Yet Another Pandora 3D build

[Don9of11]

Looking good Denis. Another resource you could look for is "The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War: 1650-1850" by Peter Goodwin. You might find a good used copy online, maybe Abe books, even Amazon. 

[herask]

5 hours ago, Don9of11 said:

Looking good Denis. Another resource you could look for is "The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War: 1650-1850" by Peter Goodwin. You might find a good used copy online, maybe Abe books, even Amazon. 

I've seen that book mentioned several times across build logs. sadly, this can turn into real expensive hobby real fast. for now I'll manage with what I can find available online... ;-) 

[mtaylor]

6 hours ago, Don9of11 said:

Looking good Denis. Another resource you could look for is "The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War: 1650-1850" by Peter Goodwin. You might find a good used copy online, maybe Abe books, even Amazon. 

Goodwin?  I have one similar but not exactly titled as "The Arming and Fitting of the English Ships of War: 1650-1815" by Lavery.   How similar are they?

[Don9of11]

I'm not sure Mark. The book I mentioned covers construction in good detail. 

[wrkempson]

Goodwin and Lavery are entirely different books.  Goodwin is the resource for building the ship.  Lavery tells you what to put in it.  Both books are necessary resources.  Add to them Lees' book on Masting and Rigging and you will have a nice trilogy for building these ships.

 

Wayne

[BANYAN]

A very nice trilogy of reference books for that era indeed Wayne; I would also suggest "Seamanship in the Age of Sail" by Harland to the mix.  Harland described how the ships were sailed and operated - this gives some valuable insight to the rigging and presentation of models.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[mtaylor]

Thanks for the explanation, Wayne.   I have Lavery and Lee's, so it's probably time for HMS Visa to take another hit.

[herask]

making progress in hold area... 

 

 

 

 

and some more screenshots from Unreal Engine 4.... starts to feel like walking through the ship ... ;-))

cheers!

Denis

 

 

 

[Don9of11]

Nice detail Denis. I like the first group of photos with the natural wood look but the sun light looks awesome too.

[herask]

thank you Don. the second set is made using different render program, that's why it looks a bit different. I plan on making the whole ship walk-able, like a virtual tour or something. no concrete plan yet...

[Gaetan Bordeleau]

Thank you Denis to show us these inside photos.

I love this kind of photos.

[BANYAN]

Stunning - that sunlight effect is very effective.  A walk through will be really something (oil lights flickering for lighting?)

 

cheers

 

Pat

[vossiewulf]

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.

 

 

[herask]

thank you guys! 

 

Gaetan, I really like the views from the "eye-point" as well. it's something we can't do with scale models. there'll be more of those, for sure. 

 

Pat, I don't know yet how I'll do the lighting, especially toward the end. it might happen that the model becomes too heavy for computer to handle the walkthrough. we'll see, I have still a long way to go.... 

[herask]

vossiewolf, thank you for stopping by.

 

right now the scene counts around 600.000 vertices. I didn't plan on being very careful with polycount. in fact, I'll be happy if this thing stays under 15 million polygons. I'm not making a game ready model, but instead trying to see how far I can push this thing. optimization was never on my agenda. 

 

that said, I'm not a complete lunatic after all :-D, I'm using modifiers to help save the memory (Blender reports around 450mb right now) with that in mind, I can't really use custom textures. for so many different objects there would be tens of them and memory consumption would again go up. I think I'll stick with materials, and material instances. right now now I'm using just 4 textures and I can change color, roughness value and tiling to simulate another wood or metal material. 

[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.

[herask]

for now blender hasn't got substance plug-in, but I got shader setup which works just fine with Substance Painter output textures. I love that piece of software... 

[vossiewulf]

Ditto. These are Battletech mechs from a game project I was working on last year. First two are high poly but bottom one is low poly + normal map (and AO and curvature and ID etc.) and not the final version, you can see where I forgot to taper the missile launcher tubes so Substance Painter's normal map baker got confused.

 

[vossiewulf]

BTW, one thing you could do with your model is make one hell of a plastic ship model available on Shapeways.  Would take time to lay out all the parts for printing. But someone's going to do it, and make some money.

 

[herask]

more progress. well with pump holes, some pillars, some lower deck beams for determining hold walls height, main mast and mizen mast steps.... now I saw that I need bolts on doors, duh! also, need to do lantern in magazine, and then I can go onto fore hold deck... feel free to point out any mistakes/omissions you see. 

 

cheers!

Denis

 

[architectnavalis]

Duuude! This is really awesome! When this is finished you could easily place a roleplaying game on this ship and I would definitely buy it.

[druxey]

Rendering looks great, but there are some details that are inaccurate. (I'm sure it is your sources, not your error!) One, the shot locker lids extend the whole width of the lockers. They are not like port lids. Check out any Swan class build or Naiad and you'll see how this is done. The boards over the limber channels are in short lengths with finger holes for lifiting them. Inside the well is open to the limber channels, not planked in. The well door probably had some ventilation holes bored through, (as would the various platform doors, if they did not have bar or lattice vents).

 

Hope this helps you.

[herask]

thank you, druxey. you're right, there's not much in plans indicating how the well looks like in detail. but omitting finger holes in limber boards, that's totally on me. I saw that in one of the build logs and forgot about it... will correct it. 

 

cheers! 

Denis 

[herask]

made some modifications as per druxey's suggestions. indeed, shot locker hatches look better this way. only, now they're bigger. now that I look at it, how did one open them and reach into it for canon balls? (if that's what shot locker stands for?). the hatches are now almost as big as regular doors.

 

fore hold deck beams done as well. need to do those breasthooks (is it called that?) and fore mast step before planking...

 

cheers!

Denis

 

 

 

 

[herask]

more screenshots from UE4...

 

 

[herask]

just wanted to inform you guys I will need to put The Pandora on hold for a while. another project came up and for the time being this one's will have to wait... :-( but will definitely continue with it. 

 

cheers!

Denis

[Gleep93]

Hey Dennis, I'm a bit late to this thread but I had one question. I'm also using blender, and have started to model the Pandora. I was wondering how you traced the frames from the plans. I'm a bit of a noob at the software. I know the half breadth plans (I think that's what they're called) show the stern and the bow, but I was wondering how you replicated them on either side to create all of the frames. Hopefully mine will look as beautiful as yours!

 

Happy modeling

-Zach

 

 

[herask]

Zack, there's a mirror modifier you can use to mirror frames from one side to the other. just make sure that the origin point is in the middle (x or y axis, depending on how you oriented the keel). 

 

I've traced the plans with curves, which I have then transformed into meshes, connected the mesh lines and got a hull shell. but, it seems to me (I might be wrong) that you still have to learn the tool before tackling ship modeling. you might wanna try something simpler for starters, follow some hard surface tutorials on YouTube (there's plenty), or even car or archviz ones. what you learn there is going to be enough for ship modeling. 

 

good luck and don't get discouraged. blender is really powerful and there's a lot to cover, but once you know the tool all you'll need is time to do everything you'd like to model... ;-D

[malachy]

Good to see another blender modeller here

Got any special node setup for cycles? The pictures look pretty nice!

 

And, of course, it´s a magnificent model!

[herask]

thx, bava. I had a node setup for PBR textures before. then Andrew Price (blenderguru) came up with his setup, and now there's a native principled shader bundled with latest blender. and that's all what you need for PBR materials. other than that, no special node setup. whichever works, mate... ;-)