I’ve wanted to model a vehicle for quite some time now and I haven’t seen many ships! So a few weeks ago I started modeling this using a few reference photos; it’s quite rough at the moment at the base and I also have to find a good material for the water (if anyone could post some settings, or i could just google it).
Looking forward to completing this project 
there’s a bunch of tutorials on water, but looking good so far. i think if you add another small bumpy texture channel to it, fiddle with the coloring a bit, ray mirroring/transparency (ior/fresnel) should look good! check out cgtextures.com for some good metal work.
your model looks great! time to go bring out the GIJoes and firecrackers now…
Really quick update with some modeling, but mostly just changes to the water and a really lazy metal texture (I plan to properly unwrap and apply it in the next week). Before I get ahead of myself I’ll probably just keep on modeling the command structure, add details to the deck and post another update in the next week or so.
p.s. how do I harden the specularity of the water? My textures at the moment are clouds set to hard noise and the spec. value is full on the shaders tab
Modelling wise it looks pretty good so far. I’m not sure about the water though. For some reason it makes the ship look like a model in a small pond as opposed to the real deal. Perhaps the waves and stuff need to be smaller.
I think the reason is the large waves and I don’t have any displacement or splashes to signify the ship’s actual weight. Something to consider, thanks
Yeah, I see what sharper means man, the sea isn’t a single shade of blue, it is the color and refraction of the light, plus the green of the vegetation, plus the deep blue depth. It looks like a pond because it lacks these things thus we recognize the refractions as in a low water level area, and the lack of sea vegetation we remember it as the result of scooping that stuff out of small ponds. So yeah, add some variation in its depth and color, as the first render was black and white and the camera angle faked depth but here we see it from above and it is no longer faked and little depth and color variation is present. Hope you get that fixed, and that you do awesome in texturing the ship. Might I suggest normal maps and bump maps?
Thats looking great so far. The water is its downfall however. I agree with the depth of colour. I also think that you need more than one type of wave. Right now you just have a cloud texture making smooth waves, but out in the ocean there are bigger, choppier waves along with the smooth waves. You mentioned this already, but I think adding in some splashes at the bow and some wake would really help with the effect. I’m not sure how you’d add those in though. Any body else know?
I didn’t really improve on anything this update but rather added more features, the water is gone for the time being and I was too lazy to model a hull because it will be under water for the final render. Next update will hopefully have a few sandbags and the smokestack completed, if anything looks wrong feel free to complain
Do you know about the Yamato Space Battleship? Wikipedia it if you don’t.
Yeah, I kept on running into pictures of it while I was looking for reference photos, although I prefer the World War 2 version 
don’t use a texture for the hard value. it overrides your hard value. 
there was a niftly ocean tutorial awhile back… i’ll see if I can find it…
used it to create this:
http://adddertoothdesigns.com/portfolio/images/image_five.jpg
edit: here ya go:
http://www.cogfilms.com/tutorials.html
makes this:
check some of his other tutorials too. you’ll need some of the ideas he presents.
Thanks for sending me the links, i’ve been having a lot of problems with the new ocean technique, so I might try a few other searches and post something later this week.
