Admiral_Vernon_RMG_PW7937.tiff

All of them seem to show a straight cut through the gallery, and what effect firing a gun would have on the surrounding structure can only be guessed.