Printing the Stranded Tugboat

Note to all: This piece will be part of the terrain pack to go with the factions for the upcoming Swarm Mode for Full Spectrum Dominance!

This is one of those moments in which a two-years-long project finally saw a conclusion.

Or better - a first conclusion, since I'm planning to make another few variants of the destroyed boat.

Lessons Learned

The challenges of sculpting a hard surface model with soft curved parts which is relatable to the viewer is bigger than one would think: ways too many miniature boats out there have the hull of a Playmobil toy, with thick railings and ...well, basically undersized hull spaces.

Ships are BIG, and even the tiniest of tugboats such as this one end up being considerably bigger than most of the stuff you'd see on a battlefield.

I relied on Plasticity to sculpt almost the entirety of this piece, with Blender used for some details and the cutting and weathering. It's a powerful tool, but the use of parametric surfaces can be easily abused. Working with flat surfaces and bevel can often be much, much easier.

More Variants

Once the whole hull is done, I'll certainly release it together with one or two extra variants of the relic.

Too many, and it becomes a redundant piece of terrain (with a lot of work to be sculpted); too few, and I've invested countless hours to sculpt the original model with no return. Ah, the choices!

That said, enough for this post.

More to follow on the Third Wave stretchgoals!

Cheers,
Jack