Hello there.
Haven’t published here anything for a while so i decided it’s time to get back to being online and share my work again.
This is my take on Golden Hind ship. Recently while looking for work online i stumbled apon The Golden Hind studio looking for 3d artist for modular ships. I started googling “golden hind” trying to remember what this ship looked like. This started my journey down the rabbit hole. I found my old models from 15 years back
I decided this is good time to take on another beuautiful galleon. The blueprints of this ship are plenty, so i sat down to gather them and set it in blender like the old times.
Little did i remember how different and innacurate might those be as every blueprint seemed to have different take on this ship with differences like deck floors number, or placing the masts.
After careful picking, adjusting and ranking those blueprints, and heavily relying on explanatory video "How a 16th Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Works" by Animgraffs i started with base shape of the hull as those curves will define overall shape of the whole ship.
I went with simple cube with Mirror modifier, Subdivision surface and some edge creasing to keep this tear like shape both organic and hard surface. Few subdivisions later i had base shape on which i started building everything else. The hull was Shrinkwrapped onto guide shape, added thikness with solidify, refined with some beles, subdiv, and booleans to cut holes for windows.
Almost everything at this stage was by me considered a sketch to define base shapes, so i used page of blueprints of the sails to just plainly import and use as it is to keep the proportions not caring after the materials at all at this stage. Then i put some basic cloth sim on them to see it in action. Hull got some basic planks material just to see if this shape actually allows to unwrap the texture to match planks directions from blueprint.
For every other part i just quickly pasted like 5 materials in total downloaded from blenderkit. Some plain wood, 2 types of wood planks, and 2 types of iron. Then i proceeded to get more in detail as on one of the blueprints I’ve found detailed views of the cannon.
Then i instanced those beasts onto the deck and checked if everything looks to scale. I also used my brave boy “evan” made in metahuman to see how it would look compared to people on deck. This also helped a little by defining each deck height and the height of doorframes
As this was still considered sketch for me i wanted to somehow document the process. I imagined it as a vague shape emerging from morning mist, making itself more and more visible as she gained details while being refined, so i created some basic materials for mist and clouds, and rendered it in cycles. I love how it came out. Love those volumetric shadows projected on the mist.
