Gold: Boat Modeling

For Project Gold the protagonist's journey starts on a vast ocean navigating on a boat. For this particular asset, the team spent many hours researching, designing and iterating before making it to the screen. This article highlights a few aspects of this process.

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Reference

The boat in question is the Pen Duick that is associated with Éric Tabarly, a famous French sailor and owner who won numerous prizes during racing competitions. He modified and redesigned the boat based of the original design by William Fife III junior, a Scottish architect.

Many images of the rigging (the metal and wooden elements, including the rope forming the mechanical control of the boat) were researched and taken into account in the final design. We reached out to his daughter – Marie Tabarly – and made adjustments to the rigging to make it possible for a single person to operate the vessel. Such changes were the replacement of the tiller to a steering wheel, and adjustments to the operability for a single person.

Florent Masurel, our project Production Designer, created beautiful painted details and overviews of the boat. The team and Florent worked together to develop the model for the boat. The nice thing was that Florent would create annotations or simple 3D mockups in the modeling file for faster feedback.

When looking for reference we stumbled upon a forum of model boat builders showing their progress (images). This informed me about the curvature of the boat and smaller details of the rigging. This was also a good way to compare various levels of complexity and variance between models, the same counts for the reference images.

For the rigging of the boat, older sketches and diagrams were used to compare reference images and standard practices. We also consulted various team members who have experience with sailing.

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Modeling

The initial setup of the boat was trying to match the proportions and shape of the hull. By using simple shapes to blockout the main masts and elements of the boat enables more flexibility. Some adjustments were:

• The width and amount of deck (wooden) -boards are lowered and simplified
• More ornamental curving surfaces were added around the bridge to remove straight lines
• Complexity and length of ropes
• Lowered frequency detail at the front of the boat since the layout (camera) was mostly around the bridge
• Excluding very tiny details like small screws, nails and such

Instances

Since most of the rigging like the wooden blocks, shackles, chocks are needed everywhere on the boat, it is more efficient to create a dedicated section with collections that are instanced. For smaller adjustments to certain instances, like the size of a metal loop, other elements that didn't need unique mesh data were re-used (instances within instances). Changes to the original are propagated to each object and it is more memory efficient.

Creating the boat

The most enjoyable elements to model were the smaller details of the living quarters and smaller bits and bobs of the rigging. The most tedious task was getting a clean curvature of the boat’s edges and hull. The ornamental piece on the side of the hull required more attention than anticipated. Other elements that were tricky to get right were the row of boards on the deck and hull, more so for the hull. Which took careful placement of the flow of the boards by using the same setup as the deck boards.

By using a plane with Solidify, EdgeSplit, Bevel and SubdivisionSurface modifiers allowed for a non-destructive workflow. The original setup also had a Shrinkwrap modifier to avoid warping or inconsistencies.

When presenting a new version we would render the boat in the modeling file from different angles and assemble the angles in the VSE. By adding a new Scene strip and selecting the correct camera allows a fast and flexible way of presenting multiple version throughout the process.

During one of the iterations we made the decision to change the design of the main sail. It is impossible to collapse the main sail compared to a real functional boat, some people might have noticed this! The final design is simpler and takes less time to finalize.

At various places around the boat, a small detail pass is added by using bevels to create a more worn and lived-in look.

Geometry Nodes

Some Geometry Nodes were used for modeling which were the ropes (curves) and the life line, that is the safety line at the edges going from the front to the back. The rope setup was later replaced by Simon Thommes to add the brush strokes.

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Completing the model

After finalizing the modeling, we added a UV pass based on the requirements from Shading. Since a lot of smaller details in the model were instanced it is quite a bit faster to complete unwrapping. Objects that are similar or logical to group together were unwrapped into one UV map, like the sails. To track which objects are unwrapped I usually add a check mark using the annotation tool.

Modeling the boat was interesting, it has its own design principles that we took into consideration and adapted to our own needs.

Download the Boat used in Gold.

Thanks again to Florent Masurel