Diorama: Pirate Ship

All model art credit to Christopher D. White, whose image/reference i found and was so charmed I was compelled to "trace" it in the heat of the moment

Haphazardly, I ended up using the reference image itself as the main uv map for the boat, which was pretty dummy in hindsight. That being said, it was very fun to reverse-engineer it and build alongside the very well-made and well-painted trim sheets.

At one point I had an enormously ambitious scene idea, with X marks the spot lighting and a secret treasure and fairy fountain and messages in a bottle and a wrecked survivor and decorating the interior of the boat and all these other big ideas

My old sharkman was going to make an animated appearance handling the sail- giving an old character/model a new scene like I did with my Kass Fantasy Room. Ultimately I scrapped this idea too- i did not have the steam to rig and animate all these things

What i did want to include in the final scene though were a few cool things I made along the way while working on the boat- first among which were my wormy trees using a basic shape in an array stretched along the length of a curve

Second- a machine for generating noise textures, that then procedurally generates a landscape based on that texture. I learned a little bit more about math that morning.

"that one part of that one starter zone from Northrend"

In memory of a very big idea, and in deep appreciation of big ideas generally. I wouldn't be here without them.