another good rope trick is to use softbodies or cloth and let it hang, then you can pick a good frame and export the mesh out and back in. kindof pain maybe but for this it might be worth the trouble for those rope railings and such.
Awesome work sofar the wood materials are vary nice.
Working on the figurehead, bear in mind I’m trying to keep it pretty low poly:
And a little reference:
Your idea of low poly would bring most computers to their knees 
Keep it up. This is really good.
Yeah, including mine! What I mean is trying to avoid using subsurf, having too mant polys on curved surfaces etc. Conservative polygon use you might say, rather than low poly.
Anyways, here’s a viewport shot:
hey there is a french phrase at the bottom of logo
can you show a front pic i’d like to read the rest of the phrase
which tool did you use for the letters
retopo or modifier?
that’s great logo
keep up the good work
Thanks
The text reads: “Deiu et mon droit” (God and my right - which is the motto of the British Monrchy. I wont post a pic as it wraps all around the front so it’s hard to show the whole phrase at once. The text around the coat of arms reads “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense” (Shame to him who evil thinks, the motto of Order of the Garter).
More info on the figurehead HERE.
Letters were deformed along curves to give the rough shape then adjusted with proportioal editing.
do you know french !
this seems to be written in very old french - certainly not modern french!
the model in the link seems to be even more complicated then what you did
are you planning to incorporate all the detials on limit yourself to an approximation
Salutations
Maybe not quite that detailed - all that scrollwork would take forever. I think I’ve found a reasonable workflow for doing it now though.
Edit: Did a bit more, so much for keeping poly count to a minimum… I couldn’t help myself :o.
just for this complicated object how much verticies did it take?
i’m guessing around 10 to 20 K?
and also to do this model did you use only pictures
or if yu where able to find some 2D drawings showing all the dimensions ?
i mean i found out that DWg’s where not use for wooden ship before around 1650 i think
and it’s in Norway or aorund that place that it began
before that only the people involved knew how to build theses ships
and no plans where used
in history it took a long time before DWg for building things where used
today all design ardone first on dwg or may be computer and then
the construction process can begin
Salutations
Well, its getting to about the stage where I want to start getting some final renders out of this project, and given it’s size and complexity I thought I’d investigate other ways of getting them then asking my poor old stuttering PC to do them, so I tried green button. There seem to be a couple of teething problems, but if I can get them worked out it looks like a great service, definitely worth paying for once the free credit runs out. Just done some low res tests so far, my current issue is these weird white marks:
If anyone knows how to get rid of them, I’d be much obliged. I’m rendering as .EXR RGBA zip encoded files, with background set to premultiply alpha. I think it’s probably something with one of those options, does anyone know?
Anyway, just for fun I tidied it up in the GIMP and did a quick and dirty comp, to get some ideas for what the final image might look like:
It might be a raytracing problem if those areas have reflections on them. I’d ask the devs, personally; those little blips aren’t part of any rendering feature I know of. 
Impressive details on this baby =)
I hate to point out something that I think could be a problem just because this project is so good, but (here goes) it looks like in some places the rigging is going through the sails which doesn’t look quite right.
Ahh, the white blips. I’ve had those before, can’t exactly remember what caused them but I’m pretty sure ZombieJohn is on the right track with it being a raytrace (possibly reflection) issue.
There is a similar issue I get at times with random black pixels instead of the white small patches. I’ve found that using the Full OSA button in the material setting fixes it. Try that for starters. Or at least check by process of elimination if it is limited to one material, then change one setting at a time (like reflection on/off) to see where it lies.
Impressive attention to detail throughout though. The consistency is great!
Yeah there’s one or two places where that happens. In some its supposed to and in some it’s not, Just a few stragglers to round up and correct I guess.
@BenDansie: Thanks very much, I’ll try that. It seems to be occurring only on the glass material on the windows and lanterns, so that’s probably it.
One more thing - I remembered that oversampling settings often came into play. You might want to try different OSA filters - gauss, catrom, mitch, etc - or, if your computer can handle it, render out with no OSA at 2-4 times the resolution and then manually resample the image in gimp/PS.
@ BenDansie: Thanks! Upping the AA and switching the filter to mitch seems to have nailed it.
Yay! Those little blips annoyed me greatly at the time so it’s nice to help someone else with them.
Just rendered a turntable animation of the whole model as it stands. As you can see it’s nearly finished now.
Sorry about the crappy compression on the SD version, hopefully Vimeo will add the HD in a bit.
Possibly the most amazing Blender project I’ve ever seen. It’s just gorgeous. There’s so much detail.