D-D-D-D-D-D-D-Digitize! (Patreon)

Hi folks, Kyle here. I was hoping to have more structural progress to show, but for the last week or so I've been involved in an ongoing effort with the team to finally, after all these years, get our research material and references into some semblance of real organization. For my part, I've mainly been scanning a ton of stuff that needed digitizing. I wasn't planning on doing it this soon, but it's become rather urgent for the wider team's needs.

We've gotten plenty of material from difference sources over the years, but we've admittedly often been bad at keeping it organized in a way where things can be found quickly and easily. For example: If we needed all photo references of a particular cabin item, we'd have to crawl through who knows how many weirdly-named folders in our own archives or on a drive to find that stuff, usually in files without actual names beyond IMG434hg53u745h39867. It was very easy to miss things. Upon going through the archives more thoroughly, there's stuff most of us never knew was there. It's been a mess, but a mess that has generally not done us much harm since it's usually just been a couple of us lately doing most of the modeling.

But now that we're really finding our feet with a workflow for making the ship and the things on it, and especially now that we're looking to expand our volunteer team, it's more important than ever to get things in order. It'll be helpful to myself and the rest of the core team as well. This effort consists mainly of trawling through our existing archives and organizing by class, room/type of space, type of object, and object. The idea is that once the archive is done, we'll essentially have a list (backed up by spreadsheets) of every single thing that needs to be made on the ship. Rooms, styles, furnishings, fittings, machinery, systems, and props with whatever's needed to make those things. It'll make it a bit easier for me and others to find things, but more importantly it'll make the task of assigning objects to volunteers far better. It's a necessary step that admittedly should have been taken a while back, but better late than never.

On top of all that, we recently acquired a sizeable cache of reference material (seen above) for our own collection; some 360+ photos of the Olympic Class Liners. There will be plenty of opportunities to use that material from the game itself to videos and other things, but it all needs to be digitized, which has been my task.

Some of the images are pretty interesting and really great to have in high-resolution. Over the course of this entire project, we've always been hunting for this kind of stuff, but only in more recent years have we been able to get it. Sometimes even the smallest resolution bump or change in the source material (book vs. negative print) can make a huge difference. For once example, take a look at the difference between an older copy of a photo we had from a book print (left) vs. a print from our new collection (right):

With all that said, it's really made me think about how far we've come in regard to what we know about Titanic and what's available to us to help digitally rebuild the ship, and how that compares to when we first individually started this crazy journey. So the last few nights between scans, I had been typing up a post about that. It snowballed, as all things do.

For a while now I've been wanting to tell the story of how we've been trying to recreate the ship from the time before THG to the present, complete with never-before-seen and old images of WIPs and old models to illustrate that journey, as well as going into more detail about the challenges of doing all this and the way our picture of the ship and our knowledge have changed over time. I've wanted to do it in video form and may still do in the future, but for now I'll just make it as a post here on Patreon. Maybe a series of posts as it's clear it'll be pretty long, especially once images are added. If I go that route, I may make it Patreon-exclusive for a while, at least until the last segment is up. I already have much of the writing done and will probably finish that while I work on more scans and between other organizing.

Other than that, work on the new archive we're building has been going well. Once these scans are done (they nearly are now) and we've done a bit more on the archive, I will just jump right back into the structural model. I want to get away from the tunnel space for a bit and expand into adding more beams and brackets over more of the decks, along with more bulkhead plating.

So comment here on what you might be most interested in hearing more about in terms of our process of making the ship, and what you might like to see. The pre-THG Lost in the Darkness days? Early THG? Demo 3 development? Megademo? Old imagery that's hard to find now, throwbacks? And would you prefer it as shorter (and perhaps more image-filled) and more digestible posts in a series, perhaps every few days?