Weekly Developer Log #1: Ship Builder Kickstarter

Hello everyone!

I decided to create this development post for 3 reasons, 

• to keep you guys updated
• collect feedback
• And also, without a goal or even a reminder, anything falls into forgetfulness. This would force me to work on this project a bit at a time.

Every week I will try to create a new post with something new so that we can discuss it.

Unlike an organic sculpt everything must fit well together, I can't create a whole ship, slice it and call it modular, it probably would not work. To start this project I started studying ships and pieces before working with 3d.

Today I brought 2 images:

The first - A colorful ship

In this ship, I've broken the major components that made this ship and I would need to recreate them or other ships.

Red: Deck

Magenta: Cabin

Cyan: Tip

Purple, Green, Blue, Orange, and Yellow: These parts compose the hull. 

For a modular build to work, I will need to make some decisions that will turn the model a bit different from the original. Blue and green will be wall 90º from the floor, the reason for this is that these 2 layers can be expanded upwards or sideways, if they have a certain angle it would be impossible to be modular as a Height option.

The Hull Tip (Purple) and Tail (Orange), will also be split in height.

The second Image - A Tile Sketch

Before going further I will make a design decision, and all pieces will be calculated by this decision, which is a 26mmx26mm tile. The reason for this is that many things will be calculated, and doing a 25.4mm might lead to further math errors by rounding things, to avoid this kind of mistake I decided to work with 26mm. It's not too much different.

I intend to work with 2 basic tiles 3x3 and 3x2. both of these would fit well on a small printer 78mm on the largest side. 

Why not 2x2 like most of the dungeon tiles? Since these tiles would build a ship, making a big ship would take too many tiles, which means more gluing and printing.

Stacking tiles, to make layer lines less visible all the tiles will "invade" a bit on the other tile, this will also create a basic locking system.

Limits:

There is a limit to what we can build with this modular tileset(it's what it is). Building that ship exactly as it's shown in the picture, would not be possible. If you look closely at the ship you will realize that a human is nearly a dot, this means that this thing for a 32mm scale model would be massive, probably 4-5 kg of resin, it would be nice for a 10mm scale though.

That's it for this Update on the project.

Best regards,

Ivo