Borealis Bow - Status Update

 So today I worked more on the bow of the Borealis. The ship is so large I will split it into sections and it will be a multi-part vessel in Stormworks. Which means the only way to spawn it would be as a mission in the game. Here is a screenshot of the bow, I got the cranes working and I tried my hand at cleaning up the topology and decorating the deck:

As you can see The ship is fairly massive. And that is just the bow. I think I could put several of my smaller boats inside this one and it still float, if the physics didn't glitch out that is... The hull was generated using a 3D model by MoffKalast on Thingiverse: (link to thing verse page). When I generated the hull using that model it was way too large at that time do to the scaling I did, I think I was going off of incorrect measurements too, because I was trying to do a 1:1 scale and I thought I had the correct dimensions. The actual length of the USCGC Healy Icebreaker is about 128m turns out and guess how big the hull is from end to end? 127.25m it's literally .75m short! Being a multipart ship though, I can easily extend it 3 blocks to make up for that. And here I was thinking the ship had to be larger, when in reality it is nearly 1:1 scale, that surprised me a lot when I discovered it not too long ago.

Anyways I generated the hull with the Stormworks hull builder, but the topology was all messed up and I had to fix it, and also with the way the hull builder generates the mesh, the ship was uneven and therefore I had to go through the long tedious process of splitting the entire ship in half, remove one half, duplicating the other, flipping it, and then merging the two pieces together before I could begin the other part, which is of course dividing the ship into multiple sections that way I wouldn't be building the ship at two fps. I split the ship into it's parts consisting of the bow, main superstructure, lower front hull (below main superstructure), amidships hull, amidships superstructure, and stern.

By the end of this project I plan on having a fully detailed ship with interior and I want it to be completely functional. That's a hefty plan, but I am confident it will go relatively smoothly. The most tedious parts I image are going to be the two domes on the amidships superstructure which I can only imagine are supposed to be skylights for some type of greenhouse built-in to the ship, or maybe some observatory, but I think it makes more sense for them to be some type of green house to grow food, the borealis after all was supposed to go through dimensions and stuff so I imagine they were thinking of a way for surviving in harsh environments unlike anything on Earth. The reason those domes are going to be a challenge is because I need to create them out of glass blocks/pyramids which is no easy task. Just imagine trying to make a sphere in Minecraft except you are building in third person and have more variety in types of blocks to use. Not easy in my opinion.

Most of the work above though is fixing topology, small details, making functional cranes, decorating, and of course since I split the ship in-half and mirrored it to get it symmetrical I have to do a little work making sure to fix some of the detailing. Like on the small portion of the superstructure, when I mirrored it, it actually had 4 hoses on it, it only needs two. Basically, everything was copied to the other side and I had to remove some things.

Though the domes on the back are going to be hard, most of my time will probably be spent detailing the interior, creating the rooms, figuring out what to put in said rooms, balancing the number of bedrooms with the size of the ship and figuring out how to put some laboratories on the ship. In my research I have found that the USCGC Healy has five laboratories: Main Lab, Wet Lab, Bio Chem Lab, Electronics Lab, and Meteorological Lab. Aside from trying to fit all those in I will have to figure out what to put in those labs. Like how to come up with decorations for equipment, what equipment is usually in there and maybe set up some computers with data on it.

Anyways I will be moving in about three days down to Florida so I am not sure when I will be able to work on this project exactly, but I will try to give updates regularly. Here is a screenshot of the generated hull in a modified workbench in Stormworks before I go: