I originally modeled this in Lightwave 21+ years ago but recently updated it and wound up doing a lot of additional detail model and texture work on it in Blender. This is a frame from an animation that was inspired by the “Million Dollar Shot” from the Titanic movie. Fun fact, 21 years ago I modeled this for fun and we wound up doing the CGI for the movie Britannic. This model was used for the Titanic sinking and also converted into the Britannic.
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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
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I Have so many questions !! Is there anyway you could share some knowledge as to how this was done ?
My two big questions are :
- What did you use to texture the hull ? ( I’ve been struggling to find something that would fit the hull of a ship)
- and second question, the foam on the sides and the back in the wake of the ship moving through the water, how was that achieved ? I’ve gotten close to something acceptable but nothing that looks that good !
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looks so nice. it would be great render it in animation with ocean simulation 
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Very great model, compliments for this result. I’ve a question, how you do are able to create this foam around hull and this nice ocean, any resources for this or maybe can you share your tips and settings? Thanks.
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I don’t really have a website so I thought I’d share a link to where you can see the animation on my Pond5 page. Unfortunately the preview quality is horrible.
Titanic animation
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Thanks, Bart!
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I see that you guys are interested in how I did the water for this so I thought I’d take a few minutes and basically explain what I did. I shared a link to the animation a few posts back. I don’t have a personal website so I just shared a Pond5 link of the animation.
I experimented with using the ocean modifier but I really don’t like the fact that it has a repeating tile pattern. It does look amazing but it’d be great if there could be a new version where it’s non-repeating. I know there’s a way to do it where you write out an image sequence for displacement and then offset it by matting it with a turbulent noise node…
Here’s an overview of how I did the water:
I’m actually doing it pretty much the same way I did it for the Britannic movie. I used Lightwave for that 21 years ago. First off, it’s all done “In Camera” meaning there’s not a lot of compositing going on. Almost all of the animation is rendered “as is”. The only thing I’m really composting is the smoke. I rendered out an animated matte for the funnels and rendered the smoke separately. It took a really long time for me to get the smoke looking good enough. I thought that was going to be the easy part, lol. I composited that in After Effects.
The Water Geometry:
The water is basically a grid of polygons. The grid is pretty dense around the ship but as it goes away in the distance it gets less dense. I came up with this for the Britannic movie. I experimented with using micro displacement but I found it wasn’t responsive enough and it was hard to tweak to make it look good so I just went with plain old subdivision modifier. The base ocean waves are made by using two displacement modifiers using turbulent noise driven by nulls. The nulls are animated to slowly change the waves over time and I found that they work better if you run them at different angles to each other. For the bow waves I came up with a black and white image that was used to displace the waves. This was a lot of trial and error. The bow waves displacement image is positioned using a null with a reference image of the bow wave displacement image on it. You just have to position the null so that the image lines up to the hull in a good spot. An additional thing I did was using the weight proximity modifier to create localized areas that have more burble to them, like near the propellers. I used some simple geometry and it’s distance and falloff to the water grid is what creates a weight map that turbulent displacement can be mapped into. I should also note that the ship isn’t moving. It’s an illusion created by the textures moving through the water mesh. The mesh doesn’t move either, it’s just being displaced on the Z axis. This works because a ship at sea cruising at a constant speed will have bow waves that pretty much travel along with the ship. The bow waves would really only change if the ship slows down, speeds up or turns. If it’s just going at a constant speed I think they remain pretty steady.
The Water Texturing:
The main water color is just set to a reflective dark blue/green color. The foam pattern around the ship was made in Krita using one of the texture brushes. I made a huge image that was seamless for that. In Blender nodes, that image is moved with a null and matted into another black and white image that controls the falloff of the foam around the hull. Remember, to make the ship appear to be moving, all the water textures need to move toward the back of the ship. For the wavelet textures that are on the bow waves I came up with way to make animated textures by using a smoke simulation. It was a lot of trial and error to make that work. These smoke wave textures were added to the water surface in the node editor. Again, I used null objects to place them in the right position. For the wake trail I added more of the seamless foam pattern to the node tree and matted that into a black and white matte image in the shape of the wake trail.
The Bow Burble:
I put in a lot of work on this but I’m just okay with it. I made a particle emmitor that is using metaballs for rendering. I duplicated a small section of the bow to use as a collision object and basically launched particle towards it so they can bounce off. The other thing I did was to add a shrink wrap modifier to move the emmitor up and down to ride on the surface of the water where the bow is “cutting through”.
The lighting is mainly an HDRI image that I modified to work for this shot.
The bump texture on the hull was made 21 years ago. I updated it and cleaned it up a bit and made it higher resolution. The Britannic movie was only standard resolution. So a lot of the textures didn’t have to be that great. I bought a nice titanic model way back and used that as a guide for the metal lines and the rivets. The original model was built in Lightwave with no sheer to it on purpose to make texturing it easier. Sheer on a ship is that subtle curve (the middle is lower than the bow and stern) from bow to the stern. Here’s a googled definition: Sheer: The upward curve formed by the main deck with reference to the level of the deck at the midship, is called sheer. It is usually given to allow flow of green water from the forward and aft ends to the midship and allow drainage to the bilges. When I brought this model into Blender, I had to redo the sheer because in Lightwave I used nulls to basically bend the bow and stern up to add the sheer. But I found I couldn’t really do it the same exact way in Blender but I got close. I then just applied the bends and re-UV-unwrapped the hull from the side with projection.
Hopefully I didn’t bore you to tears, Lol.
Thanks!
Dan D.
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Is there any way to download the model?