Welcome to my HMS Victory project!
Originally I wanted to create a small ship model as a decoration object for some interior scene... I chose the HMS Victory because I assumed that information should be easy to get; after all the ship still exists - it is open for tourists in Portsmouth, UK, and hundreds of visitors posted their pics to the Internet.
Then I puzzled along a book: "Anatomy of the ship - the 100-gun ship Victory" by John McKay; and this turned out to be a miracle. The book is wonderful, including lots of extremely detailled drawings - showing almost every single piece of wood. I turned out to be unable to skip most of the informations and concentrate on a primitive low-poly model; so the project became a little larger. And I decided to create as well the interiors as far as possible.
The whole project took me about a year of hard work, including some three months after a hard disk crash where I lost all my prior work (yes, I know about security backups - at least now I do). The ship itself consists of 14.016 single objects and needs 2 GB disk space.
Few things are still to be done: I didn't find a way to texture the rigging properly without converting my beziers to meshes (I tried using a small mesh, array and curve modifier, but as a result my graphics card refused to do the rendering). And I'd like to replace the stove on the middle deck which is a little too low-poly at the moment.
And of course I could add millions of little details picturing sailors' life in the former days...
Please pardon me for some personal remarks:
- about historical correctness:
I'm not a scientist. I'm just a simple 3D modeller, and I tried to re-create the HMS Victory as accurate and correct as possible to me, just working with the informations being easily accessible.
This is MY Victory, not THE Victory. - Anyway, some credits:
- to John McKay and his wonderful drawings
- two guys being about to build a (physical) model of the HMS Victory and doing some really impressive manual work: Alex Gurau and Henk Van Luinen
- last, but not least: to Daniel "Dafinismus" Fischer, who combines excellent manual work with a deep understanding of historical sailorship - and furthermore took some time to help me with some logical sailorship problems. Thanks, Daniel!
- about myself:
I'm neither a ship modeller nor above average interested in historical sailorship. As said: I'm just a 3D guy working on a project and doing the best I can. HMS Victory is almost done, so let's look for something else.
Of course Old Vic grabbed my heart - but that's the same with any project I'm dealing with. - Note that this site isn't meant to be a tutorial at all, but if you post some few technical questions here I'll try to answer them.
Now just enjoy the renders...
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