Shipbuilding
Modeling a Ship in Alias|Wavefront's Maya 2.0
By
Carsten Lind
Email: caligraphics@get2net.dk
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One crucial thing to do before modeling is to do research. I searched the web and found images of cruise ships. If you don't do the research, you might miss important things that will make the model believable. After studying
the images of the cruise ships carefully, I roughly sketched the
basic shape of the ship in Maya using curves. These curves will
then serve as a guideline when modeling the ship. I
also applied all the curves to their own layer, so I can turn
them all off at once when evaluating the model. The
hull of the ship was made by using Maya's birail function to sweep
curves along two rail curves to get one side of the hull. The
hull surface was then mirrored to get the complete hull. (Figure
1) |
 Figure 1 |
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I then build the front deck, by lofting the top curves from the hull. The passenger's cabin decks were then created by duplicating curves from the geometry of the hull and lofting them. This ensured continuity of the surface. To get the
lower deck (the cutout in the side of the hull) I projected the
shape of the lower deck onto the hull surfaces and trimmed away
the holes. (Figure 2) |
 Figure 2 |
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A lofted surface from the trim curves on the hull, was created from left side hull to the right side hull. I inserted a cylinder as a banister and duplicated it, running inside the lower deck side, to get some easy, yet effective detail on the lower deck. The chimney was created from a couple of lofted curves. The bridge is an extrusion of a triangular shaped curve along one isoparm taken from the front of the upper cabin decks. I added a few cylinders, serving as antennas and created a lifeboat from a hemisphere. The support for the lifeboat was made by extruding a circle along a curve. The lifeboat
sections were then duplicated and placed along the side of the
ship's different decks. The
anchor opening in the front of the hull was made by projecting
two rectangles with rounded corners on the hull surface and trimming
away the holes. (Figure 3) |
 Figure 3 |
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I also placed a few boxes and cylinders randomly on the surfaces to get the kind of "hey we are humans" look on the ship. As always, when creating 3D i'ts important to add some randomness to avoid the "perfect symmetry syndrome" which makes a model unbelievable. Always take a look at your researched material and take notice of the little things such as small boxes, and litter and used sodacans and add those to get more realism into your model. Texturing |
 Figure 4 |
| This is the
final texture that was assigned as a planar projection as a color
map. (Figure 5) |
 Figure 5 |
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When creating the texture, make sure that the texture is cropped to fit the bounds of the ship -- this makes the alignment of the texture a lot easier in Maya. Just press the 'Fit to bounding box' button in the attribute editor on the projection node. Here you can see the texture applied to the surfaces. (Figure 6) |
 Figure 6 |
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The same texturing creation method will be used for the front of the top deck. I created
the bump map for the windows from the same file I used for the
colored texture. This is the greyscale bump map file. (Figure
7) |
 Figure 7 |
| I connected
the bump to the shading network and reused as many of the network
nodes as possible. Here you can see the shading network for the shader. (Figure 8) |
 Figure 8 |
| The rendered
image with the bump map applied. (Figure 9) I find it very
important not to exaggerate bump maps. This is a common error made
by quite a few artists. The
bump map was adjusted using IPR rendering, which enables you to
see your adjustments immediately. |
Figure 9 |
| Slowly, more and more textures are being applied. (Figure 10) The chimney now has a decal and the front deck now has a wooden texture applied (it's going to be adjusted, though). I am going to place some railings on the edges of the decks and behind the chimney there will be a pool. But more on this later. |  Figure 10 |
| This image was created to present the model for the client. (Figure 11) It had to indicate that the ship was "under construction" and I added the scaffolding. |  Figure 11 |
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I have cut
the rear end of the ship to get a more irregular shape. I drew a line, describing the shape of the cut. Duplictated the curve and lofted a surface between them. The new surface was intersected with the surfaces of the rear end of the ship and then trimmed. |
 Figure 12 |
| The texture
for the bridge of the ship was all made in Maya. As you can see
in this image of the shading network, it required quite a few nodes. (Figure 13) |
 Figure 13 |
| Here you can see the result of the texturing of the bridge. (Figure 14) |  Figure 14 |
| The Virgin
Trip! Just for the fun of it, I added the sea, and applied a sea shader I already had, just to see how it looked. I don't know who made this sea shader, but it's great! (Figure 15) |
 Figure 15 |
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First of all, I wanted to have the windows as a color map. For this I used the grid texture which was applied to the color node. Then I duplicated the grid node network and applied it to the incandessence connection on the shader. This gave my shader a brighter look on the white parts on the windows. Finally,
I created an environment sky node and connected it to the black
color of the incandessence grid node to get a kind of reflection
of a sky on the black parts of the windows. |
 Figure 16 |
|
The water
level was adjusted a little and the shader with the windows was
applied a little reflection. Notice how the water surface reflects
slightly on the hull. I
also added some more antennas. |
 Figure 17 |
| I added railing and changed the texture of the front deck. (Figure 18) |  Figure 18 |
| Carsten Lind's studio, Caligraphics, is based in Denmark. Visit the Web site at http://hjem.get2net.dk/caligraphics | |
| Images are Copyright of Carsten Lind and Jubii A/S and may not be used or reproduced without prior concent of Carsten Lind or Jubii A/S Kind Regards Carsten Lind, 1999 | |