The Search for a Job!

Not put anything up here recently because I've been occupied looking for the ideal job, which I've found and applied for.  It's at Traveller's Tales in Knutsford, which isn't too far from where I live and from the look of it they have a Junior Artist position available; at least it's listed on their website!  So I sent in my application about a week ago now and I'm waiting to hear back from them, I've also been working on a galleon since it's been ages since I've done any interesting modelling.

The light project is on hold for now as I've not had much interest in it and without any income I can't really justify working on it.  I do such projects to try and get peoples attention/inspire other people, but if I don't have a crowd or can't find one then I can't really spend money on it.  I'm going to put my experiment up on YouTube to see if I can find any interest there, but I guess it might be just plain old uninteresting to other people or perhaps there's no true practical purpose for such a technology.  If however I do get interest in the idea, then I'll resume my work on it since I'll be able to justify the expenses I come across in developing such a tool.  It'd be great if I did get the job at Traveller's Tales, that way I wouldn't feel so guilty about spending money without having a way of recovering it!

For now, I'll upload a few pics of the galleon I've been working on, I only just started texturing it yesterday and so it's not fully complete yet.  Took me about 6-8 hours to model and tweak it, consists of 4842 quads / 9434 triangles and has five different UV/texture maps to it.  One for the cannons, one for the ship's hull, one for the sails and one for all the other wooden bits of the ship like the railings.

The above render along with the two lower renders show the ship with plain colours applied.  Two different versions are shown, one with three sails to the stern of the ship and one with two.  I'm still deciding which I like best, but three sails seems to be quite popular amongst the people I've asked.  The ship itself isn't meant to be a perfect representation of a galleon, just something similar to one, I might use it in a game also when I've finished it.  Some simple sailing/pirate game, where you have to go collect different crates bobbing in the water whilst destroying enemy ships.  Who knows!

  

The two lower renders show two screenshots of the ship as it currently looks, I'm just testing out different wood textures right now, like I said the galleon is meant to be a simple representation more than an accurate one and slightly stylized so I'm not going to be putting loads of detail into the textures!

Right now I'm experimenting with decking, I think it's too dark right now so I'll be playing around with lighter planks.  The outside of the ship definitely needs a lot more work on it, still haven't decided the type of wood texture I want to use for it yet, right now I prefer it without any since it looked slightly better as plain colours.  I'll have to mess around with it and see how I can make it look better.

Here are a few more screens of the ship, this time wireframe shots of the cannon, sails and hull.  There are places where I can make the mesh slightly more triangle efficient (you could say tris efficient, instead of tres efficient =D) but I've decided to go against that since it would mean having more pieces of geometry to group together.  Here are the shots!

 

The three different blocks for the cannon base have varying heights, I could separate these and have simple cubes there instead which would take away the edges that cut across the sides to join the geometry into one piece.  However I think it's better to use those few extra tri's to make the base one whole mesh, less faff when moving stuff around in either Maya or a game engine.

The sails for the galleon are also double sided, not to say that they have faces overlapping each other perfectly (I can't stand models that have those), but instead they are thick and don't consits of jsut one poly plane cut into pieces.  I gave them depth to give them a bit more life, I tried using single planes but they looked to thin and didn't suit the rest of the ship.

With the hull of the ship I could actually take the holes for the cannons out and replace them with just a dark rectangle of a dark brown colour, but since I've not really got any limits to my modelling here I thought I would put some holes into the mesh.  From the lower image it looks like the main deck of the ship is just a rectangle, meaning that all of those divisions it has would be pointless, but there is a slight curve to it's side edges meaning that I need those divisions in so that the deck suits the shape of the ship.  If I ever wanted to have more detail on the ship, I would most likely separate the deck's UV map from the galleon's UV map and have two separate texture maps for them both, but right now having them on one suits me fine.

Finally I'll upload the current UV maps for the ship.  I say current because sometimes as I go along and texture something I find that the UV maps aren't efficient enough or something isn't placed right so I need to go and change them!

 Cannon UV Map

  Sails UV Map

Hull UV Map

Wood UV Map

Look-out Posts UV Map

That's it for now, didn't want to leave this blog to get dusty like one or two others I once had!  If you have any questions or are interested in my work please leave a comment here and I'll get back to you!  I'll try and upload more stuff soon, ttfn! =)