Ancient Roman trade ship -- need sails help

[agamemnus]

So.... I am still working slowly on my Roman trading ship. Except for the rigging/tackling and sails, I have nearly everything finished.

I am looking for someone to help me finish my model, either with suggestions or direct modeling. Does anyone have any suggestions/offers of help on sail and rope construction?

Some more info:
This ship length is about 47m, so it is on the larger end of the ships of the time, something like a grain ship going between Rome and Egypt. Most trade ships were between 10-20 meters.

The hull isn't curved (like most designs/mosaics) and the oar control mechanism is speculative. I still need to add a few minor details on the ship (individual supporting planks on the deck sides and a lower wooden support system for the rudders), but it's ready to receive tackling and sails.

The current parts are exact/precise and geometrically detailed, which is very important to me. I am designing this ship to act as a complete model for a much more simplified ship model. The simplified model will be in a game about the Roman Empire I am making, for which I will post more details about later.



Edit 2: I decided to remove the ship model and post some screenshots instead. If you want to look at it I will pm you a link.

Edit 3: Finished details and did some more tweaking -- see last 2 pictures.

[dale]

Do you have a graphic of the sails and rigging you can post. That way we can get an idea about what will be involved to model it.
Cheers

[solo]

As Dale suggested, show us an image of how you would like the sails and we can help you from there.

[agamemnus]

Here are a few images I found on the internet. They are all a bit different... the first two don't seem too great. The last one is fairly accurate I think. (edit: except that it's about 3-5 times smaller than my ship)

[olishea]

TIG's extrude tools would be perfect here....or perhaps curviloft

[agamemnus]

I guess the sails themselves aren't a big issue.

The ropes are harder. Ideally, I need to be able to easily set/modify the curve along the red and green planes whilst keeping the whole thing a cylinder/tube -- perhaps 3, 4, 5-sided.

[Gaieus]

Cool project, Agamemnus. For the sails, I would also suggest TIG's tools. Before those, I used to use SoapSkin and Bubble but TIG's are great for this now.

What's the issue with the ropes? With some arcs (or maybe beziers) they should not be a problem.

(I am extremely interested both in the model - although currently I have so much to do that it would only be a teaser to have a closer look - and the Roman game you are working with so - maybe in a different topic - you could tell more)

[charly2008]

Hi,

The first time I made the sails with Curviloft.

Charly

[agamemnus]

charly -- how did you make the ropes, especially the curved part around the wood plank thingoes?

Gaieus -- might post about my game later this week. I'll send you the model link. Beware though... the ship should really be slightly curved and it is probably way bigger than it was historically, thus necessitating the entirely theoretical and probably incorrect rudder control system.

[liam887]

charly -- how did you make the ropes, especially the curved part around the wood plank thingoes?

Follow me tool would be an easy way for the ropes following a helical path? thats what I would do anyway I guess.

[charly2008]

Hi Liam and Agamemnus,

the ropes are not perfect. At first i made a spiral and some copies (DrawHelix1.4) and scaled it and than i used Tube along path.

Charly

[agamemnus]

Sails and masts more or less done (used curviloft for sails, very informative icons and easy to use!). Took some shortcuts... I duplicated and resized the main sail and beam to create the front sail and beam. No rope, either... it was tiring enough to make the sails, masts, and beams...

Now I need to convert 17429 faces into perhaps 1700 faces at most.

Edit: with the bigger sails, complete fantasy has (probably taken over). At current measurements, the main sail is 12.8m high and 16m long. The main mast is 20m high and starts at a width of .76m, ending (at the mast "cap") at .34m. The ship itself is 47.5m long. (not counting the front sail and masts)

[gistman]

Those sails are looking pretty good. I found this piece of software (I think it was this one...) years ago before there were plugins like curviloft. I messed around with it some and made some very sexy shapes and at that time, SUv4 or 5 was slow importing very high poly .dxf's.

http://www.sailcut.com/Sailcut_CAD

[agamemnus]

I think perhaps they are slightly too small.... I increased the main sail size by about 10% width/height/depth... updating the images as we speak.