Today’s blog isn’t exactly the most exciting one, but I’ve been enjoying working in Nomad Sculpt a lot more these days, so maybe talking through my workflow a bit will help me to actually solidify the lessons I’ve learned. I haven’t bothered to take any WIP shots because it’s easy to get into the workflow while sculpting (plus if it’s clear that I’m not much for WIP shots on my painting stuff, too) and I’m not enough of an expert to feel like anything I’d say would be worthwhile.

Nomad Sculpt: A Brief Primer

Nomad Sculpt is one of the cheapest sculpting programs outside of Blender, and somehow, it has become my favorite despite still hanging on to an old permanent license for zBrush and previously using that for my digital sculpting. It’s basically “zBrush, but optimized for iPad” and incredibly inexpensive for what it does – 15 bucks for it and no subscription or anything like that. While it doesn’t quite have all of the features, the most recent update has given us a brush that’s incredibly close to hPolish, one of my favorite brushes. It’s a little tricky to do hard surface work using a stylus, especially given that I’m a diehard fan of sculpting using mouse and keyboard, but it works well.

If you’re curious about digital sculpting, then give Nomad a try. I’ve done a few miniatures with it already, and the only major issue I have with it is the difficulty in properly scaling things.

While I can adjust the final scale when slicing and printing, one trick to ensure that things look right is using a “scaling piece” – in this case, a square base that I’ve mentally set at 25mm, just like the bases used in Freebooter’s Fate. As I just need to make sure the size relationship is correct to the bases when scaling the boat (as well as to a sort of “dummy miniature” to establish height of gunwales, but that’s a little more technical than I’d care to get into right now), that’s pretty much the only tool I need to get things looking correct.

YOLA: You only live aquatically

The Yola is (in game) a two-person rowing boat. As I have learned far too much about shipbuilding in the process of reading up about these little boats, I will condense what I’ve learned and its application to sculpting maritime objects for gameplay usage here:

• Boats can have a lot of different types of hulls. If it’s made up of numerous longitudinally-running boards, construction is either edge-to-edge, or carvel, or overlapping, clinker, construction.
• There are a distressing number of names for parts of boats.
• Boats are made of a lot of curves that meet up in places.

I know, highly technical stuff here. Since I like a challenge/it’s the best way I can think of how to do this, I’ll be doing carvel construction for this Yola.

My starting place for the techniques I used was this video – the most important part (to me) was explaining how to get the planks for the carvel construction using a simple shell of a boat shape. Admittedly, the techniques needed some modification given my own limited skills in the digital realm as well as for my intended 3D printing plans, but if you’re used to sculpting digitally, I expect it will give you a usable workflow.

So, here’s how I got started:

• Create a curve that’s locked to the grid line.
• Use the radius tool to get the shape lookin’ vaguely boat shaped.
• Rotate your vaguely boat-shaped object 90 degrees.
• Trim off the top to get the silhouette roughly correct
• Polygroup based on normals.
• Separate your polygroups: you’ll need the top edge separate from the bottom shell.
• On the bottom shell, start splitting off the planks.
• Mask and extract the planks, filling in the geometry.
• Realize I’d fucked up the process and everything was incredibly pixellated, choppy, and giving random holes.
• Go back a bunch of steps, smooth things out more, increase resolution.
• Repeat several times as I worked on things and improved my own workflow.
• ??????
• Start extracting the planks for real this time.
• Smooth out planks.
• Texture planks.
• Prepare to start doing more stuff and then realize you’re probably going to redo a bunch of other things.

It’s remarkably simple once you get used to going back and also making clones of any step you’d like to repeat/might need to make use of later on.

So, what’s our Yola looking like right now?

Note that I’m going to be mirroring the boards once I work out a bit more on the dimensions.

Now, you may be wondering how this will work on the tabletop, and let me tell you that I will need to flatten things on the bottom so that it will sit nicely. This method is slower, a bit rougher, and certainly more frustrating than simply sculpting a boat by hand, but on the other hand, once I’ve done these, I can print them off for running all of the boat-based scenarios AND can do some fun customization on them without ruining nice, original models.

Hobby Progress

Finishing up some final basing elements on Locura, painting pirates, and – as one might guess from above – sculpting boats. I hope to have this project finished by next week, as it’s easy to put in a bit of work over my lunch breaks.