Projected History

Just a quick note to say I have been working on this a bit every week. The model is pretty much done. The texture you see here is temporary, I think I will physically paint a texture and then layer that on. Simon said he would like it looking worn and weathered.



I have quite enjoyed doing this.

25/2/2011 - update

Just when I thought the model was complete..it pulled me back in ! I feel comfortable within my time restraints at the moment, Simon is expecting the ship scene to be complete by the end of term - so in 4 weeks. This has allowed me time to experiment with different modelling techniques. I looked at the model above and thought it would be best to match the front of the ship to my initial reference. This took a surprising long amount of time to do as I had created so many faces and points on the model. In the end I deleted a large chunk of the front of the ship and filled it in again fairly quickly with edge loops. See below.


The rest of the ship still needs sorting out. Ideally, the lines should wrap around the entire structure. I also created some rails that line the deck. Here is a rendered version of the front of the ship.


Here, I tried recreating the ship with nurbs to see the difference. This was pretty straightforward - I just created 4 bezier outlines around and up the ships structure - defining the shape at the front of the ship, then lofted them and created planars for the top and bottom. It took less then an hour to recreate something that had taken me many days! Oh well I guess thats the nature of learning software. To be honest the nurbs ship wouldn't look half as precise if I didn't have the original poly one to model around.

Here is the front of the nurbs ship rendered.


This does look a lot smoother - the way the light bounces off it. But the other one has a bit more character and shape. I also think it would be easier to model the back of the poly ship. Nurbs or polys.. who will win in the end ! Watch this space...

6/2/2011 - Update

I have been very busy recently on my post production project so unfortuantly have not made a great deal of progress on this since the last post. I have modelled the end of the ship with polys now, but the model as a whole still needs to be complete and I would like to try and make a nurbs version again as it does seem to make a much smoother result. So here is my most up to date version:



I have just done a time plan and I would ideally like to aim for a finished model and texture by the end of this week. Leaving next week for the other elements ie. Fog and lighting etc. and the final week for putting it all into the final scene, animating and Rendering.