Age of Sail 2 - 3d ship models for PC wargame

[Martes]

And sailing test:

 

[Martes]

As I already said, the completed hull of the Colossus presents a lot of interesting possibilities.

 

Among other things, the hull can be stretched by inserting a parallel section in the middle, and the Colossus turns into the Blake class:

 

 

Despite being almost 8 feet longer (180' instead of 172' 3"), it may be a little tricky to spot the difference - note the Blake has more space before and after the battery and an additional upper deck port. This model can represent practically any "long" 74, still smaller than 80-gunners and slimmer than the Temeraire-class ships.

 

Another option, very slightly less historical, is to stretch the hull without the roundhouse, since I have it anyway, but this time the resulting ship would not be considered a frigate, but a full-fledged two-decker with armed spar deck, less only the upper tier of the cabins. The Royal Navy, if I recall correctly, had only one major ship of the line in this configuration, the Plantagenet, which was of a different design but very close in size (plus the St. Lawrence on the Great Lakes, but that's completely different story), so the model will have to do at least for now.

 

 

The paint scheme is relatively unusual for Royal Navy and is closer to Danish or Russian ships, but it's not to say it was not used at all (at least it appears on a number of engravings) and it suits the design perfectly well.

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

A preliminary test of the Blake under sail:

 

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

I've written this before, but I'll reiterate that you have some kind of special gift for displaying the sexy features of ships. And that special care and feel in shaping the hull surfaces, which I find so appealing. "Small" masterpieces in their specificity and beyond...

 

 

[3DShipWright]

Yup - I'd echo what @Waldemar said. Well done indeed.

[Martes]

Thanks, I am really glad you like them.

 

Hopefully I will convert the flush-decked version today or tomorrow and show her sailing as well.

 

The Royal Navy had quite a lot of ships based on the Courageux, so making the Colossus as a base was a little bit of a cunning plan on my part (although I was completely unaware of the scale of the copying work that was going on in the Admiralty when I chose which 74-gun ship to make), I just have to maintain a list of precise transformations in case I have to correct something and reimport the change on all the derivative models.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

The long spar-decked 74 also differs from the "frigate" by retaining the same head as the ship of the line, while on the "frigate" it is slightly shorter and does not have curved rails.

 

Which one of the two is more powerful - it's a debatable question, but the frigate, having about 150 less crew is certainly more habitable

[Martes]

Sailing test for the flush-decked 74:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

Your models are just perfect for such group scenery with several ships. This is another very attractive advantage of them that is practically unavailable for very complex designs. Unless one has access to NASA computers, for example.

 

 

[Martes]

And a dynamic scenery at that. You can recreate various situations, you can even set them to fight and see what happens, it is a tactical simulation, after all. That's why I love it so much. They are alive inside there.

 

If only I could control the camera lens angle here, the screenshots would be even more beautiful, but it would be easier to reimplement the whole game in Unity than find that bloody parameter in compiled C++ code of the original.

[Martes]

And sometimes, when the conditions permit, you can see the underwater parts of the hulls through the surface.

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by Martes

[Waldemar]

 

Of course I had noticed this before, I just recognised that it was not about the weather, but, for example, the notoriously polluted environment and murky water.

 

🙂

 

 

[Martes]

In fact, it depends on three factors.

First is the weather. The water is less and less transparent as the wind rises.
Second is the presence of a sea bottom mesh and it's color. They do not appear on all maps, but here nice and not very deep sand is present.

And third is somewhat connected to camera angle and wind direction.

 

I tried once to make maps for this game, it's technically possible, just very inconvenient, because the terrain mesh should be separated from underwater mesh exactly at z=0, and if a single vertex from the land mesh or a single vertex of sea bottom mesh crosses this line, the scenario crashes on load. It is also somehow possible to place buildings, cities and forts (the game contains appropriate models) on the maps, but I did not go that far.

 

Another relatively practical solution that I have seen on several maps included in the game is that the land mesh is regular, while the underwater mesh is simply a plane with painted features (and corresponding map zones as described below).

 

The "path" object denotes the land collision edge that has to be separately created (and are particularly difficult to generate), "anchor" allows ships to drop anchor, and "shoal" can have limited depth set in scenario editor and thus strand ships that are deeper than this value.

 

 

The sea, however, is done quite ingeniously, especially for so early engine (1999 or 2000, IIRC) - it is, in fact, a combination of two flat semi-transparent surfaces that have different textures running in different directions, creating a very convincing illusion of moving water.

 

In general, I would love to introduce some accurate geographical scenery into the project, but, again, probably it's better (and easier) could be done in Unity. If only I had the time.

Edited March 25, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

The next logical step in exploiting the hull of the Colossus is to razee it completely, creating a regular - if very, very heavy - frigate.

 

 

 

As those conversions took place after 1815, almost all the ships were fitted with this or that variant of round stern, and they all were different, so I had to choose one of them, which certainly wasn't easy. You may note that some of the stern lights are actually shut and fitted with faux-windows, and the glassed ones could have served as additional gunports, except the central one, where the rudder head is located. But it was very, very difficult to choose between this variant, with smaller, 2-window quarter galleries and the more traditional with 3 windows, but in the end I went for this one as slightly more exotic, but still pleasing the eye, as far as this arrangement can. For stern reference, I used the the plan for the Vindictive.

 

Anyway, the closest ship to my interpretation was the Grampus (ex-Tremendous), which was originally almost completely similar to the Colossus.

