vossiewulf

Ok, just checking that you're thinking it through and you are, so you'll be fine. Not sure if they have a close integration now with Blender, but substance painter does have an excellent material export for Max with substance material types being native in Max now.

The gunport spacing has to be a general rule. Since frigate and ship designs of the same number of guns had gundeck lengths that varied by a foot or two from each other during any given time period, it can't be a hard rule as those differences are not going to be divisible by the size of the shot and the number of gunport spacings.

The thing that surprised me is making treenails actual objects. I hope your machine has lots of memory For the sake of rendering times you might want to think about the parts you can do with normal maps and your textures instead of building memory-intensive geometry. I know lots of people who use Blender and do very good work with it. I am MAX but that's because I have been using it since it was 3DSr4 for DOS in 1994, no way going to learn wildly different workflows at this point. At one point I had a free licensed copy of Lightwave 7 or something, but I gave up after a week, what a completely messed up program that was. The preferred modeling method was typing numbers everywhere. I assume you are texturing right, not going to keep just the generic wood textures? If so, what are you going to do to unwrap UVWs? There are only a couple tools I know of that can reasonably handle something this complex, otherwise you'll need to break it into lots of separate objects. I use Flatiron for complex UVW unwrapping, but it's a bit expensive and not sure if it supports Blender. If you can, and haven't already, look at the Substance Designer/Painter combo, there isn't much you can't do and it's quite easy to do amazingly cool things. One of them is like $150, the combo was $250 last time I looked and you could get it on Steam. Regardless, it looks good already and you're thinking about the right things, so I'm sure it's going to be a very nice and accurate model.

Give me a couple days to play with them, I just had a few minutes to experiment with them this evening and I may rate the medium more like 220. But regardless I think these are going to be really handy for making various sanding/filing tools, I'm going to mount them on some brass pieces and also some spring steel pieces but you could use wood in most cases. Also, this brand is definitely diamond But a bit more expensive at $12 for 5 pieces. But still used on wood they should last almost forever so I think either the Horico ones or these are going to be good purchases.

Easy guys I didn't say anything about slavish attempt to find the perfect furniture, just that whatever I end up doing is still an open question Once I get there I'm going to review the LN kit vs. various cutter models, I think it was Tony who provided a link upthread to a large collection of cutter models, some period. I have been toying with the idea though of giving this a real name of a cutter of the right size and time period, I don't much like the idea of a made-up name. Haven't decided yet. Passer, if you haven't found it already the best build log you should be following even though the design is somewhat larger and a bit different than our cutters, is Chuck's Cutter Cheerful. He's doing the rigging now and also the full step-by-step instructions are available on his Syren Models site. Also, as Rick pointed out to me some time ago, the first chapter of Rigging Period Fore and Aft Craft could be relabeled "The Advanced Rigging Manual For Lady Nelson and Sherbourne". It covers a cutter basically identical to ours.

Good point, hadn't thought of that use. As I mentioned, not really sure, but I would start with the fine grit. The medium that I tried last night was maybe 100 grit(?) and I assume the coarse is going to be more for reshaping than sanding.

$19.45 delivered for 12 diamond-coated stainless steel strips, and they seem to be made well and should last quite a long time. I'm disappointed they're only on .007" steel, I was hoping for a bit stiffer. But if nothing else you can make lots of really useful semi-files out of these and that's what I intend to do. I might pick up some of the wider 6mm strips also. BTW all manufacturers seem to sell coarse/med/fine grit but no indication of how that maps to normal diamond sharpening stones and the like.

The "antler" carving looks like standard acanthus patterns.

As long as you accept that anything bad that happens in your absence is your fault, I'm good I've figured furniture is still a totally open question, we've seen a whole series of models, none of which has the same furniture as the others.

Let's do a size comparison. Gaetan uses his GRS engraver's block to refine one small part of his ship. I use mine to hold my ship.

Yes, and I've been lucky in that Rick has been doing most of the research for me But I just see now that he has a new build going, something I'd missed. I'm glad that he's working on something but I'll have to assume I need to do more digging myself. If you see upstream we were discussing at length the gunport locations and orientation, since they follow the line of the top of the gunwale rather than the deck line, which still seems weird to me. Thanks Dan. I think the one book I don't have is that one, so I'll grab it. I wish I'd known about the flaring before I started the second planking, that would have made things much easier. As it is unfortunately I'm committed now and will have to go with my stealer plan. They're going to be where the surface flares out for the transom and therefore will be mostly edge-on from normal viewing angles so hopefully not a real issue. After putting on the garboard the first thing I did was taper the topline to reduce how far it comes up the stem on both sides. And I found a new issue that I'd need to account for, that the bow end of the port rabbet bottom line drifts upward a bit less than 1/32" before beginning the upward sweep. Not sure how that happened yet but experience with the first planking told me to fully compare each plank as it's put on each side to within an inch of their lives to catch those kind of things so I saw immediately that the top line of the garboard plank on the port side was considerably higher than the starboard one. I carefully trimmed the port one back most of the way with the first plank and the rest of the way with the second, spreading the error out a bit. As of the second plank they've been dead even port and starboard so hopefully all is well, and I'm going to be more careful cutting rabbets next time.

