Anchor Chain & Drum

ollowing reference material, such as photographs, can have its pros and cons.

It can be rewarding to find new reference images online, of objects from different angles; to help better aid the accuracy of a 3D model. At the same time, for me at least, it is very easy to get lost in the detail of trying to precisely recreate things from real life.

Take the anchor chain and drum below that I modelled. Although not entirely complete, the bulk majority of the model is done. I didn't have any close-up reference images of chains from crab fishing vessels in the 70's, so I had to use the contemporary equivalent (from the TV show Deadliest Catch) with some creative licence here and there to age it all (i.e. taking the design and construction from an engineering perspective and stripping it all back). The result turned out quite well.

Overall, looking at the broader picture has worked great and I think I'll use this approach in the future. So long as it conveys what the object really is (and not get caught up in the pin point accuracy), no general viewer will notice!

Jason Bartlett ©

To create all the chain, I only needed to model one link. Then, I could simply duplicate it along a curve as many times as I needed and adjust from there. Once I had created that single link, I had to make sure it was UV unwrapped before duplication. This is not only good practise, before copying something loads of times, but helps later down the line from the headache of having to do a ton of unwrapping for each duplicated object (which in turn could generate a poorly optimised space when combining into one UV layout). The objects, then if parented and exported all as one, can share the same single UV set for every link making texturing even easier!

Jason Bartlett ©

I had a lot of fun tweaking the spiralled bezier curves to give the impression the anchor chain link was coiled and wound around the drum.

Thanks for reading :)

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