Le Soleil Royal

During the summer of 2018, I studied virtual environments in a five week Architectural History course. One of the topics that I found most interesting, was the subject of "temporary architecture." For my final project, I modeled a replica of the famous French ship, Le Soleil Royal - which, though renowned for its elegance and craftsmanship, participated in only two naval battles before being completely destroyed in 1692.

This was my first 3D model and as I was still new to the medium and the software, it took me the majority of the five weeks to complete. Since then, I feel that I've learned a lot and have been hoping to find the time to go back and fix some of the topology.

All of the statues and a majority of the decorative ornament are free assets from TurboSquid -- I hope to replace these with original, more historically accurate works in the future.

The entirety of the project was done in Maya.

My search for references was pretty interesting. Because there are obviously no photographs of this ship, I began by relying on pictures of miniature models, but no two were exactly the same. So after a bit more research at my school's library, I found a digital copy of the book "Ship Decoration: 1630-1780" by Andrew Peters. It featured extensive detail, not only on the history of the ship's design, but on the carpenters and craftsmen who designed and built it. It included a lot of drawings done by 17th century artists that proved to be vital in creating an accurate replica.

Check out the history behind the real Le Soleil Royal! :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ship_Soleil_Royal_(1670)