The Big Picture

[Bob C.]

Absolutely fantastic John.

I used my arrow keys to see it “sail� by.
I can almost hear the engines humming and smell the salt in the air. This is AMAZING! How long
does a project like this take?

[John F Dye]

Glad most of you liked it. I agree the text is a little dry. the difficulty is knowing what is important. In Wayne's example he emphasised speed, but that was not an important charactoristic of the South Dakoda class battleship. They where of modest speed, faster than the WWI Battleships, but 5 knots plus, slower than the Iowa class. It was that main reason they were decommisioned by 1948. But you point is a good one I will go back and review with the experts and see if we can figure out what to emphasise
Judy A,
Sorry about the size. As far as the detail is concerned. This is approx. a 30% reduction from the original, and I reduced the quality to 70% to get the file size down. So much of the detail is already missing. The life rafts have netting floors, the railings are shaded the battle ribbions are readable and correct, The dogs that hold the doors shut are visable, and so on..... Some people appreciate that kind of thing, others don't.
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
John D

[John F Dye]

Bob,
I layed out the hull and interior decks over a year ago for another project. About 8 months ago when I had the destroyer illustration nearly done I decided to do this one. I could import a lot of the fittings (doors, 5" gun turrets etc.) form the destroyer. Been working on it off and on ever since. A few details I faked in but most is drawn to scale from the original drawing.
John D

[Peter P.]

I agree that the size is big, but I really understand your point of view that all the details would get lost (even with this size). I saved the file on my HD and I saw what you mean if you view it filling the whole screen. Some nice details show us what a patience it must have taken to come to this result; the trageted viewer will be very pleased. I do agree with the comment about the bevelled headings. I think that you should take the font you used for all the other text.


Keep up the good work!

[Dan Huff]

Very nice work! How many hours do you think you have in this beautiful piece?

Danny Huff
http://www.asherrocks.com
(I'm the guy who USED to have a lot of excess hair)

[John F Dye]

Danny,
Thanks. Hard to figure the hours. Probably 250-300, but I imported fitting and subassemblies from other drawings.
John D

[ajreed]

especially the one by Judi, so I have taken
the liberty of starting a new thread
(see The Big Picture II) just to illustrate
how I would propose keeping everybody happy.

Well you can try [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Alan

[Trekart]

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Very nice - I know how exciting it is to work on something so detailed!

I'd like to recommend an addition if I may. Have you considered adding some layers of transparent bitmaps to add texture to the ship?

I've found that this can add so much "realism" to an otherwise flat colour. The ships hull for example, is indoubtedly made up of hull plates welded together, so why not create a Xara drawing of a section of hull plating, save as a bitmap at a suitable resolution, then apply as a fill to the relevant area on a new layer with a high transparency; Subtlety is the key, 90-95% transparency is all that is required to add real depth.

I'd love for you to try it and post the results...


Stu.</font>
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[John F Dye]

Stuart,
now you've got me thinking.... I will have to go back and take a hard look at the surface of the hull plates and see if I can come up with a texture. It will have to be subtle though. It would be very easy to over do.
Thanks fro the though
John D

[John F Dye]

Stuart,
Well I have been playing around with texture layers, and came up with this. the textures are very small (I think they need to be as it is a BIG ship) and at 90% transparent. So it is pretty subtle.
My apologies to the those who object to big pictures, but the textures would not show up with a small image.
I also went back over the text boxes to try to get them to be clearer without changing the intent to much.
feed back is apreciated