Fixed that for you

Yes, but also keep in mind there are like 137 Lady Nelsons and Sherbournes being built at one stage or another here

They differ very little, so in general experience with one puts you in a position to suggest what to do with the other. Thanks for the reminder/suggestion of placing an early plank at the bottom of the gunports to ensure they are aligned. And welcome to the cutter party BTW:) I AM making progress here, just slow as my time windows remain a bit constricted and I keep finding myself spending half of it on workshop logistics, this evening was making new sanding tools using spring steel pieces of various thicknesses as a backing for PSA stikit gold paper of various grits. Then I got annoyed at the lack of a curved-edge scraper of small enough radius for this ship so I took one of Lee Valley's small scrapers (which are nice BTW) and ground it into a basic curved scraper with several convex and concave curves. That said I'm sure Lee Valley scrapers are just spring steel of the right thickness, I keep meaning to get a roll of that thickness plus some heavier- I really like my heavy luthier scraper's lack of chatter and want to try thicker small scrapers. And I've been thinking why not make some "carving" tools with traditional straight/convex/concave/v-parting cuts but make them pure scrapers - a "gouge" would just be a fully hardened tool steel piece like any small palm carving tool, except it ends in a transverse blunt curve of the correct radius. When you really sharpen something like that, you can carve with them with far more predictable results than the usual edge tools. On the downside, of course much slower. So I want to make some for finishing of difficult curves that cross the grain but I also think they'll be quite handy for general ship work and particularly planking.

I found you can get these polishing/separator strips on Amazon. The stainless steel ones appear to be spring steel coated with diamond so very promising, I ordered some yesterday. The mylar ones look good also and I ordered some of them, but they're more or less flexi-i-file pieces so they might be just a better replacement for those.

I figured you would have just worked from M. Boudriot's careful calculations of the amounts of wood of various types required. At least I remember him having good data for wood quantities, it's not something I look up on a regular basis. Although you're working at furniture scale, the easy calculations we use doing that wouldn't apply to an object where um, maybe 20%-30% of its internal volume is more wood structure in zillions of separate pieces, so I like your method of working off the volume.

The issue with making them into anything that will be heavily stressed is the metal is excessively hard for those applications and therefore too brittle in general, doesn't need teeth scores to be a problem. If you do make anything out of them you need to take that into account.

I sent a PM to Grant Druxey, so no need.

And you want these or these. At least buy one and see whether you think how much better it works from the start and how much longer it lasts than cheaper files make them a lot less expensive than they seem.

Options for dull file: 1. Make it into something else 2. Toss it in an old file drawer for those jobs you need to do where you really don't want to use your nice new files 3. Recycle bin

It's like a perfect ship-building machine.

Yeah I bought a Dietz set some years ago that had a rough case and didn't look terribly good for $40. I don't care about the case and all it took was some 1500 grit sandpaper and it looks great and could be used another 100 years.

When you're done with the model building, you should look at Substance Painter 2 for the texturing, a model that good deserves a good texturing job and CAD programs simply aren't designed to do that. I've used Substance Painter quite a bit and nothing out there can compete with how easy it is to generate outstanding results. There's a pretty significant learning curve coming from a CAD world as to how high end rendering works today, with low and high poly models with normal maps and ambient occlusion maps and ID maps and curvature maps and how physics-based rendering (PBR) works with the now-standard metal/roughness shaders. And with a model that complex you'd definitely want an automated tool for generating the UVW maps for all the textures like Unwrella or Flatiron (that's the one I use). But the results are well worth it.

I find the decision process easier than that, I long ago decided that if I think "hmm maybe I should fix that, it's really not as good as I want" then I should just stop and fix it. If it's bubbled up to that point in my mind it's something that will annoy me every time I look at it and disappoint me when I show the result to others so it seems to me the decision is pretty obvious. It may involve a considerable number of profane invectives of course and possibly throwing some of the offending bits around the room once you have them off, but no point in delaying or waffling about it - if you think you maybe should fix it, you should.

Go the other direction! I have a couple of his 1/300 frigates, very nice little kits. 1/300 Langton HMS Victory