Thanks so much guys for the very kind words. I was feeling a bit down that I didn't deliver the final model and your responses have given me a real lift.

Don, I enjoyed looking through your website. Your pencil drawings are brilliant. Do you use MoI with TurboCad?

Marc, in my experience Balancer does preserve the vertex normals. I have not noticed any issues in that regard. They have recently implemented some additional features to allow some sections of a mesh to be excluded from reduction. On the model of Colleoni I was able to keep the scuttles round by painting the glass and the rim a certain colour and then by locking that material colour, was able to preserve the shape. Definitely worth downloading the demo.

Burr, I went way too far with these models. I'm a lousy businessman! I learned a lot from the experience though. I'm going to finish off that last ship at my own pace and might start a new thread for it.

3. HMAS Sydney II (light cruiser) as lost:

I really like your ship models Mark, these are awesome! you can tell you have a passion by the amount of detail and accuracy you put into them, well done and keep it up.

Cheers

Hello Mark,

Bravo for these outstanding models and rendering !

Did you ever finish the model of Kormoran ?

I left mine as it was 2 years ago. Lack of time, a busy life, you know how it is. But the interest is still there !

Well done again !

Jean-Paul

Hi Mark,

Those are all wonderful looking models & renders, Well done!!

regards Colin

Gallery addition!!!!!!!!

Great modeling job.

If possible, I would love to see them in a larger size (in order to see some of the details).

>Don, I enjoyed looking through your website. Your pencil drawings are brilliant. Do you use MoI with TurboCad?<

I am glad that you enjoyed the pencil drawings. I must confess that it has been a long time since I created any new pencil drawings, but I used to enjoy the process very much.

With regards to using MoI with TurboCAD. Not too often, but when shapes more organic in nature are required (and are not possible in TC) then I use MoI. I export from MoI in stp format and open in TC without issue. The two programs really work well together. Anything I create in MoI that requires rendering can be brought into TurboCAD and rendered there, so that is a bonus as well.

I want to congratulate to you for a gorgeous models.

You are the example I would to became :-)

Hi Jean-Paul. I did indeed finish Kormoran. I don't think it is the best of the models but then, it isn't a particularly glamourous ship, particularly in overall black. Your experiments in shaping your hulls went a long way to helping me complete these so I hope you will get back to your Kormoran some time. Might be very interesting painted in the Japanese colours which I believe were brighter. I'm going to try some on the water renders of the battle between Sydney and Kormoran when I get a chance.

YHWH_777, I will do some larger renders some time, though probably not much closer. Much of the detail is actually not very detailed. The original requirement was that these models come in at 100k polygons. Sydney ended up about 225k from memory, Yarra about 95k, the rest somewhere in-between. Bringing the models in at those counts was very difficult (and time consuming) so much of the 'detail' is only useful at the distances I've shown here. Even then, some substantial poly reduction has been used which degrades the model up close. Perhaps when I have some time I will revisit these with a view to improving them for up close renders.

Thankyou David. I think your own model of "Aurora" is excellent and that you already do work as good as these. Simlab's renderer makes them look nice without much effort on my part! Did you ever get Aurora rendered on the water in a way that you were happy with? I am looking again at methods for doing water, possibly with Blender. There are two links for Blender which show great promise:

http://www.savetheoceansim.com/blog/
http://www.miikahweb.com/en/main

The second link is a very interesting technique. I'm amazed by the potential shown in the videos.

Thanks again everyone for your interest. I really appreciate it.

>> I am looking again at methods for doing water...

You might want to take a look at e-On Vue as well. It is very good at doing nature scenes.

I've downloaded Vue several times (last time was V8) but have not spent enough time with it. It does displacement these days as far as I know which is a definite bonus. Last time I looked on the Vue site there was an image of a fishing trawler which was excellent and very much what I'd like to achieve. I'm definitely going to check it out again.

