Shipwrights Guild Hall (WIPs, feedback, and advice)

[Bart]

I'm building water.

But now I run into a problem, when rendering the ldd file with bluerender.
The transparant bricks aren't actually that transparant. In building mode vieuwing it in LDD it self looks way different. 

example:

How it looks rendered by bluerender

Test piece with different colour transparant brick, from top to bottom. Dark blue, Light Blue, Turquase Blue, White.

This is how it looks in LDD it self. 

As you can see after rendering, the transparant plates become less see trough. And as you can see in the last picture, I was trying with different colours underwater to show rising land etc. But after the render that is almost impossible to see. 

Anyone any advice?

Bart

 

[Roadmonkeytj]

3 hours ago, Bart said:

Talk about water...Anyone any advice?

Bart

 

Use real bricks? Just kidding although ive never had rendering issues with my real bricks lol ... Ive read that you can play with the pixel counts in bluerender to get different effects to show well ... There are far more qualified people here to help you with that as the last rendering i did was in cheif architect lol 

I like your process ... I had actually considered doing this for shorelines and sand bars myself ... Like a mini topo map under the water with some texture on top.

I looks really good in the LDD workspace though

[Maxim I]

I second LS remark about space between gunports. Especially for ships sized like this one.

I am not sure about your proposal to simple refit it as a merchantman afterwards. Especially since it is LDD, I require the merchantman to be completely another vessel.

[Bart]

There are a dozen international borders between me and my real bricks (I'm not even on the same continent :O) (while legally being in the Netherlands) .

And a side note I don't even have enough transparent plates to cover one wave as I did above. I might work around the issue by posting rendered and not-rendered pictures to show off the water, and what is beneath the surface. 

Bart

[Roadmonkeytj]

5 minutes ago, Maxim I said:

... Especially since it is LDD, I require the merchantman to be completely another vessel.

With his speed that is entirely possible lol

[LM71Blackbird]

8 hours ago, Legostone said:

Curves! Curves beyond bow (and stern). Look at ship plans for large vessels and with that ;)

Ok. I see what I can come up with in the curves department. Thank you!

7 hours ago, Bregir said:

Leviathan is coming to the brick seas, it seems! A very impressive project, BB.

I agree with LS that you should look into some curves in two dimensions.

Your sides are currently completely straight from bow to stern, while a true sailing ship would be widest somewhere in the middle and narrow inwards towards Bow and stern. Similarly, the middle should be lower than the bow and stern ports so you also get a lateral curve. Bodi's vessels do this very well.

Further, gunports should be staggered so they are not directly above each other.

Last, you should divide your bow sprit (and masts). Take a look at some of mine or LS's MOCs for example and notice how we divide masts. Rather than just go narrower, they consist of two (or more) spars overlapping at the tops.

That should give you something to work with ;) Looking forward to seeing where it goes!

 

Thank you very much! You both have been most helpful! I will spend to time adjusting the build accordingly.

7 hours ago, Legostone said:

Oh, to add to Bregir - a bit more space between gunports doesn‘t hurt on such a large vessel. 4 studs are quite balanced.

Ok, I mess around with that a little bit as well!

[Roadmonkeytj]

Just now, Bart said:

There are a dozen international borders between me and my real bricks (I'm not even on the same continent :O) (while legally being in the Netherlands) .

Bart

You by chance dont work on WTG's do you lol?

[LM71Blackbird]

8 minutes ago, Maxim I said:

I second LS remark about space between gunports. Especially for ships sized like this one.

I am not sure about your proposal to simple refit it as a merchantman afterwards. Especially since it is LDD, I require the merchantman to be completely another vessel.

Well, I'm not talking about just copy and pasting it. I would have to remove all the gun ports and change the hull up a bit. It would be similar but still a different ship.

1 minute ago, Roadmonkeytj said:

With his speed that is entirely possible lol

LOL. I've been using LDD for about 8 years now. I start back when you could still buy the models you built!

[Bart]

1 minute ago, Roadmonkeytj said:

You by chance dont work on WTG's do you lol?

