HMS Sovereign of the Seas - Bashing DeAgostini Beyond Believable Boundaries

@WojtasS has been helping me with some advice in making printable 3D objects in Blender 3D. Thanks to him, some new methods to detet errors in the 3D objects were learned.

I loaded some of the militia item panel 3D objects into Chitubox to see if there were any unprintable sections. One object had several problems, so I reconstruted it in Blender from its subcomponents and did not attempt to use the Blender tool "3D Print/Clean/manifold" to this time. That tool has a habit of scrambling sections of a complex object, creating holes and reversing normals on clusters of polygons. As a result, there were more intersecting polygons left behind, but Chitubox can now print the object. It will be some time before my topology is good enough to reduce errors in my 3D objects, but I'm making progress. At least the first few objects appear printable. Only an attempt to print them will reveal if they are successful.

This decoration panel does not contain any dark blue sections, indicating that Chitibox 3D printing software did not detect any unprintable sections of the object. This object had to be reconstructed in Blender until it was printable.
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Well...I have Blender but have yet to do anything with it. Lots of warnings as to the learning curve. I'm thinking of tutorials. Another thing I have been considering is a 3D camera but they're not cheap......I could fashion fittings etc in modelling clay and 3D them with a camera. Just a thought.
 
Well...I have Blender but have yet to do anything with it. Lots of warnings as to the learning curve. I'm thinking of tutorials. Another thing I have been considering is a 3D camera but they're not cheap......I could fashion fittings etc in modelling clay and 3D them with a camera. Just a thought.
That's a three step process, and would take more time for me, so I'm taking the time to learn the software, and things will get faster over time, plus add a lot more detail. I've already been able to do a lot with just the basic tools and techiques. And is one of the objects doesn't print or breaks, I edit it and print another much quicker than making it from scratch again.
 
That's a three step process, and would take more time for me, so I'm taking the time to learn the software, and things will get faster over time, plus add a lot more detail. I've already been able to do a lot with just the basic tools and techiques. And is one of the objects doesn't print or breaks, I edit it and print another much quicker than making it from scratch again.
Resin or FDM? I find resin offers a lot better detail.20240603_123911.jpg
 
Work begins on the crossed cannon barrel militia panel. English cannon barrel models from a variety of ships and cannon makers were downloaded from the Model Ship World forum, and a 32 pounder from John Browne was naturally selected for use in this decoration. The barrels were simplified by converting most triangles to quad polygons, trunnions removed and the holes patched over. Then the barrels were sheared 25 degrees along their length and flattened to appear as carvings, and laid in an X pattern over the background drawing. Rope appears to be lashing the barrels together in Payne's engraving, so here comes the tricky part: making 3D rope using spline curves to route it.

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A bezier curve about 9 sections long (so far) was made. A tri-lobe shape made from three circles was converted into a curve, and this is the pattern which is extruded along the bezier curve rail to make a rope rod, which is then wrapped around the barrels. The red handles (see above) were positioned 180 degrees from one another around the barrels. Each handle has arms which control the curvature of the rope, and these were used to lay the rope onto the surface of the barrels. Up until now, the rope looked like three rods grouped together. The ropes was then twisted by selecting each of the rope handles, and with the CTRL T command and moving the mouse in a circular direction around the cursor on the screen, each of the 9 sections of rope were twisted to approximately the same amount of twist. It's almost like using a rope walk.

Rope cross section tri-lobe shape extruded to make rope.
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To make the rope longer and continue wrapping more rope, the bezier curve is extended by adding another section and control handle using the extrude command. More wraps of rope will be added later. After the rope is done, both curves, the bezier for the rope and the tri-lobe shape, will be convered to a mesh with a simple command. Lots of YouTube videos were harmed in the process of learning this shit. ;) Thumbsup I'll tell you what, doing this is a lot slower than actual rigging!

