High quality 3D boat model
Gcreate Graphic designer located in Cardiff & Caerphilly- High quality 3D boat model
It's been a long time since I have done any 3D work, and have been wanting to do a step by step progress on how I start with a 3D model. I won't be doing every stage of the modelling and texturing but more of what happened at each day and any issues that came along the way.
So SRT Marine got in touch with me in having a high quality 3D boat model of a cargo vessel done for their 3D viewer program. I had previously created all the 3D boat models for their viewer which you can see on my other blog here for examples and also to compare the two different models I created. Other blog here
So first of all I had to get a reference image of the boat, sadly it's not done in an ideal environment of where I would get the front, side, back, top of that particular vessel. so I had to get another random image so I could have the correct size for the final model.
As you can see its from Istock but as I was just using the outline I didn't need it to be in highly quality plus I only needed to focus on the hull or lower half of the vessel.
Next came with the many many reference images I got on Marine traffic, you can see a link here of all the images I had to work from, and while its great to have as many photos as possible its also important to have high quality images that I can zoom into which sadly they didn't have. This means there is a lot of guess work and making stuff up. Not a great process but I am used to this progress as its what I had to do before when I created the other vessels (sometimes only creating it from 1 single source photo) You can see all the images here
Next as you can see in the little gallery is all the model being created, this was over a couple days so some parts havent been completed yet. All the modelling was done in blender and used ambient occlusion, in the cycles render that blender provides.
Next came the very painful and time consuming method of UV texturing every single little bit. I won't go into much detail on what UV mapping is, but simply put it unwraps the model (or section) you have selected and puts it on a flat 2D image so when you start texturing, you know where each bit will go. I slightly misjudged the time frame on this part of the project as the previous models I was able to cut many corners when doing the UV mapping and textures, this was because the viewer didn't need to have complex UV Maps, this model however did. You can see in the next set of images what the model looks like with a placeholder grid texture to again show where the textures will be placed. I have also included some final textures just so you get a better understanding on the UV Maps.
I personally hated this section as to get some of the UV maps done correctly was a pain, and in some cases (like the hull) I had to UV map 3 times to get it look correctly.
As you might of guessed this is the last section of the project, and contains the final output of the model with all the correct textures in place. I sadly did run out of time for the project so I couldn't refine it as much as I would of originally liked, and there was talks of even doing some normal mapping. However for the distance the model will be viewed at and how accurate it is compared to other vessels I have done its a pretty good end product. Hopefully I get to do more even though it was a pain in the bum to complete in parts.
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