vertex shader of some sort with overlapping sine waves, modulate by a channel of vertex colour so you can keep the fixed parts attached to the yards/ropes properly and have the rest of the sail undulate??
Torrrtilla: Luckily, almost everything was arrayed or a linked duplicate within the scene, or referenced from an external file, so it wasn't that bad. About 12 hours total. Gotta say, I really appreciate Blender's UV tools, they work wonderfully. HOWEVER, not being able to unwrap multiple objects at once is a serious pain in the ass.
cw: If I had the first idea how to write a vertex shader, that'd be awesome, but I think I'll have to stick to maps.
frell: Thanks Though none of it is particularly difficult, just very very time consuming (though modeling the hull and making everything fit properly was tough).
Some placeholder texturing here. Just trying to tackle my biggest risk (the different textures on the hull), but it turned out to be really really easy.
This thread is awesome! im keeping an eye on it. I dont know how i never saw it before. Anyway, yeah like noors said, bad geometry or uvs. Ive had that problem before and i fixed by just rebuilding those faces and then fixing the uvs.
Try flipping the normals of the faces, then flipping them back. Turn on visible normals and see if your blue lines face the right way. The other thing that works for me sometimes is to delete the face, then recreate it.
awesome work man! loving it! but yeah, when I had an problem like this.. it was from duplicating and mirror from another object and for some reason it flipped my normals on the high rez object and i didn't realize it till i started my baking onto the low poly. so check out your high poly's normals direction. Thats my best guess at least.. Hope you figure it out!!
Thanks for the help guys! After trying everything mentioned, I gave up, but sometime later accidentally found out that it's just a bug, and it's a fairly easy fix. The issue was simply that I had selected a lower UV set in the stack, rather than the top one, with multimaterials. Not sure if I can recreate this enough to report.
Still cranking on mats. They're pretty gross, but they're on a tight schedule, so I'll just have to leave them as is. As of now, most textures are at 1024 or 2048, but they will eventually be rezzed down.
Dim, this thread is awesome. You have put so much effort into this project, I thought it deserved a mention on the front-page in this week's Friday Re-Cap.
Thanks rumblesushi. For UVing, I just used a mixture of Blender's default ABF and LSCM algorithms. They're very fast, both for organics, as well as hard surface. The big pain in the ass was all the rigging, but even still that only took about an hour.
Great work, congrats on getting it this far. I've been watching this thread since you first started this projects
I agree with SimonT. The renders are really dark, and the dark blue and black background doesn't help any. I would definitely try play around with lightening up the background and images.
looks awesome! very nice work.. hard to see though.. the black background do not show off the work you put into it very well. could use a better presentation otherwise great work.
Color Palette
For the most part, the palette is very earthy, with the exception of the near black and red. The red, black, and cream are meant to play off each other with the most amount of possible contrast. The two browns are for rougher, larger pieces of wood (masts, beams, bowsprit, etc.), while the lighter, redder wood is for worked items, such as the block and tackle, yardties, helm, etc. The white and dark grey are for the sail cloth and iron, respectively.
Style
Unfortunately, within the time limits of the project, I was unable to reach my stylistic goals. Ideally, this would be fairly realistic. Seeing movies like Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, and Pirates of the Caribbean, they are filmed with the highlights somewhat desaturated and washed out, but with the shadow and darker colors at a rich saturation. A lot of blues and greens. Obviously, this would largely be a post-process effect, but it is stylization nonetheless.
Overall Proportion
The scale of all of the pieces is 1/20th Unreal scale. Establishing the overall proportions of the vessel was fairly difficult because I had a few requirements, not included in the reference. Establishing the length of the vessel was fairly easy, as I just used the reference. However, width was far more difficult because of the perspective in all photographs and paintings. Luckily the gun mounts in one reference were circular, so I was able to use projection to work out precisely how wide the ship was. However, because I had to fit the engines and boilers in, I needed two decks below the main deck for them to be on. This didn't fit well within the hull, so I created a recessed deck for the engines to sit on.
Constructing the Hull and Ribbing
The hull began as a NURBS surface before being converted to polygons. The reason to use NURBS was to make it easy to 'loft' or 'skin' a series of splines, rather than having to model the curvature all at once (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Modeling/Surfaces/Skinning ). An alternative to this may have been using 'surface sketching' (http://vimeo.com/10715723). Thickness was achieved with a 'solidify' modifier. The ribbing was done by extracting vertical face loops from the hull, and using a 'shrinkwrap' modifier to project the faces onto the hull, then a 'solidify' modifier to give the strips depth (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modifiers/Deform/Shrinkwrap ). I tried to stick fairly close to the reference with this in order to get a proper hull shape.
Engines and Boilers
Creating the engines was somewhat difficult to do because A) I have no complete reference of a broken apart engine, and many moving pieces needed to be able to articulate perfectly. To actually figure out how the engines worked, I spent a fair amount of research time assembling as much reference I could, and dissecting it to to see how each part articulated with the others. Do not discount general reference, as simply exploring how steam engines work, or even engines in general, is invaluable. I chose to create the engines and boilers as midpolys because it was much easier to model from life initially than to try to account for the extra edge loops and subdivision of a highpoly, or the optimization of a lowpoly. From there, I split it into high and low.
Rigging
Rigging was an interesting challenge that could not really be solved polygonally. I used several sets of 'beveled' bezier curves (several because multiple resolutions were needed depending on the amount the curve was bent), that were beveled by a 'curvecircle' with a resolution of 1 (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Curves). This turned it into basically an extruded cube. When the curves were complete, they were converted to polygons. They unfortunately needed UVs after that, which was an arduous process.
Sails
The sails were created by baking out medium resolution cloth sims, and then decimating them down to a low poly mesh. The sims were done with 'wind' forces to make them accurately billow. In the future I would like to add some geometry to the sails for border seams in the canvas, and brass studded holes for ropes.
Scene Structure
The scene is fairly large and complex, partially in terms of geometry, but certainly in terms of texture. In addition, getting scaling, fitting, etc. correct was very difficult, so I wanted to prototype early and then complete and polish assets later in order to make sure they were on the right track. Because of this, I chose to reference most of the details of the scene. All props were referenced in separately, and any geometry that was constructed within the scene that could possibly be instanced was (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Data_System/Linked_Libraries). Gradually, many of the instances needed to be made local as materials were added, and certain modifiers (such as array and mirror) needed to be applied to add textural variation. The drawback to all this referencing is that the scene is far less portable, requiring a complete folder structure (though everything is relative to that structure).
Rendering and Compositing
The light rig is a simple 3-point setup, with environmental lighting and AO turned on. All frames were output as .png in case of a render failure, so that they could be recovered. Initially, I had wanted a bloom composite effect, but I was unable to figure out a good solution in time. Instead, all that occurs during the compositing pass is the superimposition of a background beneath the rendered frame, and then the copyright and software used over the top. In the future, that step should be done within the sequencer, not the compositor. Within the sequencer, I put together the different strips of .png images and added fades. Finally, it was output to AVIJPEG. There are still some rendering errors I cannot figure out. Also, I've found it to be very frustrating that there is a large disparity between how things appear in Blender's GLSL viewport, and how they appeared when rendered, particularly with regards to specularity.
TODO
This project was not completed to the level I would like for it to have been. I would like to finish it in the future. Here is a list of tasks that will need to be accomplished in order for me to consider it complete.
Complete material overhaul. As is, the project is very clean looking. It needs some grunge and decay.
Bake engine parts high to low and texture.
Bake boiler high to low and texture.
Create mast connection pieces (ropes and metal intersections).
Add railing ropes on second subdeck.
Build coal storage.
Build crates and barrels.
Build support structure for the engines.
Build additional deck props.
Create cannons.
Redo bulkheads from scratch with highpoly detail included.
Build doors
Build chain winch for anchor chain.
Build ventilation pipes to connect with shafts on deck.
Remake sails with areas for seams, and rope holes.
Create props for below-deck (lanterns, hammocks, footlockers, etc.)
Create bowsprit intersection.
For rendering, some better post-processing would be nice.
Replies
cw: If I had the first idea how to write a vertex shader, that'd be awesome, but I think I'll have to stick to maps.
frell: Thanks
can't figure out what the hell this is, and I can't fix it.
Keep it up!
http://vimeo.com/13891865
I'm having some weird errors where the ropes are flickering and I'm unsure why.
Besides that, any comments about the presentation?
Also, how do you embed video?
Turnabout, etc:
http://vimeo.com/14032509
Out of curiosity, what method of unwrapping did you use? 12 hours doesn't actually seem too bad for an unwrap of this scale.
I agree with SimonT. The renders are really dark, and the dark blue and black background doesn't help any. I would definitely try play around with lightening up the background and images.
Other than that, no crits from me
Great work once again.
