Week 9

As I stated before because of my project workload and poor internet connection the previous posts I made on this blog since the beginning of my project will be replaced with updated versions this week with more details and images. Also everything is due this week.

The following are close up of the ship of different areas

Week 8

Rendered

I added three point lighting into the scene key, fill and rim to light the ship more nicely allowing the details of the scene to be properly seen. As you can see the trial render of the ship with the new lights in place made the details of the ship easier to see and the background no longer looked like it was eating away the details.

Here are the final renders of my ship model from different perspectives

Textured

The ship was then textured with seamless textures found online and parts of it UV mapped with UV layout to ensure it looked proper in its shape. Due to time this was not done for every part of the ship and majority of the ship texture was applied a solid colour blinn where possible. Also during the texturing I noticed that the UV displaced parts of the colour on the ship, this sadly was not resolved at the end of the project due to the sheer detail and size of the hull. Hopefully this can be fixed in the future outside the major project.

Here is a simple trial render of the ship as you can see some of the detail is blurred out by the dark background due to the lack of lighting in the scene.

 

Week 7

Organized

The ships polygons and files were neatly arranged and named with unnecessary parts deleted to save space.

Worked with UDK

After the modeling was done I went back to UDK to try and adjust the materials I made earlier the following two images shows the textures appearance although the settings have not been adjust to liking yet.

I also tried importing some parts of the ship into the file and adjusting the scales between the two. However due to the remaining time of the project it was recommended by my lecturer to ignore this section of the project and completely focus on the ship only. I also agree with my lecturer and chose to ignore this component of the project however I might revisit this in the future not as part of my major project but for my own personal experience. Another reason I agreed to this was because I also wanted to try perfecting my ship model first before moving onto anything else.

Week 6

Decorations for front and back

Using the previous detailed image planes I made as reference I create the finer detailed decorations for the front and back of the ship. This was done generally by a simple cube with a few edges moved into the general place of the shape and then adding additional edges and moving them for finer detail. After the general shape suited the appearance of the detail I smoothed and create the nice detail decorations that can be seen in the below two images.

Mirror

After all the modeling was done and completed I mirror the side I had been working on therefore completing the model on both sides and saving time. After this was done the file size grew enormously large and I had to export each part of the ship into separate files and reference it into a singular file to save some time opening it in the future.

Week 5

More rope work deck

Again more rope work but this time it focused on where the ropes were tied at the end as there were so many different areas and me not being too sure where each went I decided to only have the rope loops made and ignored the ropes that were supposed to be tied off at each area. Another reason for this apart from me not understand the proper placing of the ropes was also to save space and time on details that would have been difficult to be seen on the overall ships due to the sheer scale of the project. This part was mainly done by creating a main rope loop shape and duplicating them the necessary placements.

Week 4

More rope work bowsprit

Created the rope work for the bowsprit and attach the ends of the rope onto the ship. These ropes are used to hold the bowsprit firmly in place onto the ship.

Week 3

Bowsprit

This time the general structure of the bowsprit for the front of the ship was created in a separate scene and imported into to the whole ship file and placed in place. Again this was created using the plans from the book. The image above the completed structure image shows the different parts that were made in order to create the bowsprit.

Sails Rope work

Again more rope work was done with the focus this time being the sails rather than the ropes that supported the masts and yards structure.

The above two images shows the rope work for the sails seen at the side and the ones that could be seen at the front, middle and back. More detailed and larger images of each section can be found in the book that I used as referenced.

Week 2

Sails

Parts of the sails were modeled separately in different scenes and later arranged as a whole to be placed onto the ship. Again the same problem with the mast and yards occurred in that the individual plans scale did not match the overall plans scale. The scale of the overall plans were chosen again as this reference would be more suitable when assembling it on to the main ship structure as a whole.

Originally I had planned to used Mayas ncloth to create the cloth flowing form by turning the them into ncloths and the rope and structures holding them into passive colliders so they can hold the sails in place whilst they were in motion. How ever there was difficultly in creating the flowing form though this method and future use of this when imported into UDK remains questionable. Therefore I chosed to manually move the centre vertices and them smooth them. This gave the appearance as seen below with the problem with it being too perfectly formed and static unlike the ncloth choice I was originally planning to used. However I’m sure once I’ve applied a suitable texture onto the sails the unnatural perfect appearance of the sails would not be as noticeable.

 

Term 2

Week 1

The laptop I mention earlier arrived at the end of the break and I will be using the new computer from now on as the older computer was having trouble meeting the project demands which made it constantly lag and crash at times. Loading time was also a major problem with the original computer and the current new computer shows none of these problems. I have also notice a significant improvement in working pace thanks to the SSD (solid state drive) I choose to include into the customization of this laptop instead of a HDD (hard disk drive. Opting for flash memory has significantly speeded up the data reading process when opening and importing files.

Rope work sides, mast and yards

Created cylinders as ropes and positioned them according to the plans onto the ships structure. I left out many details in this section as I felt it unnecessary to include due to its scale in the overall model would make it difficult to see or notice. Things that I left out included some know, rigging equipment like hooks and gears and much more.

The knots and rope holders were made by making a single one and duplicating and rotating them into place. Individual ones that feature some differences were changed separately.

Holiday break

Continued modeling

I continue modeling various additional details for the ship; this included the railings, window sills and various parts of detail of the ship to finish up the ship hull appearance. After the railings and other details were created the size of the project file rose considerably that I had to order a customized laptop online from Sony which will arrive shortly at the end of the break. This problem was already foreseen early on before the start of the project and money was put on hold ready for purchasing a new stronger faster laptop. During the progression of the project I made sure to pay attention to new laptop releases in case of the need to replace my current one.

Week 9

Ship front internal details

The internal structure for the front of the ship was made based on the previously top front detail plans. The main problem whilst making this part was the different planes didn’t match making parts of the shape stick in areas where it was supposed to be seen. Therefore areas for this had to resize and repositioned after the structure was made inside the front inside of the ship.

Stairs

The stairs image provide general appearance of the railing of the stairs however the stair dimensions cane from the internal side ship plans and the top ship plans. Again for this prop it was general making the main parts duplicating them and then moving and rotating parts where necessary.

Fireplace

There wasn’t any image solely for the fireplace prop so the creation of this was completely relied on the ship internal side plans and top ship plans.

 

Week 8

More props

Again a continuation of creating more props to be used in the overall ship model.

Sunroofs

Created two sunroofs as there was only a perspective image available for the general appearance guide actual dimensions had to be relied on the internal ship plans and top ship plans as references.

Steering wheel

Made the shapes for the steering wheel and duplicated and rotated parts where necessary and then smoothed it to create its nice smooth appearance.

 

Capstan

The main problem I encountered with the capstan was that the plans were hard to interpret the overall shape to some of the parts of the capstan. This was resolved by searching for photos of capstans from other ships and using them as a reference when modeling the shape.