Week 15 (1st – 7th May) – Modelling The Ship:
The Maya Problem:
Originally, I had wanted to do this model in Maya as that was the software I was most comfortable with when it came to hard surface modelling – such as a ship.
Unfortunately, my licence had ran out and so I could not access Maya. So, I renewed my license and tried to open Maya 2022, however I got an error. It stated that I needed an internet connection to access it, even though my internet was working fine.
The only solution I could come up with was to ditch Maya and work in Blender, despite having very little experience with it.
Research:
Before I could begin modelling, however, I decided to do some research on pirate ships.
I tried to find pictures from all different angles to give me a good reference of the shape and silhouette. Minnie also created some concept art which was a useful reference.
Link to Padlet: https://padlet.com/econyers2021/ship-pujgywmfgv1wf1yf
Modelling:
Since this was only my second time using Blender, I followed a tutorial on how to make a ship. This was extremally useful and I couldn’t have done it without that video.
Blender was surprisingly similar to Maya, although the controls for moving around the scene took awhile to get used to. I started by stretching and adding more loop cuts to the cube. Then, by using proportional editing, I pulled up the front and back ends of the ship and also made it slightly wider.
Once I had extruded the back and front, the rough shape of a ship was coming along. I was surprised at how quick this could be achieved, given that I had barely used Blender before.
Extruding down the top faces to give an edge around the whole ship was one of the biggest jumps in quality from one step to another, throughout the whole process. Now that the base of the ship was completed, I could start adding details.
I started by making the stems which hold the sails up. These were extremally easy to make as I just duplicated a stretched cylinder three times. At this point they were all on the same level, but after looking at some of my references, I realised that the pole near the front was lower down than the rest.
I then created a shape for the railing by extruding and scaling a cylinder a few times, duplicating and placing them at the front and back of the ship.
For the top of the railing I used the automirror add-on that comes with Blender. It allowed me to quickly and efficiently do both sides of the railing by extruding a flattened cube.
To get place each individual stair precisely, I used wireframe mode and fixed the camera to the side of the ship. I then duplicated the stairs and placed them side by side.
For the wheel I just combined multiple cylinders with a torus. This relatively simple method actually worked quite well, especially since the wheel is so small on the ship that the player will not be able to see any tiny imperfections.
I used a similar method for the crows nest, however instead of just standard cylinders, I thought it would be nice to reuse the railing pattern – which helps tie the whole ship together as it feels more cohesive.
Feedback:
I sent Jack a picture of the ship as I believed it to be finished but he asked for it to be a little deeper. This is because the ship is meant to sit on top of the hermit crab boss as a shell.
After making the improvements he had requested, the basic shape of the ship was finished. Now all that was left was subdividing it to make it smoother.
After applying the subdivision modifier to the body of the boat, I noticed that it had smoothed parts where I wanted hard edges. To fix this, I searched up a tutorial on how to keep edge sharpness whilst subdividing.
It turns out it’s as simple as selecting the edge you want, holding SHIFT+E and dragging your mouse. I repeated this process for all of the pink lined edges.
Texturing:
I was under the impression that after I handed the boat to Jack, he would use Substance Painter to paint the boat. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, he decided to just apply a wood texture to it.
The texture like this doesn’t look the best, but in game the water effects and lighting hide the simplicity of it. Ideally it would’ve been textured in Substance Painter and had metal parts over the wood and had a more detailed and damaged wood plank texture. However, I understand why he couldn’t due to time restraints.
In Game:
References:
- Himel 356 (2023) Keep Edge Sharpness When Using Subdivision Surface Modifier I Blender Tutorial [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AhWHDfO28Y [Accessed 04/02/2023].
- PolyRem (2022) How to Create a Stylized Pirate Ship in Blender and Substance Painter [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoqXP7tpL1o&t=96s [Accessed 01/02/2023].