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Tutorial Ship Hull modeling tutorial.

It actually is the Taney. I'm rethinking my plans to do that vessel now, and thinking about prioritizing Spirit of Dana Point instead. (I'll give it the name it was given when it was launched in the '80's, Pilgrim of Newport. It's much more authentic-sounding.)
I recently by chance ran into one of the original crewmembers from the 80's and he told me that the vessel origionally was built with a square fore tops'l and t'gallant and a square main tops'l. (they were taken down after a few months to placify the coast guard) That makes the whole vessel infinitely more interesting.
 
It would have been captain's perrogative in that area, but there's probably ample room for up to twelve. Packed in tight, she could definitely mount more, but that would probably slow her down too much.
Right now we're carrying a very profound and striking amount of guns: two.

Edit: Damn it, I think we're down to one gun now.
 
The vessel I want to start with is from the year 1542 and has to do with Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. It was not worth any mention, but absolutely priceless. (a hintesque hint if I've ever seen one)

If that turns out well, and nobody else takes it, I'm thinking of trying Pilgrim myself: Pilgrim 30 years ago (a good picture, but not one of mine, from before our sheer line was messed up by hogging)
In theory, the hull shouldn't be too difficult to model, although you would probably know better than I would. The fact that I have every feature of the vessel memorized will also help.


Ooooo the guy that discovered San Diego Bay? I'll help with textures if you need some. :onya
I'll be happy to help with the Pilrgim's textures too if you want.

Helldiver, thanks for such an amazing tutorial! I'm gonna try some modeling asap. :dance
 
BLiIx,
here is the tutorial I used to set up a my plans in a 3d studio. if you need it.
http://www.3dsmaxresources.com/tutorial_display.php?id_tut=11
first you will want to make copies of 3 parts of your plans the profile view, the fore/ aft view, and the top view. try to get the # of pixels as close as possible to each other when you cut them ( only in one direction, for example the top and profile views could be 1421 x 425 and 1421x 183 respectively) this way you can just line up the ends of each plane that you make to put the plans on (explained in the tutorial) as for the modelling itself, I should be able to help you with thickening the sides of the ship, making deck fittings like the capstan, bell etc ( I have some standard models that you can use for these if you want as well), and to a certain extent cutting gunports, but if I were you I would follow helldiver's explanation in the tutorial first, his way is cleaner than mine. let me know if you need my help with any of these things, and good luck! :dance

I can't get this (oldish) link to work, even when logged in. Is it still working, perhaps someone could provide an alternative link?

I'm on Day1 of modelling at the moment and have spent many hours trying to get the texture to size/scale/align properly. So far I'm limited by the square preference of the software, have managed to get it rectangular but not at an acceptable resolution:

Le Raisonnable - Side profile.jpg
 
UPDATE.

I've managed to get this now, using off-setting and scale trickery but I don't think this is the proper way to do it?!

See below:

Le Raisonnable - Side profile.jpg



EDIT: I seem to have got it now, using the off-set and Real-World Scale tick box (having to offset the width by 100% only) it's full aligned to the correct size.

I'd still love a link to that tutorial if anyone can find a working URL, it's the jig construction one. I've only got 1 plane so far! :)
 
That ship looks familiar :p

I've managed to get this now, using off-setting and scale trickery but I don't think this is the proper way to do it?!

I´m using Blender, but the basics should be the same: make a plane with exactely the same dimension - or ratio - as your plan (e.g. 3500*1750). Then unwrap/make a UV map of the plan (I use 'UV project from view' at a 90 degrees angle and 'project to bounds', so the texture will fill up the whole plane, there should be a similiar setting in MAX).

The final set up should look something like this:

Unbenannt.jpeg


By the way, if you invert the colours of a museum plan, you a pretty cool looking blue print which is much more legible :)
L%20-%20Le.jpeg
 
I didn't know what size to make my plane, so I used FEET. Is that going to be too small to work with, should I increase it by a factor of 10 or something? Or will it present no issue with smaller objects, i.e. can you zoom to infinity?

It should be familiar it's the Le Raisonable the French 64. I'm waiting to hear back about the Ramillies Digital Download as you suggested :)
 
You can always scale the planes to a better size if needed, as long as you keep them the same size relative to each other
 
Very handy, thanks for the tips. I've started a thread in the Content section... Humble beginnings :)
 
Hi Helldiver,

Being cheeky I know, but would it be at all possible to get the original images somehow? Only this thread is seriously helpful for me but It'd be great to have some pics to go with the first post :) It's written well but pics would be amazing! No worries if not though. They look as if they've been removed to me?

Rob
 
Being cheeky I know, but would it be at all possible to get the original images somehow? Only this thread is seriously helpful for me but It'd be great to have some pics to go with the first post :) It's written well but pics would be amazing! No worries if not though. They look as if they've been removed to me?
helldiver was last seen: Apr 1, 2011
You can try to send him a PM and maybe he replies. But he won't be seeing your request here.

I wonder if @Armada has anything still available? Or maybe @Thagarr?
 
Will do! It's just near impossible to find good hull-building tutorials online so this is gold-dust!
 
I didn't realise these images had disappeared. I should probably have made a back-up, since they were quite important. :facepalm

The best I can do is refer you to this post in my Bellona thread, where I explain the method I used to create the hull using NURBS curves in Maya.
In 3ds Max, I would avoid NURBS like the plague (I tried using them once, and it didn't end well), but you can apply the same principles from my example to polygon modelling.

The only issue here is that thread is only visible to HoO team members, which doesn't help others seeking help.
We'll need to write up a more complete tutorial some time and post it either on the Wiki or in both the HoO and Storm Engine Modelling forums.
 
I think I have a moment to catch up on some of these posts before I lose internet access again :)

Thankfully, Nurbs were the first thing I taught myself when I got into modelling so I'm pretty confident with them, but still these tutorials will be a great help for when I start some serious hull-building!

When I did the hull for warrior (I have no pics on me sadly) and Monitor (pics in my recruitment thread), I used the Loft Nurbs in Cinema 4d and they proved very effective at building a spline-based skeleton to then throw a NURB skin (or Loft) onto. I havn't used the function in 3DS yet so I'll do that once I get back, but from what I can tell, it is pretty convoluted. In C4D it's a simple matter of building a load of skeleton splines and shaping as desired using the points in a frontal viewport. Pretty straightforward. Is this much the same across software?

Thanks for getting back!
 
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