Liberté, 1:250

[Golden Bear]

I am labeling this thread by the name of the most famous ship of the class. There were four very similar ships, Democratie, Justice, Liberté and Verité. Liberté had the unfortunate distinction of suffering from a spontaneous explosion in its ammunition storage that left it a tangled wreck in Toulon until after the Great War. I have not actually decided which ship of this class I will actually model.

Some folks... OK, mostly Barry, have asked me to show some of the design process, particularly the hull. I start with a series of plans and sections provided gratis by the French Government. I needed to spend a lot of time studying them and photos and making my own plan for how to proceed.

My 3D CAD program is Rhino. I've had good luck recently with making hull sides in one continuous surface... which makes it easier to deal with rather than forming the sides as separate pieces. In the end I will actually chop the hull sides into sections for unrolling... but that is a story for a later time.

Anyway, I started by drawing the outlines of the waterline section and the top deck. Despite the fact that the poop/fantail is a deck lower than the rest of the ship I planned to skin the entire boat up to the highest deck and then carve down.

I positioned the upper deck outline and made the difficult decision not to put in deck camber. It is basically invisible in photos but would be nice to have for hyper detail reasons. My first, undisplayed revision had camber but I redid everything without it. Once I had the top deck outline in place I used the "Bend" command to curve the forward part of the deck upwards, according to the drawings.

Then I drew the bow and stern outlines, extending the stern example up to reach the upper deck outline. I also put in a single cross section outline near the center of the ship.

At this point I was ready to make the hull skin. The image (poor, I admit) shows highlighted in red the five edges and lines that formed the basis for the "Surface from Network of Curves" command. Now, this command can be twitchy which is why I deliberately used five continuous, not compound or joined, curves to form the surface.

The purple surfaces will form the back of the top deck and will trim the top deck to shape.

[Golden Bear]

My surface construction was successful. By doing this without multiple cross sections I avoided small errors that creep in with the small drawing differences that occur from one section to the next. However, it doesn't necessarily fit exactly to the actual ship sections at each place. This one is pretty good, except perhaps for the portion under the poop which should slope outwards a little more steeply. I'll finish the hull cutouts and then see how I feel.

This photo shows the result of making the skin and then cutting it and the decks to shape. The trim command is also easier to use if there are fewer cutting edges to define a shape.


Carl

[Royaloakmin]

Carl, a great start. I dont know anything about CAD, but fascinating anyways. I think some of these ships had interesting camo schemes. Have you thought about that yet?

regards

[Greg S.]

GB:

Don't know CAD either but it is interesting to see how it is done.

BTW, the ships in the class differed in derricks & forward portholes as you probably know.

[Golden Bear]

Sorry 'bout the CAD stuff but at least there are pictures! The problem is that there are "tricks" that make things easier to do... such as minimizing curves and surfaces. But it is difficult to figure out what it is that might be the most help.

Greg, certainly I am aware of those details... that's why I am not yet committing to any particular ship. However, almost nobody else knows these facts so please keep throwing them in. There are lots of other things I also have no clue about.


Carl

P.S. I'm planning on doing the ship in grey rather than in Tan and Black. It will have lino decks.

[Barry]

Thanks for that Carl sort of backwards to metaseq certainly gives a nice smooth hull

[Don Boose]

Me, another CAD-ignoramous, I am very happy to have the CAD tutorial. I'm beginning to understand it a little bit and I very much enjoy watching the ship take shape. Who knows, someday I may try my hand at CADishness myself.

Un excellent début pour la Liberté! Bonne chance pour la construction.

Don

[Golden Bear]

SInce there won't be anything but CAD to show for a while, I'll keep showing it. Here is my lunchtime progress. Having defined the basic hull shape, I then made the surfaces of the cutouts and used them to Trim the hull and decks as needed. Then I reverse and use the hull and deck to trim the cutout pieces to size - the cutout surfaces are made from lines of the correct shapes that are extruded into oversized surfaces. Trimming always works most painlessly if the cutting tool projects past the part. Of course it wasn't as straightforward as all that but nobody would want to see (or hear) the blow by blow details.

So the idea was to begin with a single nice complete surface and then cutout the pieces as needed. Too bad that the Unroll or Smash commands cannot decently lay out the single finished piece.

...and for Greg: The aft cutouts are not finished. There will be a tumorous sort of piece added in for part of the secondary battery. Note that the top deck shape back there does not conform entirely to the cutout beneath. This is also seen clearly in photos. The earlier ships which had more (but lighter) secondary armament have more complexity with more doodadage a little forward of that aft cutout.

I also changed the surface colors to approximate the final model.


Carl

[dansls1]

It's funny, I can relate to a lot of the CAD stuff, but am lost with some of the ship terms you are discussing. Nonetheless, I love reading the methods for developing these things, while the subject will be different, I imagine I'll eventually give designing some models a try down the road.

[B-Manic]

Nice looking hull design Carl. Did you decide to drop the camber and tumble home or are they just not noticable at this scale to my feeble eyes?