What is WTG? but nope what ever it is, I'm a sailor, an actual one, not the brick variety we send on adventures here. I'm an engineer onboard a merchant ship. Currently in the Black Sea, enroute to St. Petersburg. 

Just now, LM71Blackbird said:

(...)

LOL. I've been using LDD for about 8 years now. I start back when you could still buy the models you built!

SAME! although the buyable bricks where limited. I remember when it couldn't handle anything over a 1000 bricks :O. (side eyeing the brick count at my current moc and seeing its 6k)

on your ship, I feel it's to long for its width. but maybe the design and shape of the next decks could change that look. How many masts have you planned? If I can just say, 4 mast barque. And leave you with your curiosity. 

Bart

[Bregir]

I'd probably suggest sticking to a three-masted full rigged ship, as that was the all-pervasive norm for warships of the era. Barques and barquantines were, to the best of my knowledge, not common before the end of the period, and mainly used for merchants, as they required less men.

[LM71Blackbird]

16 minutes ago, Bart said:

What is WTG? but nope what ever it is, I'm a sailor, an actual one, not the brick variety we send on adventures here. I'm an engineer onboard a merchant ship. Currently in the Black Sea, enroute to St. Petersburg. 

SAME! although the buyable bricks where limited. I remember when it couldn't handle anything over a 1000 bricks :O. (side eyeing the brick count at my current moc and seeing its 6k)

on your ship, I feel it's to long for its width. but maybe the design and shape of the next decks could change that look. How many masts have you planned? If I can just say, 4 mast barque. And leave you with your curiosity. 

Bart

St. Petersburg, Russia? I've always wanted to visit there...

Yeah! I once made a 10k piece model and the laptop I had was not made to handle it...

Per the advice of Bregir and Legostone, I'm going to try widen it a bit to try and make it look more proportional.

2 minutes ago, Bregir said:

I'd probably suggest sticking to a three-masted full rigged ship, as that was the all-pervasive norm for warships of the era. Barques and barquantines were, to the best of my knowledge, not common before the end of the period, and mainly used for merchants, as they required less men.

Sounds, good to me. I've still got some re-design work to do before I add any sails though... Thanks again!

[Roadmonkeytj]

45 minutes ago, Bart said:

What is WTG? but nope what ever it is, I'm a sailor, an actual one, not the brick variety we send on adventures here. I'm an engineer onboard a merchant ship. Currently in the Black Sea, enroute to St. Petersburg. 

Wind Turbine Generator ... The big twirly fan things that make electricity lol as they are more commonly known ... I traveled commissioning them for 5 years we would be out a month and a half before being home for a week

[Legostone]

I started on another small prefab vessel (I really like these and happened upon a bunch of them... With 1 BL order waiting I now have 4 or 5 small brown midsections + 3 bow+stern combos and 7 small white midsection + 3 bow+stern combos, so plenty more small vessels to put together) - this time trying a technique first shown by Captain Green Hair to cover the black part.
Example by Captain Green Hair:

Spoiler

The Tit (2) by Captain Green Hair - don't just favour, comment!, auf Flickr

My implementation:

Still undecided if I wanna go with a small full rigged ship or a second brig. I'm currently tempted to go for the full rigged ship, but I can't quite decide...

[LM71Blackbird]

Spoiler

1 hour ago, Legostone said:

I started on another small prefab vessel (I really like these and happened upon a bunch of them... With 1 BL order waiting I now have 4 or 5 small brown midsections + 3 bow+stern combos and 7 small white midsection + 3 bow+stern combos, so plenty more small vessels to put together) - this time trying a technique first shown by Captain Green Hair to cover the black part.
Example by Captain Green Hair:

  Reveal hidden contents

The Tit (2) by Captain Green Hair - don't just favour, comment!, auf Flickr

My implementation:

Still undecided if I wanna go with a small full rigged ship or a second brig. I'm currently tempted to go for the full rigged ship, but I can't quite decide...

