The particle effect results

Well first up I sent a link to the wrong tutorial, FumeFx is an add on program so I had to use the Maya fluids tutorial instead, and what a fun time that was.

I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand the explosion does look really good as you can see...

however when you have done the explosion the Maya view port becomes completely unusable, so either I make the ship, add the modifier to bend the ship and then add the explosion after and hope it goes well as editing it afterwards will be damn near impossible or I give up on the nice looking explosion and go for something more reliable that won't break my new computer.

Hmmmm,..decisions decisions.

Particle effects

Surprisingly there doesn't seem to be many tutorials, well decent tutorials for creating explosions anyway but I did find one which I think will be effective. It is based of a fuel explosion so it might be better for after the torpedo has hit and has ignited fuel stores and maybe the munitions but still it's a start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddabUUvZqUA

A little late concept art

Well I never said I was good at concept art but here is some anyway. Blogger decided to load the top one at a weird angle and I can't change that annoyingly but that was just 2 ideas for the wreck. The bottom one is an idea for the new diorama, a frigate escorting some civilian ships when it comes under attack by a submarine. If my research into particle effects proves fruitless or doesn't look as good as I want it too then I can make a little wave of a torpedo as it heads towards the frigate and a periscope.

Maybe even create the ships and the submarine under the water so the viewer can see above and below the waterline.

Another direction to take it

So after some consultation and a quick re think my original idea seems to not have focus and the rocks look unnatural which is fair enough, they don't. I seem to have 2 options. One, I can carry on with my current diorama but add a focus to it and get rid of the rocks. For that I would add an exploratory submarine to investigate the wreck and I would have a high powered light focusing on part of the ship which I think would give the diorama a sense of focus especially if the rest of it was slightly darkened so whatever was in the light was the main focus.

The second idea was to have a diorama of a ship mid explosion. This will be the most interesting but also the hardest to model the damage accurately and  I will need to learn how to do explosion particle effects to make the diorama really something special. I have looked through a lot of dioramas and have never seen a ship mid explosion. If I can pull it off then I would guess that mine would be the first mid explosion diorama around. If I am going to make this diorama then I will still finish the wreckage diorama as a back up, no point wasting it.

I do have my reservations about this new direction though as it seems all I have to do is create a ship, add a bend modifier to bend the ship slightly and add a large particle effect. If the particle effect is big enough I might not even need to damage the ship, simply cover up the 'damaged' areas so it wouldn't even need to be modelled. If the the effect isn't big enough then I will add damaged

An aquarium

I managed to get my dad to take me to Matlock to see a little aquarium so I could get reference images and hopefully some texture shots too however taking shots through a glass tank is not easy so the shots are....well hit and miss really

Some more progress

I've added some marine life to the scene because underwater areas look a little strange without any life in it and I also tried to edit the back of the front section of the ship to make it look like an internal explosion ripped the top deck open like a can, it isn't great but it's a start and helps get my point across so I can edit it later to look better.

Eel's are cute :3

Wildlife

So I added some more fish and some sting rays to the scene to make it look a bit better :D

(The normal maps on the UV spacing texture was an accident and I can;t get rid of it, that's why everything with the spacing texture also has a rock normal map on it.)

Getting closer

So the current poly count is at 3503, which I'm really pleased with as I didn't set a poly count limit because I always try to do low poly stuff anyway. When I'm modeling I naturally merge vertex's and delete faces when they're not needed so that's worked in my favor and yes I know the normal map is a bit wrong. I'm hoping I might be able to get away with it, like it will look good anyway but if not I'm going to have to do an interesting fix to it :/

Other peoples model wrecks

I can't find a poly count for this but the guy used Max, Zbrush, xNormals, UV layout, Crazybump and Photoshop

 






http://www.scapaflowwrecks.com/

The website is amazing, it basically is a divers website and it has 7 full 3D real life wrecks that you can rotate around in full 360 and also has photo reference for certain areas of the real wreck. I love this site :)