weirdguy

I vote no. Clipper ships usually had metal hulls, small steam engines to work their capstans to reduce crew, hollow metal masts and yardarms, unarmed, and were used after the American Civil War. It would be like adding Sherman tanks to a World War-1 game.

If it is from Chapman, which it is, specifically plate 33 (chapman etched the "drawings" on copper plates to make sure the plans last longer), then the dates tend to be the early to mid 1700's.

Ok, but the point of my post wasn't about this ship specifically. I was hoping to let people know that when it comes to making 3D models of a ship the main thing a guy would need are the engineering style blueprints of the hull ribs and side view (also know as a line drawing), and then a yardarm/mast plan views are the primary thing I look for. Too often I see enthusiastic people post a metric ton of pictures of a model ship, probably under the belief that is all a 3D art guy would need. I end up feeling bad for the guy who went to that effort. I assume the guy probably thinks he did well, but the reality is that line drawings are what count most.

Chapman plans are great, except they never come with any sail/mast rigging plans. I find it useful to have the masts and sailplans to be able to accurately make a ship model. If you are new to making ships, the best plans tend to be those that are intended for making wooden display model ships for your book case. They know the people making wooden models need information on how the bits and pieces should look like, and yet will have the same hull and mast drawings to get those parts accurate as well. Actual real ship blueprints tend to lack that sort of detail because at the times the authors probably didn't imagine a future without sailing ships. It is a guess, but I bet they assumed we can figure out the details easily because sailing ships are still common. Actually, that isn't a true sailplan. The plans an artist would need show the yardarms of the ship turned 90 degrees, flat on with the page (which is actually impossible on a real ship as they would hit the rope stays that reinforce the masts strength). A typical frigate sailplan ought to work, however, like the image from a model kit advertisement for a frigate called the Carolina.

I found that same set of plans off one of the websites in the resource pinned thread. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a hull line drawing, showing the ribs of the ship. I have made some ship models before, and the only way to make this ship would be to substitute another ship's hull, or just make your own hull by eye and guess what it should look like. To be honest, in that case it would actually be simpler to just make a different ship.

Really good books are Architectura Navalis Mercatoria by Fredrich Hinrich af Chapman (lots of smaller cargo ships, some frigates, but no ship rigging plans) The History of American Sailing ships by Howard I Chapelle Anatomy of the ship book series.

I agree. The 3D models for PotBS are a bit low res. They don't have things like footropes on the yardarms for example. Still, you can always add things like that.

Any sailplan picture like this? One that has all the masts and yardarms on it (sails are nice, but not required), with the yardarms turned 90 degrees to the bow to be flat on the page? Granted, with the separate picture of just the masts and yardarms by itself I can probably piece together out of the bits on the page, but this sort of sailplan picture is the best type I use in my 3D art. Like I said, I probably don't need it now that those plans were posted, but it would help.

Actually, from what I understand the opposite is going to happen. I've been told that the guys here will take outside submissions of ship 3D models from us and put them into the game. I just was hoping for a standardized textures for 3D artists to work from so we don't end up with every ship in the game using custom textures, all of which add up in your computer memory. It really does help keep memory usage down if everyone is painted using the same texture out of your RAM memory. As for screenshots of my work, I already posted those in a different introduction post I made, but I suppose I can post some more. Just google "Pirates of the Burning Sea La Belle and Pirates of the Burning Sea Cruizer Snow" and those are my two ships that got added to the game (over 60% of the ships in PotBS were made by players, not the in house 3D artists from Flying Lab Studios). That is a Cruizer, and my La Belle, both screenshots from when they were added to the game.

Because I don't think they have as good of pre-made plastic model kits like Americans and Japanese have. They seem to have lots and lots of really perfect and detailed plans for people to make their own models from scratch out of just wood and glue in they have around their house. All of my best blueprints (and I have a few hundred) are Russian for some reason, which makes me think this. Downloaded all of that, I might add. Thanks!

There are plenty of Dutch ship plans out there, and those plans tend to be really good ones too (model kits are often better than the actual ship blueprints). I have prints for 13 Dutch ships, from giant East Indiaman, to small 4-gun yacht. However, I agree that Dutch ships from the 1600's should not be fighting British and French ships from 1800. It just feels wrong. That year spread that has been mentioned is probably a bit too wide to make sense. I think sticking to ships from about 1750 to 1830 or so is a better idea.

I watched a stream with Sidestrafe, RamJB, Bismark70, and The Mighty Jingles and at the end RamJB (who is their most experienced player and knows ships and naval combat history pretty well) commented that the game needs more smaller frigates. The jump from the snow to the Trincomalee is too big of a gap. I may want to make some sloops-of-war or light frigates if this is the case.

All I get are prompts to download sketchy .exe installer programs. Not a chance in hell I'm doing that.

Here is the Russian Mirny from 1819 in English that I mentioned.

