The HMS Victory is most famous for her role as the flagship of Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. One of the oldest commissioned warship in the world, she currently lies in No 2 Dry Dock at Portsmouth Naval Base in England under going restoration.
I had originally created a low poly model of the vessel for someone who is developing a sailing ship simulation. After that was completed, I enhanced the model with more details and better textures for rendering in Max. The Max version of the ship is still relatively low poly, weighing in at about 50K faces if you exclude the base, sails and the flags. All of the rigging and some of the detail objects such rudder chains, anchor ropes, hammock nets, etc were all done with renderable splines (finally found a use for that feature besides hair).
The main reference I used to build the ship was the book “Anatomy of the Ship series: The 100-Gun Ship Victory” by John McKay. I also had pictures of the actual ship and of museum quality models to help me with the texturing.