 

So far I think that looking pretty good! I assume the bricks sticking out are only temporary right? I like how your doing the gun ports.

7 hours ago, Bart said:

As you can see after rendering, the transparant plates become less see trough. And as you can see in the last picture, I was trying with different colours underwater to show rising land etc. But after the render that is almost impossible to see. 

Anyone any advice?

My only suggestion is to try Pov-ray... that's the only program I know of that will keep the transparence. The only down side is that I hear it takes forever to render trans pieces... like in the range of several weeks...

Ok, so I've done some revisions on the hull and widened it as well as sloped and staggered the gun ports. Here is what I came up with:

SOTL4 by LM71Blackbird, on Flickr

SOTL5 by LM71Blackbird, on Flickr

Here what I have for the bow so far. I have yet to change the bowsprit.

SOTL6 by LM71Blackbird, on Flickr

Here what I've got so far for the stern and stern castle. The rudder is kind of pathetic right now, so I will be working on that as well.

SOTL7 by LM71Blackbird, on Flickr

[Legostone]

1 hour ago, LM71Blackbird said:

So far I think that looking pretty good! I assume the bricks sticking out are only temporary right? I like how your doing the gun ports.

You mean the tiles on the side? That is the big issue with the small prefabs - there are only a couple colours out there for each part (bow/stern bottom half exists in brown, white, dk grey and black, midsections exist in white and brown, and the top part exists in green, blue, black and dk grey. Which leaves you, if you combine the black top with the white bottom, with something like this: 

Which isn't bad, but the bigger the vessel gets, the larger the big black blob at the bottom gets. You can, off course, add some other colours in the middle, but that doesn't really do it for me. So that leaves the tile option - and black shining through is sadly really obvious, which makes the whole thing a bit awkward to build around... And given that this vessel will probably be standing in a place where it'll only be observed from further away (I have a local shop that stores some of my vessels for me), the rough edges aren't that bad.

Added a rough stern prototype to the vessel:

Still not entirely happy with it (I think I need to change the entire stern plate, I don't like the look of the top part above the windows nor the sides currently, I need to find a different solution for that...

 

As for your vessel - the curve certainly looks much better then a boring flat wall from before, but I gotta ask - what is the reason for the slopes next to the gunports? It seems kinda like unnecessary decoration, but we are gonna see. The headrails look fine btw, interesting idea to clip some stuff onto flex tubes, might have to use that (though I would probably just go with a similar route)

Small thing about the curve towards the stern (should be easy to fix in LDD): You are currently going 4-5-6-3; this looks weird, rather go with 6-5-4-3 for that (you'll see from ontop why)

But lastly, the big issue - the stern. Right now it looks like an airport tower stuck ontop of a vessel (sorry!). Look at some examples of historical 2 deckers - Let's take the Agamemnon - the stern is indeed angled outwards from the hull, but only going towards the back - which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. You don't want heavy stuff dangling on the side of your vessel. Also note that it gets slightly thinner towards the top, and is integrated into the gundeck - it makes the vessel appear a lot sleeker and probably helps with rigidity of the stern. Adding a quarterdeck (partial deck basically starting between main and mizzen or right behind the mizzen) helps integrating the stern into the hull too.

If you wanna go extra fancy with the shape of your hull (you are just starting out after all - it could add lots of complication in some places) - add some tumblehome. Simplest solution would probably be simply using 3 tall slopes in place of the bricks between the gunports and angling the gunports, a more involved solution would be using hinges (I can recommend Captain Green Hairs tutorial - I think it has resulted in many many beautiful vessels over the years and is still quite relevant. While I used a different technique for a while I've fallen back to it a couple times because it makes building a vessel very straight forward and I'm right now using a variant of it. Mid-size vessels are also a lot more practical in game here...)

