Rebuilding Titanic: Part 2 - Two Beginnings (Patreon)

By Kyle Hudak

Sketching Decks

One of Matt's early models from 2007-2008. You're looking at, essentially, the beginnings of Titanic: Honor and Glory.

From the age of 6, Matt DeWinkeleer has been obsessed with Titanic. Originally manifesting as forcing friends and family to attend Titanic attractions, locations, and exhibitions with him, his obsession turned to model kits. Titanic model kits have never been particularly detailed (if you wanted detail and accuracy, you needed scratch-built modifications and expensive photo-etch), and there’s also the little problem of size and the fact that they didn’t show you what was inside the ship. There had to be a better option.

After high school, Matt would go on to earn degrees in film and business, but it was early on in all of that when he decided to start experimenting with 3D modeling. And so, in 2006, Matt installed Google SketchUp with the goal of digitally recreating Titanic as a walkable model. The entire ship, top to bottom, bow to stern.

F Deck of Matt's original deck layout models.

B Deck aft, with the Restaurant Galley and crude representations of the Aft Grand Staircase and Restaurant.

D Deck with the 1st and 2nd Class Pantry and the Saloon.

This was not initially as gargantuan an effort as Titanic: Honor and Glory, with the models being extremely simple. This would be no easy task as he was fairly new to this and reference material was pretty low in supply for the average Titanorak on the internet. It was still going to be two more years before Titanic: The Ship Magnificent would be published. About the best Matt had to work with were some G/A plans, a few books, low-resolution photos found online, and a copy of James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer.

An early model of the Grand Staircase, B Deck. The wall panel textures were merely screenshots from Titanic Explorer.

B Deck amidships staterooms. The bones of the different styles/color schemes are there, but it's still a far cry from anything resembling detail.

Under the Forecastle Deck. All of the walls in these early models were one-sided faces and would not have rendered properly in game engines.

Matt’s earliest models through 2007 were extremely simple deck layouts with crude walls and doors, textured in part with screenshots from James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer. There was very little in the way of real detail at this point. The goal was less "world's most detailed model" and more a way to visualize General Arrangement plans and the deck layouts. Almost nothing had actual depth, and there were innumerable errors.

C Deck aft with the 2nd Class Library and staircases.

Under the Poop Deck.

Aft E Deck around the Engine Rooms. Compare to this area in Demo 401 today.

Work on these deck models continued well into 2008 with almost every deck represented in this simple way. Matt also started making some exterior models as his skills grew, with a focus on various individual objects such as windows and cranes.

An early model of the A Deck Promenade with Lounge windows.

An early model of the refrigerated food stores and aft 3rd Class.

One of Matt's earliest tries at an exterior model. No sheer, naturally.

Needs More Detail

By the end of 2008, Matt had transitioned to making more detailed interior models. Some of the earliest included cabins on A Deck and cargo holds, though both were still extremely crude by today’s standards. By this time Matt would have had some more references along with a copy of Titanic: The Ship Magnificent, so that also allowed him to start adding more detail.

Areas such as the Turkish Bath almost demanded more detail.

As Matt started to up-detail his models, the walls gained depth and became double-sided. But in this early period, things like wall paneling were still lacking, even after that also started getting upgraded.

Some of the earliest attempts at cabin furniture.

An early attempt at a cargo hold. Without detailed iron plans (which would not become available to Matt/us for over 10 years yet), areas like this can be extremely difficult to make properly, especially if you're still new to modeling and have yet to learn a lot about the ship's structure.

Matt had also made somewhat more detailed versions of the Grand Staircase and other areas by early 2009. Since this was not being done for any particular project and nothing was going into a game engine, there wasn't a whole lot to do with the models, and so Matt uploaded them to the SketchUp Warehouse where anybody could download them.

Playing with Glue

Like Matt, I had been mysteriously obsessed with Titanic from an early age. I think it started when I was living in Arizona and glimpsed bits of marketing for Cameron’s film. It would be a couple of years before I’d actually see it, but that big pointy bow on cardboard cutouts and posters stood out to me. Over time I would grow more curious about Titanic, checking out books from libraries and drawing or painting pictures of the ship, usually instead of doing school work. Occasionally I would hijack time on school computers to make digital Titanic drawings. Imagine my happiness when I finally got my own PC!

My attempts at being Ken Marschall 2.0 around the age of 10-11. Nobody look! I certainly didn't look at any source material when I painted them at my grandma's house after excitedly buying canvases and paint from a local Ben Franklin.

My later attempts at art were a bit more successful, though I never did finish the Britannic painting.

By the 2000s, I had begun several attempts to scratch-build large scale models of Titanic, including a bow wreck model complete with a gutted Grand Staircase. I used paper, cardboard, foam board, balsa wood, and a lot of hot glue. There was a huge model made of poster-board and construction paper. There was an attempt at a hull made of balsa wood. There was another attempt made from paper. At a later point I even tried to build a foam-board model of the Queen Mary 2. Towards the end of 2008, I had built my last model kit (as of 2024).

This 1/350 scale kit in 2008/2009 was my last attempt at building a scale model, at least until I get around to building one of my Trumpeter kits in the next decade or so...

Of all of those models, I never fully finished any of them. I just never had the space or everything that was needed. To this day I have an unfinished 10-foot foam-board Titanic hull in my storage room, a giant hulk of nonsense I’ll never finish and which I'm currently debating whether to scrap or give to someone else. Physical models had simply proven too expensive, too difficult, often too big or too small, or too tedious to make. I could only do so much with such models. Even 2D art started getting boring.

The 10-foot foam-board hull, never finished, that's now languishing atop a shelf in my back room.

Something Something Right Ahead

It was in June of 2008 when, fresh out of high school with nothing to do, I decided to tinker with 3D modeling. I settled on Autodesk Maya as its interface seemed much easier for me to use, though it would take a long time to learn even basic functions, let alone how to make a good model. My earliest models were not Titanic. Instead they were random shapes and simple objects that I rendered with different materials. It wasn’t until a bit later that I attempted slightly more complex objects and other models with textures made from household objects that I had taken photos of.

My first 3D models and renderings, if you don't count a couple of even earlier, even lower-effort attempts in G-Max around the mid-2000s.

After my initial attempts at digital modeling, I gave up for a few months. But something would happen in early 2009 that caused me to try again. I wanted some new way to see Titanic that wasn’t the same old models or the same old games and, much like Matt a couple of years before me, I felt I had to do it myself. For both of us (and consequently others), this would prove to be a life-altering decision.

Continue to Part 3: https://www.patreon.com/posts/98589899