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Big Boy. Here is a quick update to the Atago. I did a quick render with one of the Japanese destroyers to give a sense of scale.

‘nother ship underway. This is an Atago Class heavy cruiser. It’s still in the early stages, but I’m hoping to have it done this weekend.

No cords. A new version of Lightwave was released this week, so I thought I’d play around with it by making my Fender Stratocaster. I’m also trying out a technique I’ve haven’t really tried before called spline patching. It’s working so far, but I have made many mistakes. One thing I need to remember for the next model is to plan out my splines better. Ah, lessons learned.

Periscope off the port bow! Okay, I’m just playing around here. I finished modeling my John C. Butler Class Destroyer Escort today.  Then I thought I’d throw my two US destroyers into Vue 5 (which does scenery) for a quick render.  Only spent about 10 minutes setting this up, and neither ship is textured, so overall not a very good render. However, considering the time spent on it, this turned out better than I thought it would.  If I actually knew how to use Vue 5 (this being my first usage of the program) I think I could produce a pretty realistic looking scene (with textured ships of course).

B5. Here is another ship I’m working on. It’s a much smaller cousin to the Fletcher Class destroyer. However, it does share many elements that I could borrow from that ship. I should have this finished over the next couple of days.

Puzzle. Minor update. I combined the renders and it reminds me of a ‘find the differences’ puzzle. Can you find the differences?

Mo’ Ships. This has been one long weekend. Below are three classes of WWII Japanese Destroyers (Shimakaze, Yugumo, and Kagero Classes).  They are all based on similar hull designs of varying length. The Shimakaze was much longer and had more fire power because of it (more torpedoes and bigger AA guns, etc.).  The Yugumo and Kagero were near identical (only minor differences), though the Yugumo was 10 or so feet longer.  Now you would think that building three similarly designed ships would be just about as fast as building one. Well, maybe it is for professionals, but I’m spending a lot of time on the differences so it’s still taking me forever. I guess I feel that if these are different classes of ship then the minor differences should be there and not take the easy route of stretching a Kagero 10 feet and calling it a Yugumo.  Overall it is taking less time than building 3 standalone ships as many features are identical between all three ships (just maybe not in the exact same location).  Anyway, enough of that, here are some renders:

Img1 = Kagero Class
Img2 = Shimakaze Class (IJN Shimakaze – only one of these was ever made)
Img3 = Yugumo Class

And now, for something completely different! I started this ages ago, so I thought I’d drag it out. I’ve added some detail since my first posting of this, but really still a long way to go on this. It’s really kind of amazing for me to look at this model. I started this during the first quarter of school about a year ago and when I look at it now I can see so many mistakes. I’m not saying I’m an expert now, but goodness, I used some really rookie techniques in this thing. With that said, I’m not planning on reworking what I had already completed.

[Clang], [clang], [clang]! Much further along, but still a long way to go:

Bearing zero-nine-zero. Here is a quick update to the destroyer. It’s coming along nicely, but still needs quite a bit of work.