Oh, and if you want to earn a couple DBs - I have a long forgotten LDD WIP that I'll probably never finish on my own, so if you want to try to finish it to sell it to me PM me 

[LM71Blackbird]

Spoiler

 

34 minutes ago, Legostone said:

You mean the tiles on the side? That is the big issue with the small prefabs - there are only a couple colours out there for each part (bow/stern bottom half exists in brown, white, dk grey and black, midsections exist in white and brown, and the top part exists in green, blue, black and dk grey. Which leaves you, if you combine the black top with the white bottom, with something like this: 

Which isn't bad, but the bigger the vessel gets, the larger the big black blob at the bottom gets. You can, off course, add some other colours in the middle, but that doesn't really do it for me. So that leaves the tile option - and black shining through is sadly really obvious, which makes the whole thing a bit awkward to build around... And given that this vessel will probably be standing in a place where it'll only be observed from further away (I have a local shop that stores some of my vessels for me), the rough edges aren't that bad.

Added a rough stern prototype to the vessel:

Still not entirely happy with it (I think I need to change the entire stern plate, I don't like the look of the top part above the windows nor the sides currently, I need to find a different solution for that...

 

As for your vessel - the curve certainly looks much better then a boring flat wall from before, but I gotta ask - what is the reason for the slopes next to the gunports? It seems kinda like unnecessary decoration, but we are gonna see. The headrails look fine btw, interesting idea to clip some stuff onto flex tubes, might have to use that (though I would probably just go with a similar route)

Small thing about the curve towards the stern (should be easy to fix in LDD): You are currently going 4-5-6-3; this looks weird, rather go with 6-5-4-3 for that (you'll see from ontop why)

But lastly, the big issue - the stern. Right now it looks like an airport tower stuck ontop of a vessel (sorry!). Look at some examples of historical 2 deckers - Let's take the Agamemnon - the stern is indeed angled outwards from the hull, but only going towards the back - which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. You don't want heavy stuff dangling on the side of your vessel. Also note that it gets slightly thinner towards the top, and is integrated into the gundeck - it makes the vessel appear a lot sleeker and probably helps with rigidity of the stern. Adding a quarterdeck (partial deck basically starting between main and mizzen or right behind the mizzen) helps integrating the stern into the hull too.

If you wanna go extra fancy with the shape of your hull (you are just starting out after all - it could add lots of complication in some places) - add some tumblehome. Simplest solution would probably be simply using 3 tall slopes in place of the bricks between the gunports and angling the gunports, a more involved solution would be using hinges (I can recommend Captain Green Hairs tutorial - I think it has resulted in many many beautiful vessels over the years and is still quite relevant. While I used a different technique for a while I've fallen back to it a couple times because it makes building a vessel very straight forward and I'm right now using a variant of it. Mid-size vessels are also a lot more practical in game here...)

Oh, and if you want to earn a couple DBs - I have a long forgotten LDD WIP that I'll probably never finish on my own, so if you want to try to finish it to sell it to me PM me 

Oh! From a different angle the tile look much better! And I gotta say, I really like your stern!

 

The slopes next to the gun ports... I was going for a Imperial Flagship look, but it didn't quite work out... after I did it though I just decided to commit to it... probably not one of my better choices... right along with the barber poll color scheme as well...

Changing the curve towards the stern will be easy to fix. 

No need to apologize about the stern! It does indeed look pretty bad at the moment... That shouldn't be a to difficult to fix though.

I will admit it is a pretty ambitious project. Smaller vessels are quite a bit easier to build but I do like a challenge. My original goal was to have a couple of behemoths in reserve until I can afford them or perhaps sell them to my faction as needed. While not the most practical ships, no one would consider attacking you in it!

[Roadmonkeytj]

@Legostone  do you think you could give a couple broke down shots of the side ... I still have five complete small hulls to build on and I really like this technique better than the seabus adaptation im currently using 

[Bart]

@LM71Blackbird It's already better, but if you don't mind me saying, now it looks like the middle is sagging. I always think of the bow and stern curving up, instead of the middle down. with the curve become stronger towards the ends. 

You can see that in @Legostone his vessels above, which are all fine vessels btw!. 
I'd ditch the IFS style gunports. I think your ship is to big for that. 

