Projected History.. My ship is now in ship shape! Woo!

This project has been chugging along happily in the background alongside all our other projects and so it has taken a while but.. the ship is pretty much complete(depending on Simons approval.) This image shows my work in progress.



Firstly, I created two patches for the front and back of the ship that imitated the curves of my original Polygon ship. Then I stitched the patches together - adding another curve to the front half before stitching to keep the result in the right shape (second image.) Following this I converted it to Polygons (third image) then divided up the hull into six areas (fourth image) in order to add on the 6 separate texture maps. This allowed for the texture to be detailed all the way across (which is important as this will eventually be projected to a very large size.) Since this work in progress image, I have changed the font and perfecting the texture as much as possible in photoshop to keep it looking as life like as possible.

I think ultimately it would have been good to get photos of this ship using a good DSLR camera on a more overcast day as opposed to using my compact camera on a sunny day. The problem was these ships come and go fairly quickly, so the opportunity for photographing on a day with overcast weather whilst this ship was at the docks didn't present itself (typical!)

Here is a little test movie of the most basic way in which the ship will be animated. At this stage I'm not sure to what extent the building will be in front of it - you may just be seeing it through the buildings windows. The idea is that the hull will occupy the size of the whole building as it goes through it.



Since the completion of my ship, I have been experimenting with the ocean shader in Maya. The first image has been rendered using mental ray, and the second - using maya software. As shown both cause problems, but I'm sure there will be away around these. It requires a bit of research and playing around with render settings, using alpha channels and composite. The question is whether there is need for the ocean. It looks cool but would it make sense perspectively looking at it going through a building..





Here are a couple of images I rendered just for the sake of it. (I used photoshop to get rid of the visual errors that came out in the renders like those above.)





Nice :)