Today I started working on a pirate ship I promised to make for my best friend shortly after I extruded my first cube in Blender. It didn’t start out too good.
I finally realized that the whole time I thought I was modelling a Pirate Ship (cliche) I was really modelling a Chinese Junk Boat!
:o
So I stopped for a while and rearranged my computer room.
Eventually I was able to come up with this by squishing a sphere just right, so I decided that’s the one I’m keeping.
Now I want to add details, build a shack and some guns, and make it do something fun.
Like wind…
Some kinda way to drive around…
Some place to hang out when it rains…
*…I can’t get the light to come out of the lantern the way I want…
Just tweaking some details. It’s designed for a person I know.
And of all people in the world, I’ll bet she would have expected me to be able to make a better beer keg…
I was just taking her out on her maiden voyage…chilling in the cabin with my awkward beer keg and my lantern…
When the ship was attacked! Terror on the high seas!
From fore and aft, even!
Aaaand…I think we lost 'em…
Srsly, that’s it. My little work in progress. Or doesn’t everybody just jam their cannons through the wood like me?
I’m also going to build kind of a steel base ring around the pole, and create a lower hold and stairs to the front deck. Any tips or suggestions?
Yeh… Most people cut wholes to stuff their cannons through. 2 things that I strongly suggest are, looking at a ships diagram for a more accurate hull. And setting the hull smooth with an edge split modifier.
It has some typical beginner flaws, but it’s still nice and creative.
Some suggestions would be: kill the specularity on the wood, it only looks good when done properly and it’s not that necessary.
Add some frames on the windows and doors etc…
Enable ambient ooclusion in the world panel, set gather mode to approximate and enable pixel cache. This will give you a nice basic ambient light.
If you want your stuff to look less polygonal, it’s a good idea to use smooth shading in combination with the edgesplit modifier.
This is after following all your suggestions.
I want to see if it looks any different. Plus, I changed the wood in the poles, put that metal base around the bottom, and painted the top edge of the hull. Next I’m going to cut holes in the hull (which I’m keeping the way it is). Thanks for the help! There’s a reason I hang around here.
Edit: adjusted the lighting, and I guess I made the cannon wheels too smooth, because no matter what I do you can’t get a good look at the spokes.
TypicalBeginner Daddy
This is a wider shot with the new settings.
To be honest I don’t know what gather mode and pixel cache are or do…
Is this lighting conservative enough?
I’m trying to light all the sails, but I think all those lights is what’s making the wood still shine.
Post a .blend for us please. i want to see all your settings.
'coitanly!
I think this should do it. I went to the UV/Image Editor and pushed the little pack button on every one. Is that all I do?
*…wait, you fool! They’ll discover the caboose discord you’ve so artfully tried to dodge.
BTW, don’t make fun of the pictures in the cabin. It’s for a chick. 4rilz, yo.
What the?! Why do you have all those wind modifiers? And the hook curve. Just model the curves. And just increase environment lighting. Lastly turn down the secularity of the wood all the way down. If you want to light the sails though use some ambient occlusion. and shade the sea smooth.
I got rid of all the wind generators and lights except one wind and just a couple lights.
So I got rid of all this:
And ended up with this. Who knew?
The hook came with the tutorial. I also like how the wind came out instead of a hurricane the sails actually kind of undulate…Thank you very much for your help!
Ok, I took a look at the .blend file and noticed among other things that the geometry is pretty messed up. While it is possible to make a good render with messed-up geometry, keeping it clean and simple will make your life so much easier.
So, more suggestions:
-Remember that 3d-models in blender are always an empty shell, and should be treated as such. If the geometry is not visible, it’s no use modeling it. For example: you have given your ship hull an inner surface as well as the outer one. I strongly suggest you delete the entire inner surface below the deck, it only serves to confuse you with additional vertices.
-Normals are very important. The renderer does a pretty good job on flipping them so that they will show correctly, but having them right from the beginning is much better.
-When I suggested adding frames and stuff I should have added “as a separate object”, in order to not mess up your texture mapping, also avoiding unnecessary subdivision of faces etc. and giving your walls more depth instead of just being flat planes.
-An extremely simple, but pretty useful light setup I sometimes use is: Bright main sunlight with a subtle yellow tint and a not too bright hemi light with a blue/purple tint for environment light, using ambient occlusion set on multiply for better shading. Using lots of point lights doesn’t give very good results for outdoor scenes, and can crank up your render times quite a bit…
