Thanks kindly to everyone for their comments, I greatly appreciate this. I realize there is quite a variety of backgrounds on this forum, and alot of talent here in developing wonderful sketches and concept drawings !

OSTexo: This is the start of a detailed design project. There is a need to come up with an initial concept which could be assessed from a naval architecture perspective. Don't have any naval architects to help me at this stage. Given cruise ships have been designed and built for some time now, from small to mega size, there is an expectation generic models are available and could be used, corresponding to a given size category, in terms of lightweight, GT, length. However finding a suitably sized model that could be imported into an analysis program, is where I don't have leads. What will happen in due course is that a naval architect will create their own concept model to meet the performance requirements. Just in dire need to get something initial developed.

Micheal Gibson: Thank you very much for these suggestions. That model at grabcad.com looks like a great lead ! I'm trying to figure out how to convert those kinds of models into useful formats for naval design concept analysis.

Pilou: Thank you for your feedback on this. There is alot of talent here to create detailed sketches ! Wow. The thing I would like to determine is to what extent could one take a sketch based model, done in .dae format, and convert it into a useful file that could be used for initial hydrostatic & hydrodyamic analysis, hull design. A NURBS model would be a good bet it seems. I tried to export a mesh model from AutoCAD into a format useful for hull design, but ran into some problems. Could Rhino be a reliable route ? I have not tinkered with it before.

DH

Hi Pilou,

The Maelstorm is insane, 45-50 days of work too ... if it's artist days, it's probably the double in fact :P

Anyway I wish one day we could do something that complex in MoI, but we need a little help of Michael for that, like any sort of group system, and instances to limit the memory usage.
A library system with an easy drag/drop/align/scale feature would be amazing too, to speed up the 'greeble' work.

Hi Frenchy!

I'm pretty familiar with what can be done with SketchUp. I've beta tested some of the top plugins including ones by Dale Martens and ThomThom. The image you show I don't really consider organic-- nor iterative. By iterative, I mean being able to easily make more and more changes to a model.

You may know Pete Stoppel, who goes by the handle Solo. He's the best I've seen and did these in SU with the Artisan plugin rendered in SU. They are definitely organic!



For many, it's not the tool but the artist. Still, some tools are better at different things-- is all I'm saying.

<< like any sort of group system, and instances to limit the memory usage.
<< A library system with an easy drag/drop/align/scale feature would be amazing too, to speed up the 'greeble' work.
@PaQ
Sure, but i believe that Moi was first created for make speedy one design object exportable and not a true aircraft carrier! ;)
I had this problem in the past for modelise the Borges' Library! :)

Yep Solo makes very cool organic toons! Will be more difficult for classical personnages like Michel Angelo scupltures!
Box Subdivision modeling is a very hard way because you must imagine the subdivision from the rough start polygons!
By Solo


It's different than clay modeling more intuitive like ZBrush! ;)

chippwalters, as I know Bulgarov made this Spider in XSI Sofimage.

Hi Andrei,

Yes, I do believe some of it was made in SoftImage, but he told me some of it was made in MoI as well. I don't know what percent, I suppose one would have to ask him. But I'm sure these were made in MoI:





And I assume parts of the kitbash was as well: