The Ship Model Forum

I've had a few problems getting Cycles to kick out the same render quality as Yafaray. After some thought I decided to bite the bullet and purchased a copy of Octane Renderer. It's only 99 euros, but for me that is a planned-for expense .

Early results are looking promising.

Cool! When you get familiar with it, I'd like to hear what you think about Octane, and how you set up your renders with it. It sounds sweet!

Cheers,
Dean

Its a GPU accelerated renderer. You export your .obj with your textures and hit render. You can assign mesh lights and transparency and it has a few nice pre-made textures (a good brass is one). The lighting response is much nicer. I could probably have gotten the same results out of Cycles, but it was taking forever to get a decent result and Octane is pretty much nicer and faster.

Owen

As an aside, I've been doing some research for a writing project and came across something I didn't know about the Canonicus class monitors. At initial design, the turret was to have been located further aft, more centered like the Passaic and Monitor. During initial design and test builds, though, they added larger engines and more armor, which changed the center of gravity of the ships, so the turrets were moved forward as a counter balance.

I've yet to find any drawings of the anchor handling systems for these ships, though. It has me baffled!

I've gone back to my refs and on the plans by Adm. Peterkin, it shows the anchors where I placed them. I'm not allowed to re-post them for copyright reasons, but anyone else who has the plans should be able to back that up. On the interior shell diagrams, it shows that the windlass room is aft of the most forward cabin, which would make it difficult to have the anchors in the same configuration as the Passaic and original Monitor.

For those who don't have a copy of the plans, you can check within the 'Shipwreck Management Plan' PDF you can see that the Windlass room is back from the prow. Also, on Page 29, there is a conceptual sketch of the ship in a proposed visitors centre (a tad heartbreaking that ). On that diagram, you can see that the anchors are placed in the same position as on the model.

I hope that's cleared up a few points.

Owen

Yeah, I'm still not 100% sure. I agree that the anchor room is further aft, and that there was a covered run on the deck for it on the starboard side, but I still don't know where the chain/hawser exited that run; below the waterline doesn't make sense as they'd proved that to be less than ideal with Monitor and the Passaics, but with a definitive photo or drawing would go a long way towards convincing me. Two photos below give a little more info, but honestly bring up more questions (click link for access to large photos on Flickr)

Foreground bow detail of USS Saugus: In the foreground on the left (the starboard side of the ship) is the covered chain/hawser run. But what is that on the right next to it? An uncovered run?

Same area on Saugus, from off-ship: I wish the log boom for the torpedo rake wasn't there in this shot. There's some sort of chain going over the side here, not sure if it's the main anchor chain or just a handling feed. One interesting detail is the depth numbers on theside of the hull.

USS Mahopac: this one clearly shows the large anchor chain draped over the hull side.

I've gone by the plans I've got. From what I've got in front of me, I think that this is how it was. If someone can provide some evidence to change that, I will happily listen.

Got some more work done with Cycles. I love Octane, but I'm having fun and games getting a 'pipeline' established for regular workflow. On a project like this that has evolved over a fair bit of time, every time you export an obj, you have to re-noodle all your textures, which is a pain in the nads.

I've got a preliminary exporter that seems to hold promise so I'm still rooting for it. There is an 'official' exporter that I will snarf up as a present to myself when I think I've got somewhere doing this stuff.

Here is the latest render in Cycles. It's got a lot of post-pro on board.

I've fixed some links that Photobucket trashed.

Here are some later renders.

Anyone still working USS Tecumseh - AWC monitor history/information?

Wilson

Not as far as I'm aware.

I was going to do a project where I animated some scenes from the Battle of Mobile Bay, but there was no interest so I moved onto other things.

Since I did this model, there was some information that the Tecumseh had a white turret rather than a black one. I did some renders for the animation project accordingly.

Said renders and link to the animation project preview included.

There's a new book out about her, by someone that dove on the wreck. I picked it up last week, but have yet to really look at it.

My plan is to do a printable 3D model of her at some point, but I haven't really decided on scale or done any drawing yet.

-Devin