 

And I am not nearly done with this hull.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

One of the things that constantly amuse me is when somebody compares L'Egyptienne to a 74-razee.

 

Yes, they are (more or less) of the same length. But you can't mistake one for another (and not because of the stern):

 

L'Egyptienne (top right, bottom left) is much slimmer, her hull long and narrow, compared to the round bulk of the cut down 74-gun ship.

 

Edited May 12, 2023 by Martes

[mtaylor]

There's a bit of catch to this....  the L'Egy;ptienne was French and the French went for more sharp bow and stern on their ships as opposed to the English.

[Martes]

Colossus, being built to the lines of the Courageux of 1753, is also sufficiently French in that regard.

They are both relatively sharp at the entry (quite unlike the absolutely French ships by Forfait, but we'll leave that at the moment), but the difference is in absolute values, of course. She's simply narrower at 43' 8" against  48" breadth of the 74 (and the razee), with only 2.5 feet difference in length and that shows. After all, she was built for 24-pounders and speed, not 32/36 pounders and standing in the line of battle.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

To emphasize the sense of scale:

 

74-razee, Egyptienne, Liffey, Belle Poule.

 

Keep in mind that Liffey was considered large for a frigate, and was already carrying 24pdr battery.

Belle Poule is admittedly small (although, again, for her time she was also relatively large and several similar ships were rearmed with 18pdr guns against original 12pdrs in British service), and what I miss here is the "standard" 38 (18pdr) - that would be the Virginie when I finally get around to rebuild her.

 

And don't let the decorations and raised heads fool you - all of them are still French hull forms.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

Traditional post-launch sailing test:

 

 

  

 

[Martes]

Fixed the mast placement in config file:

 

[Martes]

A close-up on both variants of cut-down 74.

[Martes]

I found that while I really like the black paint for the flush-decked long 74, an absence of a regular, two-striped variant greatly disturbs my sense of order. So I made an appropriate skin to mend this:

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by Martes

[3DShipWright]

Looks great Martes! Random question - are you baking multiple textures into a single material for each ship? If so, is this something you have a lot of experience with? I'm ashamed to admit I've been hesitent to get into that part of blender, yet I know its an absolute 'must' if I ever want to do detailed ships in a large scale setting, be it a game, video, or render.

 

Either way, your work continues to impress!

-Nate

[Martes]

Nate,

 

First of all, thanks, I am very glad you like them

 

Remember, I deal with a very specific game, which is extremely old and imposing a number of not very obvious restrictions, so everything I do is somehow directed to circumvent those restrictions and still get aesthetically pleasing result.

 

The rule is 1 object -> 1 material -> 1 texture. Multiple objects can share a material (and the texture), but an object cannot contain more than one and a material cannot reference more than one texture. The game can substitute the textures under certain conditions at runtime (config file sets the paint schemes for different navies and damage textures).

 

Also, I have to be very careful with order in which the objects are processed during export. This order is used by the game engine (which is OLD and based on DirectDraw, not even Direct3D) to determine which object will obscure all the others if it is visible. If I place the deck after the hull, for example, it will poke through when rendered. This imposes a limit on the number of objects, their placement and the number and structure of the textures.

 

Obviously, there are no normal maps or anything like it. Everything is just drawn as is, including shadow to give the hull a bit of volume. But then, when you look at a ship from any distance, you won't see any planking details or anything like that under the thick layers of paint that usually covers the hull.

 

I more or less used the Unicorn for the paint basic scheme

 

And to make any modification relatively easy, the I mostly use "project from view (bounds)" on the hull and the stern, since that allows to move the vertices around as much as I want and quickly reapply the texture (which is, essentially, a painted side or stern view of the ship) afterwards - as long as the limits of the bounding rectangle remain the same.

 

What I am not sure is if any of those tricks can be useful for more modern environment, but they definitely work for me.

Edited June 9, 2023 by Martes

[3DShipWright]

Okay - gotcha, thx. Yeah, if there's no normal, roughness, specular or bump map data to consider, my question kind of goes out the window lol.

Still, it makes your work that much more impressive as at first glance I thought there was that kind of 3D interpolation going on, especially with the cannons on the lower deck(s).

 

Thx again.

[Martes]

That's absolutely pixel-induced illusion.

And I am quite proud it's so convincing

[Bruma]

What a wonderful project! 

May I ask you what game engine you are using? 

I've been thinking about something similar, but on a much smaller scale, using Godot. 

Also, in post number 103, you seem to be using an old version of blender for modeling; why aren't you upgrading to a newer version? 

Thank you! 

[Martes]

8 hours ago, Bruma said:

May I ask you what game engine you are using? 

It is an existing game, called Age of Sail II: Privateer's Bounty. Released in 2000, or thereabouts. I just found the right converters and went as deep into the parameters editing as it was possible.

I did some experiments in Unity, mostly to see how cablework can be implemented, but models do eat most of my time.

 

8 hours ago, Bruma said:

why aren't you upgrading to a newer version?

Got too much used to 2.79 Besides, the workflow requires exporting the model to OBJ and then to special converter that creates the game model, so it ultimately does not matter. I tried newer Blenders for terrain generation (blenderGIS, and all that), but I haven't yet figured out a way to make this process (conversion of GIS data to game-specific format) convenient enough, so it's shelved for the moment, and it would be redundant if I ever switch to Unity.

Why?

Edited August 2, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

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.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Martes

[Martes]

In-game tests for Hyperion: