Another preview and your chance to name a ship or boat!
It's been a month, time to tease you a bit more! :D
The mesh is done and I'm almost finished with the texture (there's also a red-black alternative). I ended up completely redoing the mapping to squeeze out every bit of usable space on the textures. As you can see I also made an alternative mesh with the cranes up, ready for travel. The polycount is around 7000 for this and 7600 for the one with extra cargo bits. Think you can spare another 1000 for two anchors? Big ships always have two, and I feel like something's missing without them. There's still some space on the texture that I could use.
Of course one ship alone is kind of boring, you also need a place where it can dock and a tugboat to help. :D Criquette's embankment is a bit too short to get the ships close enough (at least the version that has the unloading crane beyond the railing), so this dock piece is longer. I'll make several sizes and also plan to do one with those cranes on rails. Now, there's one problem: I cloned a rock and that comes with a bumpmap, so I tried my luck with that. But I don't see any difference. I made sure I have bumpmaps enabled with the test outfit from MTS. On the other hand, I can't see any effect on the original rocks, either. Maybe it was never actually enabled for neighbourhood deco, wouldn't surprise me. So, here's a test file for you: download test dock
You'll find it in the Misc. category and for some reason it's all the way back in the catalog. If the bumpmap effect doesn't work for anyone I can remove that part and make the file smaller.
I spent a few days searching through the web for free meshes and found quite a selection! :D Most probably more than I'll be able to finish, but maybe one of you wants to try their hands on one of these?
Most of them came without a texture, obviously. Some are 10k and below, others around 35k. The highest is near 60k which seems to be around the limit before glitches appear. Some have missing parts, but most would only need their polycount reduced. There's a lot of potential to do that, like very round ropes and railings. It's just a question of how much time you/I want to spend on it.
I have a handful more boats with higher polycount than the game can display, these two are my favourites:
96k
134k (This one has meshed riveting! That's one thing for quick polycount reduction, for example.)
Anyone willing to lend a hand with this project? I already did the scaling.
And now for the names! That "Nordic" on the cargo ship is not final, it was cut off on the texture I used and I think I'll use simlish letters, but which names should I use for this ship and eventually the smaller boats, too? I already have Jenny and Marla on my list (both film references ;) ).