Aug10: Battleship from 1878

[CarstenSB]

I am trying an old battleship from 1878. Steampunk on the ocean.

[Dean]

Cool, cant wait to see your progress

[Gadgetfun]

Old ships have a lot of parts and detail should be cool :)

[CarstenSB]

Hi,
I am afraid, ships are not my cup of tea. I am still struggeling with the main hull.
Btw - I am a real military noob. It is not a battleship - it is some sort of blockade runner.
Wikipedia says armored frigate... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Sachsen_%281877%29

[spam_septic]

Carsten,

I would find it very difficult to model a hull from that drawing. I usually find it necessary to get a hull plan (see link) that has profile lines at different points down the length of the hull to use as a rotoscope image. You would also need a side view to show where the profiles are located, unless they are at regular intervals, as in this one.

I start out with a cube and then draw vertical isolines at each cross section and several horizontal isolines. Then I move the points at each cross section to fit the hull plan profiles. I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but I find this to be a quick way to get a smooth hull shape.

This happens to be the hull plan for the Titanic. I couldn't find one for the Sachsen or its sister ships (Baden, Wuerttenburg, Bayern...)
http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/3534/hullplan.gif (http://img844.imageshack.us/i/hullplan.gif/)

Hope this helps. Good luck.

[CarstenSB]

@spam_septic

Thank you very much for your help and the time you spent on googleling (does this word exist?) the hull plans! I tried to find plans myself but failed. I even spent money on a special book about building RC ships of the "Kaiserliche Marine". I nearly cried, when I found out, that the only complete hull plan in this book is plan of a little lifeboat :-(

I try to finish this anyway. I regard this monthly competitions as test for completing jobs within a deadline.

Got to find a model ship builder nerd ;-)

[brandeil]

I thingk the older ships look cool. Best to eyeball it if u dont have a detail map, I know how difficult i is since I spent lots of time in Library books looking for hull designs.

[spam_septic]

@CarstenSB: No worries, you're welcome. Hmmm.... "Model Ship Builder Nerd".... I resemble that remark. ;)

@bravo2zero: You're probably right... the hull shape on the Sachsen actually doesn't look too far off from the Titanic's hull shape, only smaller in scale. That just might do the trick.

[CarstenSB]

Okay - hate to admit it but I failed.

I am trying to contact a man who derived his hullplans from archived copies of the original blueprints of the ship. He seems to be some kind of Yoda of the ship modellig scene here in Germany.

Hard to find him... I heard he lives in an old ship wreck ... you can only find him with a special compass...

Okay - enough hallucinating. It will take some time and I wont make it till end of the month. Now that I am not bound to the rules anymore, I will try some new things. I found a ship hull modelling tool (delftship) which is free ... the basic version at least. Unfortunately only the Pro-Version has tools to fair curves to eliminate bumps which occur when you are not precise enough.

I will combine it with my modo->Cinema 4D-> Vray Workflow. If you are interested I will post some stuff here.