[WIP] "Lochinvar" Clyde puffer

[gap]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

Looks great! Nice little boat.

Thank you Cybermat,

that will be of the 'shorehead' (66 ft) type. Her game dimensions will be: length - 20.08 m, breadth - 5.55 m, draft 3.68 m, so yes, she will be one of the tiniest boats modelled in game

[kapuhy]

Hey, looks great! It could also be used as much better looking "coastal boat" than one currently present in game

And if making it will give you appetite for some more, I have a ton of plans and photos of various cargo ships stashed on my drive that I've collected doing research for my ship pack - mostly smaller sizes, up to 2000 GRT, but also a bunch of larger ones

[mkiii]

looking good gap,

[Sonarman]

The Clyde puffer was immortalised in the Para Handy novels of Neil Munro and a 1970's BBC Sitcom loosely based on the books entitled 'the Vital Spark'

[vdr1981]

Beautiful!

[iambecomelife]

Great job! And nice to see another wings3d user active on the forums. The details are top notch, and the hull cross sections look correct.

In my opinion, small ships like these are needed much more than the big 5,000 - 10,000 tonners - even in WWII, little cargo vessels still made up a lot of the merchant fleet. And too often in SH3/4/5 we see big ships like Liberties operating inshore, where they rarely would have been in real life.

Oh, and the accents in Sonarman's clip are great.

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Hey, looks great!

Originally Posted by mkiii

looking good gap,

Originally Posted by vdr1981

Beautiful!

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

Great job!

Thank you for the nice words guys

Originally Posted by kapuhy

It could also be used as much better looking "coastal boat" than one currently present in game

Not in place of the stock "coastal boat" but hopefully together when my boat will be finished.

Originally Posted by kapuhy

And if making it will give you appetite for some more, I have a ton of plans and photos of various cargo ships stashed on my drive that I've collected doing research for my ship pack - mostly smaller sizes, up to 2000 GRT, but also a bunch of larger ones

I have some ship and aircraft plans too, together with many SH-related models whose completion and/or release is still pending: a French lighvessel, some aircraft, several lighthouses, various U-boat equipments, bombs, air torpedoes, depth charges, DC throwers and racks, some German and British coastal defense emplacements, a couple of memorial, a floating mine model by Targor Avelany. This list could is not even complete but you got the idea More than an appetizer I need a doctor to prescribe me a diet and someone to remind me to finish a project before I start the next one lol

Out of jokes: let's share our resources and discuss our respective projects. I am sure we can find some common priorities and if more cargo ships are part of those priorities, I will do my part of the job

Originally Posted by Sonarman

The Clyde puffer was immortalised in the Para Handy novels of Neil Munro and a 1970's BBC Sitcom loosely based on the books entitled 'the Vital Spark'

Yes, I have watched some episodes of that sitcom. They have been a great source of inspiration, and their tranchant humour was hilarious even for a non-native Englishe speaker like me

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

And nice to see another wings3d user active on the forums.

I am in love with the simplicity of Wings3D. As much as I tell myself that I should get more proficient with more powerful programs like Blender, I always go back to Wings

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

The details are top notch, and the hull cross sections look correct.

As usual, figuring out details too small to appear clearly on that plan, was probably the hardest part, with the complicated windlass winning the first prize in this case.

Talking about small details, I have a small problem that maybe you or kapuhy can help me with.
From the plan I have used as template, and from several pictures I have seen, it seems that puffers had most of their rudder chain running in the open all the way from boat's wheel to the stern. As you can see from the screenshot below, the chain was not running straight but it formed several angles.
I have tried modelling it as an almost flat geometry with a transparent, seamless chain texture. This is a trick I used for keeping acceptably low the poly count of other models, but in this case it didn't work. Due to the prominent position of that chain on to its changes of orientation, having it as a 2D texture looks really odd.



For the moment I have opted for a 3D chain. I simplified each chain link as much as possible; it is composed of just 18 vertices and 36 triangles, but there are many of those links, and in total the chain accounts for 2,232 vertices and 4,464 faces. A bit too much for a small detail like that.

Do you guys have any better idea on how I could make that chain to look nice and natural while keeping its poly count under decent limits? Yes, I know, I could scrap it all, and very few naval fans would notice its absence, but being stubborn realism fanatic that I am, I can resolve to adopt such a drastic solution

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

In my opinion, small ships like these are needed much more than the big 5,000 - 10,000 tonners - even in WWII, little cargo vessels still made up a lot of the merchant fleet. And too often in SH3/4/5 we see big ships like Liberties operating inshore, where they rarely would have been in real life.

I agree. Uboat.net's database of ships damaged/sunk by U-boats is a great resource, and not surprisingly ships under 500 grt are quite common a common entry there. Talking specifically about puffers, we are a bit on the low end: their tonnage is of only about 100 grt and I don't think any of them to have ever been attacked by a WWII U-boat. Yet, they were a common and tvery typical finding around the coasts of England. When I figured out that no other SH modder had ever modellled it, I told myself that something had to be made

[gap]

Originally Posted by Mister_M

Gorgeous ! The 3D part is beautiful, except the small davit at the bow which could have a softer curvature...

Thank you for your comments Mister_M

Yes, davit's arc could have been smoother. The same goes for vent's inner part and for many other small details, if you look at them from close enough. At some point one needs to put the word "end" to his projects, and this is the case with my puffer as long as the 3D modelling job is concerned. In future someone else might bring his own improvements to it, and I will be glad to accept them, but by then I hope I will be working on something else

Originally Posted by Mister_M

Else, the shadows are a bit odd. Why aren't they symetrical relative to the Z axis ? Why are there more shadows on the vertical surfaces of the upper parts (sail, cabin, funnel, ventilators, lifeboat and base of the mast) than on the hull ? Why aren't they any dark shadows on the bottom of the hull ?

Three factors should be considered:

1 - The screenshots I posted yesterday were taken in Wings3D. Wings is not a 3D rendering program, so don't expect too much from it. It supports the creation of scenes with various types of lights, but I never messed with them. The one source of light in my screeshots is a standard emispherical lighting which, I think, is aligned with the x axis. That's why one side of the boat looks more illuminated than the other.

2 - For the above reasons, my previews don't feature any dynamic shadow. If you compare the pictures at post #46 with the one at post #1 you will easily realize that, in the screenshots I posted more recently, the shadowing comes mostly from the ambient occlusion map. Considering that, it is logical for objects on the deck - whose exposure to diffuse light is occluded by bulwarks and superstructure - to be darker than hull. In game, this will be balanced by direct sunlight beams and by the dynamic shadows supported by the granny format.

3 - The program I used for AO-map baking is Autodesk Softimage Mod Tool 7.5. This is the free version of the program devs used for the same job in SHIV and SH5. The only manual touch ups I made to the procedural AO map, was subduing by 50% or removing the pre-rendered diffuse shadows cast by breakable model parts, otherwise those darker spots would look odd when the boat is damaged and the objects casting them are ripped away from the main model.

[Nickwkr]

Originally Posted by Sonarman

The Clyde puffer was immortalised in the Para Handy novels of Neil Munro and a 1970's BBC Sitcom loosely based on the books entitled 'the Vital Spark'

being from Glasgow i watched this as a kid think capts name was para handy