Pov-ray I'll look in to that. but weeks rendering o.O 

[LM71Blackbird]

2 hours ago, Bart said:

@LM71Blackbird It's already better, but if you don't mind me saying, now it looks like the middle is sagging. I always think of the bow and stern curving up, instead of the middle down. with the curve become stronger towards the ends. 

You can see that in @Legostone his vessels above, which are all fine vessels btw!. 
I'd ditch the IFS style gunports. I think your ship is to big for that. 

Pov-ray I'll look in to that. but weeks rendering o.O 

Ok, well at least there's progress! Yes, I thought the IFS style gunports would look good, but it was a bad design choice on my part. I will fix that before I post more Wip photos.

Yeah, you'll need Pov-ray and another program called LDD to Pov-ray converter. There are tons of tutorials online you can checkout to help.

Here are the links to check them out:

LDD to Pov-ray convertor: http://ldd2povray.lddtools.com/

Pov-ray: http://www.povray.org/

[Bart]

I'm just gonna drop this here. To force myself to finish it. I've titeled the ldd document "dispatch runner" so a fast but small ship.
Probably going to be cutter rigged. 
If anyone has a valid technique, I can steal uhm learn from, of making 1,5 stud diameter masts that'd be fantastic. 

And yes te use of the curved pieces in the bow is inspired by others here. 

Haven't gotten around to acquiring pov-ray. It doesn't want to download over my internet connection. So I'll make do on the water part of the other moc which is slowly taking shape and being filled in. 

[Legostone]

@Bart looks good so far! i've found that masts that are to thin usually look better then to thick masts. You can get slightly different thickness by using the round technic connectors for the supposedly thicker part and axles or axle connectors for the thinner parts. Also don't forget to change the colour of the internal parts that are visible through gaps 

[Legostone]

Slowly progressing on my Brig. I need to pick up a couple more technic axles (the royal sails would be the wrong ship as of now, and I'm not quite sure about the topgallants, those might be a bit too wide as well), some parts to connect some other parts of the rigging and some string - but in general I'm slowly getting there. With a bit of luck I'll have it done towards the weekend 

[Bodi]

@Legostone Another fine ship from you, that sort to lateral cover looks good here, it hasn't widened the hull too much and the overall shape is well proportionned for its length. I really like your masts.

[Bart]

@Legostone, you are right a one stud mast looks good enough, and with all the lines and stuff on it it will look just right.

I like the lashing with the technical ring parts for the big fore stays. I've used that technique also on a small build, on the side stays, and you can easily tighten it way to much, so be carefull.

[Legostone]

On 2/25/2018 at 1:58 AM, Roadmonkeytj said:

@Legostone  do you think you could give a couple broke down shots of the side ... I still have five complete small hulls to build on and I really like this technique better than the seabus adaptation im currently using 

Well, there isn't much to this technique - its just tiles snotted to the side of the hull. If you need more pics tell me ;)

Also another note that I wasn't the first one to do this; see Captain Green Hairs example:

15 hours ago, Bodi said:

@Legostone Another fine ship from you, that sort to lateral cover looks good here, it hasn't widened the hull too much and the overall shape is well proportionned for its length. I really like your masts.

Thanks!

13 hours ago, Bart said:

@Legostone, you are right a one stud mast looks good enough, and with all the lines and stuff on it it will look just right.

I like the lashing with the technical ring parts for the big fore stays. I've used that technique also on a small build, on the side stays, and you can easily tighten it way to much, so be carefull.

Great! The technic rings are there so I can take off the masts for transport  Should take about 2 minutes to take the masts off or install them again 

 

Oh, short rigging strength test:

(sorry, the video is quite bad, but I think you can see how solid it is )

 

Edit: Rigging is solid, time to start on the sails:

Lots of stuff still missing, might bother with ratlines (I would just do them on the lowest of the stays where they are the most obvious). Next step will be taking the sails back off (they are only taped on right now to see if they would fit), flattening them (they are quite wrinkled right now, I would like to change that again) and paint some lines on them.