In general if you are new to making 3D models of sailing ships, go for high quality ship model kits. They tend to have lots of pictures to aid the hobby guys make their little toy ships, and 3D art guys are in the exact same situation. Also, those ships tend to have actual models that people post pictures of online, and those can be very useful to look at details like how the wheel is positioned, or what bits on pieces on the deck are supposed to look like, ect. Russian websites tend to be really good about posting ship plans they have for others to use, often kits that are very far out of date from the 1950's and 60's from companies that don't exist anymore. Here is a good example. They put up some plans for ships that came out of a Russian model making magazine called Modelist Konstruktor. http://www.shipmodels.com.ua/eng/models/drawings/ Get the ships: 1. Peter I = a rowboat in detail. Always useful to have for any ship model as they all have rowboats somewhere. 2. Predestinatsia = 54 gun ship of of the line aka the Goto Predestinatsia, note that a full sized replica was built in 2014 called the Voronezh. 3. Ingermanland = 62 gun ship of the line from 1715. 4. St Pavel = 88 gun ship of the line from 1799. 5. St Peter = 12 gun brig. Nice little vessel. 6. Palada = late era ship of the line, but the sailplan doesn't properly show the yardarm lengths, so not that useful, actually. 7. Mirny = aka Peaceful, a small 20 gun Sloop-of-War ship from 1819. I happen to have the same plans that somebody deleted the text and put in English. But, the plans I was going to just send you some I already have. Also, send me a private message to give my your e-mail and I can get you some more information, and a low quality texture pack I used to use on Pirates of the Burning Sea. How about the prints for the Russian Sloop-of-War (note that "sloop" here is not the rigging, but confusingly is the size of the ship, aka a miniature frigate of around 20 guns).

I can probably give you some ship plans if you want to make a small ship. Anything specific you want to work on? Fore-and-aft rigged schooners, cutters, or do you prefer small, square rigged ketches, brigs, snows, or maybe even very small ship? FYI a 3-masted square rigged is the "ship" rig.

Also, it would help to know the polygon budget allowed for each ship model. In pirates of the burning sea that changed based on the size of a ship, but I know the polygons are much, much higher in Naval Action based on the graphics you can see in screenshots and video.

I think it has more to do with languages and what ships are called in each language. The plans I posted are in German, intended for making model ships. The word "Fregatte" does translate to English as Frigate, but what I want to know is what Frigate is supposed to mean. As in where did the word come from. In Naval Action I wouldn't dare call this ship a Frigate. It is a 3rd rate Ship of the Line. It would probably help to avoid confusion when ship classes and names are used in a game by kids who probably have no idea what nautical terminology means. Even Port and Starboard mean nothing to newbies/land lubbers. So, my vote is to call Friedrich Wilhelm zu Pferde a ship of the line.

Well, you didn't actually provide any blueprints for ships. I know you are kindly offering to go to a museum and get some photos of plans, but I would prefer an actual scan of a plan, not a shaky, handheld photo of one. You did link to a museum where you can buy ship blueprints, but I also don't think we need to do that. There are enough places on the internet to get plans already posted online for enthusiats. Russian websites are really good about posting free ship plans for all sorts of ships for people to download with the intent to make table top display models, and even official documents are available for free like the excellent Danish http://www.orlogsbasen.dk/smart.htm site. The Danish Christian den Syvende of 1766 is a good set of plans off the Orlogsbasen site. Just go to the link enter in a date of1766 into the "Datering" and hit "Sog" aka "search" to get the list. Hit "vis" to see the plans. I have plenty of ship plans left over from my time working on Pirates of the Burning Sea, most of which I got free off the internet (ship model makers love to post plans) as well as scans out of some really detailed books that I bought off Amazon.

I'm talking about a 3D ship model that would have to be made. In this case there is no reason to do so. There already is a 3D model, so there isn't much of a reason to ask for another ship to be added, the USS President. As for the armament, that is a different mater, and probably best asked in the Suggestions forum. 1. A new feature to rename your ship, preferably having it show up on the stern as well. 2. A new feature to re-arm your ship, which I understand is partially in the game already. I assume people would also like to see the cannon 3D models on their ship change if you swap out the visible deck guns from small caliber, long barreled cannons for large caliber, short barreled carronades as well. But as for a new ship model to be added to Naval Action, then I say don't bother. USS Constitution is good enough for that role.

Anim8or, but it can put out files as both Lightwave or 3D studio Max. Also, I have used a couple of other programs like Maya PLE to convert files back and forth between Anim8or and Maya. However, for textures any JPEG file works just fine for a texture. What I suggest is to make low quality versions of the game's textures available to us 3D model maker guys (again, to keep the file sizes down) and we can then send back3D models using those low quality (but same physical size, aka if the original texture is 1440x1440 pixels send us a low quality 1440x1440 texture) and the Games-Labs LLC guys can just load in their good, high quality (and huge file size) textures when we send them our 3D models. That is what we did on Pirates of the Burning Sea. We amateur 3D art guys were able to all work using the same exact textures, although you could include your own texture if you wanted, but we tried to keep that down to a minimum.

I know it sounds like fun to add the HMS Enterprise, but I couldn't make a 3D model of this unless I got the line drawings for the hull and sail plan.

I would like to have a pack of textures for the wooden hulls, ropes, and the rest from the Naval Action guys, that way I can make a ship and not have to worry about them having to texture the whole thing. I could use my own textures, but I prefer to use something pre-existing to keep the quality up, and possibly help out the game designers to keep textures kept in memory down to a reasonable level. I believe it helps to use the same textures as much as possible.

I do 3D models, but I wouldn't make a model unless I got a sailplan along with the hull line drawing. After those two pages the pictures of the models are nice for reference to see how the details look, but the hull lines and sailplan are the most important drawings.

no sailplan?