I'll throw up a post-mort doc about this thing as well.
Post Mort
Brandon Phoenix
Color Palette
For the most part, the palette is very earthy, with the exception of the near black and red. The red, black, and cream are meant to play off each other with the most amount of possible contrast. The two browns are for rougher, larger pieces of wood (masts, beams, bowsprit, etc.), while the lighter, redder wood is for worked items, such as the block and tackle, yardties, helm, etc. The white and dark grey are for the sail cloth and iron, respectively.
Style
Unfortunately, within the time limits of the project, I was unable to reach my stylistic goals. Ideally, this would be fairly realistic. Seeing movies like Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, and Pirates of the Caribbean, they are filmed with the highlights somewhat desaturated and washed out, but with the shadow and darker colors at a rich saturation. A lot of blues and greens. Obviously, this would largely be a post-process effect, but it is stylization nonetheless.
Overall Proportion
The scale of all of the pieces is 1/20th Unreal scale. Establishing the overall proportions of the vessel was fairly difficult because I had a few requirements, not included in the reference. Establishing the length of the vessel was fairly easy, as I just used the reference. However, width was far more difficult because of the perspective in all photographs and paintings. Luckily the gun mounts in one reference were circular, so I was able to use projection to work out precisely how wide the ship was. However, because I had to fit the engines and boilers in, I needed two decks below the main deck for them to be on. This didn't fit well within the hull, so I created a recessed deck for the engines to sit on.
Constructing the Hull and Ribbing
The hull began as a NURBS surface before being converted to polygons. The reason to use NURBS was to make it easy to 'loft' or 'skin' a series of splines, rather than having to model the curvature all at once (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Modeling/Surfaces/Skinning ). An alternative to this may have been using 'surface sketching' (http://vimeo.com/10715723). Thickness was achieved with a 'solidify' modifier. The ribbing was done by extracting vertical face loops from the hull, and using a 'shrinkwrap' modifier to project the faces onto the hull, then a 'solidify' modifier to give the strips depth (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modifiers/Deform/Shrinkwrap ). I tried to stick fairly close to the reference with this in order to get a proper hull shape.
Engines and Boilers
Creating the engines was somewhat difficult to do because A) I have no complete reference of a broken apart engine, and
Rigging
Rigging was an interesting challenge that could not really be solved polygonally. I used several sets of 'beveled' bezier curves (several because multiple resolutions were needed depending on the amount the curve was bent), that were beveled by a 'curvecircle' with a resolution of 1 (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Curves). This turned it into basically an extruded cube. When the curves were complete, they were converted to polygons. They unfortunately needed UVs after that, which was an arduous process.
Sails
The sails were created by baking out medium resolution cloth sims, and then decimating them down to a low poly mesh. The sims were done with 'wind' forces to make them accurately billow. In the future I would like to add some geometry to the sails for border seams in the canvas, and brass studded holes for ropes.
Scene Structure
The scene is fairly large and complex, partially in terms of geometry, but certainly in terms of texture. In addition, getting scaling, fitting, etc. correct was very difficult, so I wanted to prototype early and then complete and polish assets later in order to make sure they were on the right track. Because of this, I chose to reference most of the details of the scene. All props were referenced in separately, and any geometry that was constructed within the scene that could possibly be instanced was (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Data_System/Linked_Libraries). Gradually, many of the instances needed to be made local as materials were added, and certain modifiers (such as array and mirror) needed to be applied to add textural variation. The drawback to all this referencing is that the scene is far less portable, requiring a complete folder structure (though everything is relative to that structure).
Rendering and Compositing
The light rig is a simple 3-point setup, with environmental lighting and AO turned on. All frames were output as .png in case of a render failure, so that they could be recovered. Initially, I had wanted a bloom composite effect, but I was unable to figure out a good solution in time. Instead, all that occurs during the compositing pass is the superimposition of a background beneath the rendered frame, and then the copyright and software used over the top. In the future, that step should be done within the sequencer, not the compositor. Within the sequencer, I put together the different strips of .png images and added fades. Finally, it was output to AVIJPEG. There are still some rendering errors I cannot figure out. Also, I've found it to be very frustrating that there is a large disparity between how things appear in Blender's GLSL viewport, and how they appeared when rendered, particularly with regards to specularity.
TODO
This project was not completed to the level I would like for it to have been. I would like to finish it in the future. Here is a list of tasks that will need to be accomplished in order for me to consider it complete.
All images sourced from CGTextures.