Introduction - 3Dships

[3Dships]

Good morning MSW forum and NRG members,

 

I joined yesterday and after my first post was made aware that a new member introduction is appreciated. So here we go...

 

Born in Groningen, the Netherlands in 1966. Spent the first years of my life on coasters because my dad was an marine engineer and back in those days it was normal for officers to have their family on board. During my school years I did a lot of sculling, rowing, sailing, reading nautical books & ship model making. At 18 I joined a coaster as an ordinary seaman. Went to nautical college when the Dutch law was changed allowing for ratings from other (cheap labor) nations and then went through all the ranks including engine room to become a Ship's Master. Served on close to a 100 different merchant vessels, initially on various Dutch cargo vessels and later in the nineties, after moving to England, specialised in ship handling serving mainly on supply, anchor handling, dredging, offshore construction vessels & tugs and various types of workboats. I feel fortunate that I was still able to navigate all the 7 seas & visit the far corners of this planet.  Unfortunately, the European national laws where further adjusted to allow for initially officers from (cheap labor) nations and eventually also Masters. Nowadays, it has become a bit impossible to keep competing with all those Russians, Ukrainians and officers and masters from even further afield and the costs of maintaining a Master Mariner certificate of competency in the 21th century have risen quite considerably too, so forced to throw in the proverbial towel by the end of 2018 and have been sailing around the West European coasts instead ever since. 

 

Started building scratch ship models from wood, cardboard & metal based on drawings and photos before I was ten. In the late eighties my younger brother showed me one of the first home computers & once I noticed drawing software that could do curves becoming available I got on board the digital revolution as well. Around 1990 I learned working with AutoCAD 10 / vector drawing applications and produced a first 3D sailing boat model in 1992. Around that time got my first laptop and thus could continue with 3D drawing at sea and in the following years learned to use 3DStudio (on MS-DOS) and Lightwave 3D (running on the first versions of windows) later. Produced countless modern day merchant vessels with Lightwave 3D and many of these models are for example in use at nautical simulators around the world today & also did things like producing hundreds of images for a collision regulations book, doing artist impressions of new designs, concept design & taking various commissions if they where challenging enough. While using Lightwave 3D as my main tool I always kept a sharp eye on new developments in the CAD software world and with the advent of 3D printing switched to using the NURBS based CAD application MOI 3D to start producing solid models that are suitable to derive all the different products from and recently started learning Blender for texturing, visualisation & animation purposes.

 

I suppose that during the past decades I also collected quite an impressive collection of 2D reference data with regards to ship modelling. It now totals 183 Gb with 183,871 files in 3,778 folders, not including the almost 40,000 photos I took working at sea. It contains scanned books, general arrangements, line plans, details, nautical art, photos, complete CAD drawing sets, etc, etc.

 

My personal preference with regards to nautical history is the days of sail. At the moment I intend to redraw scanned drawings of a number of 18th & 19th century Basque Country build vessels in 3D. The Basques have an impressive seafaring history with for example the 1st captain (Elcano & not Magellan) to complete a circumnavigation and the Basques possibly already visited North America on secret whaling & cod fishing trips even before Columbus discovered the New World. In the beautiful ancient port of Pasajes the Basques are currently reconstructing a real size mid 16th century Nao based on archaeological findings in Red Bay, Canada.  Some more photos on this reconstruction and also model making here.

 

Kind regards, Hans Meijer

 

 

[lmagna]

That is quite a resume Hans!

Welcome to MSW from the Pacific NW USA.

[markjay]

[ccoyle]

Welcome aboard! I enjoyed reading your story and seeing your work -- looking forward to seeing more of it.

 

Cheers!

[mtaylor]

Welcome to MSW, Hans.  I too am looking forward to seeing more of your work as it is impressive.

[3Dships]

As I mentioned before the devils are in the details especially if the reference material is scant. Did railings, blocks, shackles, stays, etc. I did them before in 3D modeling packages but now in 3D CAD it's a little bit like learning it over again. Pleased with the possibilities & results though. Even the tiny solid objects merge fine with the larger solids. You do get a lot of respect for those chaps that designed and build these vessels a hundred years ago. All these curves in 3 different directions and hardly a straight line to be found (-: One wonders if it is actually computers that delivered us these ugly boxy vessels during the past decades?! Not so long ago it was still rather difficult to do all the curvy stuff digitally but obviously computers have allowed us to do all the calculations necessary for weight & hydrostatic estimations for a long time.

 

Solid Objects on different layers with different objects names and material colors in MOI 3D

Same Blocks in Blender with simple Blender materials applied.

 

I am also checking in Blender trying to figure out how to best efficiently structure a model consisting of many parts. MOI 3D does offer some great advantages over Rhino with regards to keeping separate object / part names & materials when exporting a solid object. In MOI 3D you can join parts on different layers but in Rhino you can't so your solid object becomes an impossible amount of work after export for further editing in 3D modeling software like Blender. You could claim that MOI 3D encourages export to other 3D packages and Rhino is making it a pointless exercise other than for 3D printing.

 

Sort of Plastic 3D Printed look. One wonders if any resin 3D printer could handle an object like this?

 

Have fun, Hans

[mtaylor]

Hans, you probably need to edit your post and upload the images here instead of linking them.  None of the images came through.

[Dave_E]

Welcome to the forum Hans! 👍😀