The HMS Victory project

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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.

  4. 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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