Some case studies for ancient ships for my MA thesis in preparation for my PHD-project
These small case studies I made in 2022 for my MA thesis on a concept for the reconstruction of ancient sailing routes in the Mediterranean. For my upcoming PHD-project, I will heavily use procedural models made with Houdini to cover the various ancient ship types in the Late Roman Republic and High Imperial period and perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations on these models to get their performance data for the route calculation.
Either Houdini or Marvelous Designer will also be used for making realistic sails and to perform cloth simulations in various wind conditions which will be used further.
Note: these examples are very basic since I didn't need them to look nice at this early stage, just functional.
A realy basic example of the idea behind a procedural 3D model for ancient trading ships, made in Houdini.
Illustration of the influence of the change of different parameters (here only how steeply the bow rises) on the topography of a wireframe model to show, how difficult it would be to edit all points by hand to adjust to the new stempost mid-project.
Illustration of the hull shape of a ship in the water (left) and its change in heel (right); the keel as the ship's longitudinal axis is highlighted dark for orientation. Note the asymmetry that is created; made also in Houdini.
Simulated square sail in wind almost exactly athwartships without tensioned tacks to the bow and with the leeward sheet (left) strongly tensioned to form a 'pocket' to still be able to catch some wind, made in Marvelous Designer.
Simulated ancient square sail in the same wind as before, only this time with tensioned tacks, made in Marvelous Designer.