Group project

It's been awhile since I posted but, here goes.

My introductory 3D Modeling class is working on a group project.  We're building a little island outpost.  The aesthetic will be a mix of feudal Japanese (think Edo Period) and high tech.  It's intended to be a little run down near the docks but there will be a Japanese style castle at the top where the island's rulers live.  Everyone was initially assigned different materials to contribute to our material bank and an object which will be scattered around the scene.  I drew canvas as my material and sacks as the object.  I figured they'd be big sacks like one would see for potatoes or coffee.  I put a simple burlap texture on them.

There's a purple blob in the sack that someone can use to add the texture of the contents.

So far, so good.

Next, we had assets to build.  Streetlights, cafe's, the castle, things like that.  I got assigned an airship to be floating above the harbor.  I decided to build it like a boat but with sci-fi elements.  I used simple box-modeling to create my boat.

 It took a day and a night to get this done.  Overall, though, I think it turned out pretty well.  My professor showed me a way to make the shape a bit less smoothed.  I really wanted some sharper angles above the waterline.  When I got home and tried it, though, I was unable to find the buttons that let me control that.  Still, the whole thing came in at less than 1200 polys!  Our budget was 3000, So I could have gone into even more detail.

The anchors were a pretty involved box-model

The engine

I hadn't realized it would look so much like the ship from Disney's "Treasure Planet".  WHOOPS!

Next, I had to texture the boat.  In keeping with the assignment, I chose textures provided by my classmates.  Different colored woods, 2 types of metal, solar panels, and a corrugated tin roof texture.  I tried to mix different wood textures on different polygons on the hull to give it an old and frequently patched look.

The darker wood on the hull didn't work as distinct panels.  It all tried to map as one continuous texture.  Never figured out how to change that.  When I added individual panels of dark wood, it just mapped to match the rest of the panels.

 I added a simple dark gray color that wasn't in our bank of provided textures for the engine nozzle and struts connecting it to the hull.  It came out as one gray blob in the screenshot.  It will probably be better defined after lighting is added to the scene.

The deck is a little too far below the side railings in comparison to the scale of the ship.  The thing is supposed to be about 60-65 meters long.  I used the old sailing ship U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) as my reference for scale.  I meant it to be a small freighter, but it looks like it could be a fishing vessel, too.  I named her the Seion Maru.  "Seion" is a Japanese word meaning "serenity".  A nod to the Firefly Class Transport ship Serenity from the unjustly canceled TV show Firefly.  "Maru" is an old Japanese ship naming convention.  It means "circle" as in circle of protection.  It's a word often tacked on to the end of the names of civilian Japanese ships and boats.

I was running out of time to get to class, so I gave up trying to get my textures exactly the way I wanted and just decided to render.  The render, however, didn't work at all.  The images you see above are all screenshots.  Here are the renders.  No lighting, though.  Just simple, basic renders.

WHAT THE...

What a disaster!

I have absolutely no idea what happened here.  I'm going to email my professor to see if he can shed some light on the problem.  In the meantime I uploaded both the textured and untextured versions of my ship to the shared file the class is using.  We'll see if this mess is fixable.