THG ~ Kyle Update, January 2023 (Patreon)

Hi folks, Kyle here!

I think it goes without saying it's been a while. My last update was just before (American) Thanksgiving, when I started taking time for the holidays. The remainder of November and good portions of December (Christmas and New Years) were like this as well. I was meaning to get an update out in late December, but I hadn't made a ton of progress and it was the holidays, so I just left it for January.

SHELL PLATING

Between holidays I started back on work with shell plating. Before I said I needed to take time to properly finish the shell plating for the bottom, as they still needed to have a better fit with trimmed overlaps. This is a slow process, particularly at the fore and aft ends where the hull curves require more careful attention. The last couple of weeks have been largely devoted to this task as well, and I've made good progress.

The process so far has been done in 4 steps: Making the base shell plate (color coded as white above). Making the plates high-poly (red). Adjusting the high-poly plates' curvature, mainly so the overlaps with other plates fit better (yellow). And finally adding cuts to various corners of overlaps (green). There will be further steps after this (namely cutting of any holes where needed, UV mapping, naming conventions, etc.) but these early steps are necessary to ensure other adjacent parts can also be finished and the model can move beyond this area.

On the real ship, shell plates had to be trimmed or "scarphed" in certain places where they overlapped to be riveted together, resulting in some corners being shaved down to rather sharp ends. The above images should show this to some degree. This also turned out to be necessary to do on our model because there was a tendency for some of these corners to stick out of overlapping plates. Making these cuts solves that problem and makes the model more accurate to how the ship was built. The only issue is, due to the uniqueness of the plates, this has to be done separately for each plate. That said, it's not a hard process, just tedious and repetitive.

The end result is shell plates that are smooth, fit nicely together, and accurate to the real thing.

THG - LOOKING BACK AT TEN YEARS

As of the turn of the new year, it's been 10 years since THG started. There was also a project called Titanic: Lost in the Darkness, on which Matt DeWinkeleer and I worked for quite some time, that predated THG by about 4 years. In simple terms, we've been working on Titanic for a long time.

Matt started modeling Titanic in late 2007 with a dream of being able to walk the decks. In 2008 a small group of Germans started Titanic: Lost in the Darkness with the goal of bringing Titanic to life in CryENGINE 2 as a Crysis mod. In 2009, I started modeling Titanic because I was dissatisfied with the quality and accuracy of existing models. Both of us eventually found our way to T:LitD as interior and exterior modelers, which eventually led to us leaving and forming THG in late 2012 with others who had joined the previous project, including Tom Lynskey (who joined as a writer and became Director, departing in 2021) and Derek Verveer, who rejoined THG in 2021.

Over the next ten years THG would have a heck of a ride with plenty of wild hills along the way, the last two years being particularly challenging after the New Direction of 2021 took several bad turns that we're still paying for. We've learned so much over that time in terms of experience, skills, lessons, and a vast library of knowledge and research built up from our years of working on Titanic. We're by no means the only Titanic project, but I'm willing to say we're pretty unique in many ways. Probably the only Titanic project that's been going longer is the Mafia Titanic Mod, which was started by Robin Bongaarts in 2006 (and which I also briefly worked on before THG).

This is a significant amount of time and effort that couldn't be ignored, so here and there over the last month and change I was doing research and archiving of THG material with the intention of using that info for a possible video about THG's progress over the years. It was meant to mark 10 years of THG, showing how our models and research have evolved over time. However, this little endeavor was easily Snowball Material and it's just not a priority right now. So, for the time being, the video idea is shelved.

That said, I still managed to build up a cool archive of old THG material, much of it rarely seen, some of it never seen. If you all are interested, I may do a series of posts here showing some of this stuff. It'd be a shame for this material to go unseen, and I think it'll help illuminate the work we've done on this ship over the last 10+ years.

As a teaser, here's a glimpse at one of Matt's earliest Titanic models from around 2007-2008, and my earliest Titanic model started in 2009, both predating THG and any associated projects:

This old material paints a stark contrast between our skills, standards, and knowledge of the late 2000s and now. As we continue work on the Alpha and structural model, these looks back will hopefully show how far we've come from a time when UE5 wasn't even yet a dream and the idea of having more than 12 polygonal sides on a column was unthinkable, a time when our only references were a couple of encyclopedic Titanic books and the few low-resolution images we could find on Google. A lot's happened and changed in 10+ years, and what you're seeing now wouldn't be possible without that.

LOOKING FORWARD

Looking forward again, I will continue working the structural model, which will be the theme for quite some time. Once I'm satisfied with the bottom shell plates, I can finalize the floors, put in the intercostals, do the Tank Top Plating, and eventually start the vertical frames and associated brackets. I've said repeatedly that what's being done now is the most difficult part of the ship. It'll take a bit to get past it but, once that happens, things will get exciting. I'm hoping it won't be too much longer before the structure starts looking like this:

While the Alpha's structural model continues, Derek, James, and others will put their efforts into finishing Demo 401 and then Project 401. Project 401 will probably be the main things for them for quite a while since we really need to allow time for the alpha modeling to progress. At some point we'll be able to start bringing in these structural models to create an initial Alpha release, but exactly when that will be and what it will consist of remains to be seen.

Thanks again to all of you for your patience and support!