HMS Siobhán

[Pheasent Plucker]

thats she's a cute gal.

[nornica]

WoW! awesome job!
Fabulous!
There is even a roman counter for the enemy to see how much sinking this ship is! haha, j/k.
Really great.
What ship You will now build?

[Grim DeGrim]

That's awesome. Near fell over. Sitting here with my daughter (15 months old) reading the forums when I noticed her name...

The ship is beautiful - which is fitting

[Balck]

As a fellow 3D modeler... Bravo sir, bravo!

[harry]

edward - looks really cool, ive been trying to get used to modeling ships as well.

 

we should talk on skype if you have it. ive made a lot of observations about the NA models. The first thing i will note is that their masts use a lot of standardised assets with minor tweaks. probably to save texture memory at runtime.

 

Another thing i am about 90% sure of is the NA models are produced in a way similar to that which we usually associate with environments. That is, they use "universal" tiling textures for their planking, possibly with shaders to depict colour changes, and overlay ambient occlusion as a lightmap much in the way youll see on buildings or whatever in games. Of course i havent seen their files so i cant be sure but as a fairly experienced game artist i feel fairly confident in my judgement.

 

the reason they do this would be again to save texture memory (smaller tiling texture uses less ram than a bigger "unique' one to achieve the same texel density) and so that the gunwales etc can look high res when you are aiming and generally the ship can be quite high res even up close. What you have atm looks awesome but in the aiming view would look a lot lower res than a vanilla NA ship.

 

The only thing making me doubtful about my theory on how they texture their ships is that they havent used the lightmaps as an opportunity to incorporate large areas of discoloration or wear.

[Charles Caldwell]

Outstanding work Captain Harvey, you do yourself great credit!