Over the course of three weeks, I worked with Professor Austin Mason on his ongoing project to create a viking longship for virtual reality applications, including a minigame and interactive elements involving real artifacts. Since this work has been in progress for several years already, being a joint effort between Carleton and Grinnell Colleges at various points, coming in at this stage proved difficult—much of the work had already been completed, so most of what remained was filling in the gaps in the project. Documentation of processes were inconsistent, which made recreating steps, for continuity, more difficult.
As a member of the 3D art team, most of my job was touching up pre-existing pieces of art. My work took place entirely on Blender, a 3D art and animation program that was new to me, coming in. I worked mainly with scans of artifacts that would have been found in a sea chest on a viking longship. The chest itself and all the artifacts including a mug, a comb, and shears, were discovered and held at Hedeby by the project’s German museum partner, the Viking Museum Hedeby. All of them (and more) were scanned and turned into downloadable files.
I would import these files into Blender before beginning the process of making them usable in other areas of the project. This included centering the object on the origin, making sure the texture was applied correctly (textures are what gives an object its look. Here, there were custom textures made from the same scans, so the color and wear-and-tear were the same as in real life), and double checking that the scale was right—we used millimeters to record our artifacts, but Blender defaults to meters. Once everything was complete, I would save it, export it as a new file, and upload it to the shared Google Drive.
My second big task was to add a halyard to the model of the longship itself. The halyard on a boat is the rope that is used to raise the sail. Since in our model the sail is raised, this meant that most of the rope would be in a coil on the deck. Once I learned how to use Bezier curves to design my coil, I placed it on the ship, going through the mast to reach the top of the sail while also going through a small hole in the side of the ship on the bottom. I then began the process of turning it into something that looks like genuine rope, rather than a thin line. I ran out of time in the project to complete this part of the task—it proved to be more troublesome than expected, and though I never figured out what my issue was, it made for a comical (and slightly terrifying) Image of a rope sea monster about to swallow the ship.