Results so far.
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The crossed cannons militia panel is complete. Some of the objects within it are guesswork because they are not discernable from the sources that show this decoration. All the 3D models are shown in flat shading and not smooth shaded, because that is how the 3D printer will produce them. The resolution of the model far exceeds what the printer is capable of since the items are so small in scale. They will also be very delicate, and I don't know if the prints will be successful yet or not.
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A polygon base was used to allow the decoration a better glue surface to attack it to the hull and it reduces the polygon count. This was also done on most of the other militia panel decorations. You can see that the cannon barrels are squashed flat and skewed to appear more like a bas relief carving.
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It looks nice in gold.
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Actual size of these panels will be about 30mm.
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any chance on charing these stl files be happy to pay for it , just learning to use blender !
YES. These .STL models will be made available as a group for a very modest price, with exception of those which contain content used from free models found online (those will be lumped in for free). That was the plan from the start. Let's just see if they successfully print first. I am new to Blender 3D also, @maddog harry. The models are getting better and better as I learn new functions in Blender. There are a few other modelers out there who have made decoration .STL files for HMS Sovereign of the Seas, but none who were willing to part with them at any price. Given the amount of time they take to create, that is understandable. It was very disappointing that no options for purchasing accurate decorations based on historic sources for this ship were available anywhere. Releasing my files will provide at least one option, and create a huge timesaver for many other builders of HMS Sovereign of the Seas. The quality of my 3D models will not be high because I am a novice at using Blender, and the topology of the models is pretty bad in some cases. If the early ones print successfully, no more effort on my part will be made to improve them. I leave that to others.

One of the largest problems is eliminating intersecting polygons. I noted that loading my 3D models into Chitubox, using their repair function to eliminate interior polygons, then re-saving them has been useful at removing internal clusters of polygons that boolean functions in Blender could not do. A tiny hole or non-manifold polygon in an object can occasionally cause the boolean functions in Blender to fail, sometimes catastrophically and crashing the program, especially if the computer is low on memory and the object has a high number of polygons.
 
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i really do appreciate that and i know how hard and the amount of work need to eb put into this , but at least you will be providing a upgrade to the models for others to improve and since deagostini stop making the SOS , its only one model now on the market ,
 
it can be a team effort on this others can help am pretty sure
Most modelers prefer to keep their models. There are few who are willing to devote the time to make these models for any price, much less for free. @SZKUTNIK stated that making a full set of decoration models for the Sovereign would take a few years and cost a lot of money, and he is a skilled and experienced modeler. I would have paid any price to save me the time of creating them, but there are no options, so I'm creating them anyway.
 
i feel your pain and its moslty why i started to look into 3d myself and learnto use blender, modeller are a very proud breed i will be working on some of them since i have lots of material to work with and being next to the nmm in greenwich but be aware mackay book is not accurate ok great graphic still
 
YES. These .STL models will be made available as a group for a very modest price, with exception of those which contain content used from free models found online (those will be lumped in for free). That was the plan from the start. Let's just see if they successfully print first. I am new to Blender 3D also, @maddog harry. The models are getting better and better as I learn new functions in Blender. There are a few other modelers out there who have made decoration .STL files for HMS Sovereign of the Seas, but none who were willing to part with them at any price. Given the amount of time they take to create, that is understandable. It was very disappointing that no options for purchasing accurate decorations based on historic sources for this ship were available anywhere. Releasing my files will provide at least one option, and create a huge timesaver for many other builders of HMS Sovereign of the Seas. The quality of my 3D models will not be high because I am a novice at using Blender, and the topology of the models is pretty bad in some cases. If the early ones print successfully, no more effort on my part will be made to improve them. I leave that to others.

One of the largest problems is eliminating intersecting polygons. I noted that loading my 3D models into Chitubox, using their repair function to eliminate interior polygons, then re-saving them has been useful at removing internal clusters of polygons that boolean functions in Blender could not do. A tiny hole or non-manifold polygon in an object can occasionally cause the boolean functions in Blender to fail, sometimes catastrophically and crashing the program, especially if the computer is low on memory and the object has a high number of polygons.
Oh you have so much more patience than I do, well done for sticking with it and hopefully you will look back with satisfaction at the end result.
I hate sitting at a computer trying to create anything even in Microsoft paint so forget about anything more complicated.
 
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