Gun Deck models and problems

The first attempt I made on modelling the gun deck was, in one word, crap. Pretty much everything on it was wrong, nothing on it looked right at all. The floor was far too 'clean', and didnt look as though it was made in 1805 at all. the walls were perfectectly straight instead of being slightly curved, so they didnt follow the curvature of the ship at all. Basically, it had the hydrodynamics of a lead brick.

So, after nearly 4 hours working on it, I scraped it. Completely. Grabbed a coffee, recomposed my thoughts, did some more research, worked on it for two nights and came up with this little beauty -




The cannons arn't made by me, they were modelled and mapped by James Tickett. I just added them to see what the deck looked like when armed :)

The floor was a real pain in the ass, mainly because the reference picture was so small and at a weird angle, making it really hard to judge the dimensions to make the floor with. Also, another thing about the floor from looking closely at the pictures showed that it was made using different sized planks, that were offset from one another. At this point I thought that I had bitten off more than I could chew!

I made the floor, by making it out of seperate planks with individually modelled nails as well. After mapping it, it seriously slowed down the machine I was working on. the poly count was immense, and after discussions within the team we all decided that yes, on one hand it looks really good, but on the other it is too much. In the end the floor was replaced by a plane, with a bitmap map on it of a screenshot of the old floor. This greatly decreased the rendering time, which was esssential to getting the whole animation finished by the dealine.