Mark, I remember about a year ago? you were discussing water. I was just starting texture creation (I'm still a beginner), but I made a project to make a decent looking water texture for you to try. I just went through my pc and I still have it. I'm posting it now. It's a 512 x 512, predominantly blue texture and one that is predominantly green. The water is about what you'd get when at sea on a not particularly calm day but not stormy. It has a (I think regular normal map), a regular texture jpg and a fluid height map. I'd like for you to use it if it has promise, and since I still have the project files I can remake the textures in a higher resolution. I am deeply impressed by your ships and hope to be that good someday. If you need changes to it I could definitely try. It would be good practice for me.

Al

Here is a picture of the blue regular image texture that is in the package. I'm not sure what it will look like with the fluid height map and the disturbed normal map, but it might be fun to see. I made it with Genetica Pro 3.

Hi Mark:

My laptop was broken 3 weeks ago, and I'm still thinking what will I do. (repair it, buy a new one....)
Meanwhile, I haven´ t got MoI, and I am desesperate :-)

Then, I have a big computer running under linux, but I can't use MoI in it. I am trying to virtualize the HD of my laptop (afortunately it works) under VirtualBox, but I have problems I don't know how can I solved. Therefore, I can't use MoI in this way. :-(

And more....I was doing stupid things and I lost all my /home under linux. Then, I have lost the *.blend files and the pictures I was rendered. It doesn't matter, because I have the MoI files secures, but I must to export the ship again and remake the UV textures I was finished....when I can use MoI again!

About the ocean...there are buildings of blender including the Ocean modifiers.
I have used any of them, but Blender shut down when I tried to make the textures of the foam :-(

Here is the last building with ocean:

http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1858

Good luck with the sea!
David

Hi Mark,

> The original requirement was that these models
> come in at 100k polygons.

Wow, any particular reason why they put such a low limit on it?

That's even more impressive that you were able to get such a nice detailed appearance within a low polygon budget, but yeah I can sure believe that made for a lot more extra work and planning.

- Michael

Amazing work !!!

Great job, those look fantastic!

Hi Al,

Sorry for the slow reply. I have been messing about with your excellent water texture.

I used the dielectric material I've used for water previously as the starting point for using the textures. After experimenting for a while I decided on both colour textures in the refraction channel plus bump. The normal map didn't seem to play well with the dielectric material so I left it out for the time being.

I would be very happy to have more like it if you don't mind doing them. Something to give a North Atlantic stormy look would be very nice.

Here are renders of HMAS Perth I with the unusual unfinished paint job she was wearing when lost, as well as Sydney rendered in KT with your water textures:

Hi David,

Sorry to hear about your laptop. Even worse is hearing that you lost some of your work. That is always heartbreaking!

I tried exactly the same thing with VirtualBox on a Linux netbook. In the end I just had to accept that the DirectX emulation in VirtualBox is too immature to run MoI. Instead, I managed to install Windows XP on a USB stick and booted from there. More trouble than it was worth really but it did work. I think though that installing Windows in another partition on your Linux box is a better option.

The Ocean Sim and that 'Dynamic Paint' build are both very interesting additions to the new Blender. I'm also thinking about taking another look at Terragen and a first look at Mojoworld. Povray also seems to have come a long way since I last tried it.

So many interesting possibilities.

Paq, sorry to read on your page that your employer shut up shop. It will be somebody's lucky day to snap you up. I've always thought the work you've shown here is something special. The gallery on your blog page is incredible! You are a seriously talented 3D artist.

Thanks to both you and Jim and everyone who has commented so kindly about these models. I'll finish all this off with some Simlab renders of Yarra in a day or two. Then I think I'll take a break from modelling to do some coding. I'm a terrible programmer but I find it relaxing....

Hi Michael,

Yes, the low polygon budget was a real challenge. I don't know exactly why they set such a low target, which in the end I failed to achieve. Some of the battles they want to simulate had quite a lot of ships involved so perhaps the number of models on screen plus the need to simulate the ocean, smoke etc was a factor in that. One would hope though that the Navy has a fair bit of rendering power at its disposal!