Hi
It's Friday again which means our weekly challenge is here.
This week I bring you a 3D render, modelled on the gun deck of an old ship. The modelling and texturing kept me occupied for much longer than I planned, but I learnt a few things along the way so that's never time wasted. So there is the scene, what will you do with it? Will it be pirates, a scene from history, or something else entirely?
Anything goes as long as it meets the forum rules on decency, copyright etc.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to have a go - whether you are a complete beginner or a Photoshop expert.
There are no prizes apart from the chance to practice, show off, or bring a bit of humour and fun. Don't be shy - come and have a go!
When posting back your edited images please use jpeg and downsize to 1200px on the long side.
To download the image below in jpeg format with ICC color profile (sRGB) and without the forum scaling artefacts , right click and then use Save Image As /Save Target As (or similar depending on your browser).
Have fun!
Dave
Edit : Updated image - with better rope render.
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Replies
jane-e wrote
Dave, this is brilliant! The rope turned out especially well!
Blimey, I am completely blown away with this one. I love all the dirt and texture and how real the wood looks. Sensationally good Dave.
I am just a wee bit worried about one of these is for? Graham is going to have rivers of blood running off it. 
I made a rope brush for a project a while back. I didn't save it to a set, so I have just made it again.
Select one twist from the rope and define as brush preset, push out the spacing, and set angle jitter to Direction. You need to mage it on the dark side, or it will end up too thin, and you'll need to copy the layer and set to Multiply. This is about right.
It does this
When you colorize it with a Hue/Sat layer, it looks a bit flat, so you have to stroke it with the Dodge tool to give it back some depth.
Those wee gaps in the curved rope, could be fixed by reducing the brush spacing — but you all knew that. You could give it some distance by adding Fade to size jitter, but that would complicate dodging the centre to give depth.
Ussnorway wrote
rivers no I wasn't thinking that, well maybe a bucket
Graham, have you got Alien Skin Eye Candy 7? It actually has a blood preset.
You have to be a wee bit creative using two layers, and a layer style to finish it off, but it looks a bit like dripping blood.
I had another play with the rope brush after realizing that blurring the overlapping area would give better curves without showing the wee steps as in post #5. You do this before defining the brush preset of course.
When you define a brush preset with mid greys, it will be translucent when first painted. You need to Ctrl click to load the selection, and fill that with white on the layer below, and merge with the rope layer.
Sorry. Too easy, and I'd like to complain about Adobe making Select & Mask work so well. It takes the challenge out of making selections. I also want to know why the lady on the left does not have any pirate clothes on... Or _any_ clothes on. Is that because it gets hot on the gun deck? 
Trevor.Dennis wrote
I am just a wee bit worried about one of these is for? Graham is going to have rivers of blood running off it.
Maybe a wad-screw for cleaning the guns?
Hi
Good to see the entries coming in.
Rista - I'm impressed that you took up Dag's additional challenge 
Jacob - I hope no penguins were hurt in the making of that scene!
Trevor - The Pirates fit very well
I think Jane has given the answer to the use of that corkscrew tool. When creating the render I looked at several images of gun decks and most had a similar tool near the canon so I made one and dropped it in.
Love the rope brush Trevor - I shall pinch that idea. Actually I am not fully happy with the ropes in the image. The positioning and textures are fine but if you look at the edges you can see I just used normal maps to simulate the surface. A better result would be to use actual displacement of the mesh but to do that adds vertices (an awful lot of them to get fine detail) and therefore increases render times. The render above took almost 2 hours on my GTX1080 GPU. I want to do some more work and finish the image using the ability in Blender to use micro-displacement and add vertices close to the camera but not in the distance, thereby keeping the memory requirements and render times reasonable. The memory requirement is important as once the render exceeds the GPU memory capacity then it has to be rendered on the CPU which means waving goodbye to the PC for 12-24 hours.
Pierre - That video is seriously impressive. Great stuff ! 
Keep them coming
Dave
Lovely flowers, do they grow on gunpowder, and may I ask which kind the spiky balls are?
Dandelions!
On my ship, Jacob Bugge​, the gunpowder has been replaced by potting soil and the world has all agreed to put an end to war.
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