HMS Sovereign of the Seas - Bashing DeAgostini Beyond Believable Boundaries

Setting up a collage of objects and then merging them into one object is quite a lot of work. I could not get all the objects merged together using the boolean "union" function without major crashes for the past two days. This was because there were so many errors and holes in the polygon meshes that Blender would crash. After learning a lot about how to clean up non-manifold polygons, and manual elimination of holes and other errors, the mesh was finally united into one object. Previous objects will also have to be cleaned up. So far, the use of other modeler's objects has led to hours of cleanup. When I get better on modeling using the tools in Blender, I will rely less on other's objects to start with and make my own from scratch.
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I took a mermaid tail object off the internet and have bent it into the shape of a sea monsters tail. A lion's head will be reformed to make the monster's head later.

You can see the tail adjacent to the sea monster figure. Once the monster object is finished, it will be mirrored to make the monster on the other side of the panel.
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Up close, you can see the bones that make up the skeleton have been made visible. They are one of the many modeling tools in Blender. Each bone poses and bends the tail into the desired pose. These bones are invisible and inside the tail. It only took ten minutes after watching a short YouTube video to learn how to do this. One more small step in the learning process...
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I also model everything I need for my Victory in Blender, but these are usually simpler elements. I haven't gotten to the decorations yet. And honestly, I take my hat off to your craftsmanship... I wish I could learn sculpting like that.
 
A lion head object was downloaded from the internet, and using the sculpting tools, the entire face was transformed into the sea monster. The monster head was joined to the tail, and the entire object mirrored to create the left side sea monster. This object was a great tutorial for me in using bones to pose parts of a mesh object. The sea monster skeleton will be posed into different tail positions for other instances of this icon on the model in different decoration panel areas.

Payne's engraving
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Sea Monster models, right and left
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Maarten said:
Hi Kurt,

Amazing work you are doing.
The seamonsters are actually dolphins, or are least the way they depicts these in 17th century and are very frequently seen on 17th century ships.

See below some original contemporary dolphins from this era.
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Click to expand...
No kidding! They didn't look like dolphins to me... Well, I got pretty close.1728901629271.png
 
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guess the movie I would say.
But what is it? is it a fish? In my eyes not a dolphin. Looks like a fish from Duckburg
 
Steef66 said:
View attachment 477406

guess the movie I would say.
But what is it? is it a fish? In my eyes not a dolphin. Looks like a fish from Duckburg
Click to expand...
Ben-Hur. A truly great movie. The dolphins were used to count the chariot laps in the Circus Maximus.

These things were really cool.
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And this sea battle was AWESOME!
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Work has begun on the next panel, which depicts a globe with some sort of vine background, bracketed by baroque style dolphins.

Two background images are used here. The blurry one is a high resolution scan of the Payne engraving. The sharper section is taken from a super-high resolution scan (7,746 x 5,578 pixels) of the engraving which is 210 mB (22,471 x 16,329 pixels). It is superimposed over the larger image. The reason I only use a small square from that image is that loading it would take up too much memory, leaving too little for Blender to model with. The difference between the images is quite noticeable.
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The background vine decoration is just outlined thus far. It will be shaped and textured later. In the Payne engraving, the surface of this decor is flat as it appears now. The engraving could not provide more detail at this small scale.
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