My real time sinking animation

[Titanic Animations]

Hello all;

First thread here, I hesitated to create one as I don't usually do this but I've ran into a bit of a conundrum while animating the last few minutes of the animation. Everything from 11:40 PM - 1:30 AM were going relatively okay and then the ship basically never matched up with survivor accounts of where the waterline was. If it was matching in the bow it would be off in the stern, and vice-versa. This led me to thinking that I had modeled the sheer incorrectly (as what happened in the 1.0 animation) but as far as I can tell it is correct.

So here is what I have polished after 12 hours of keyframe revisions:

2:00 AM

Even though Bright noticed in Boat D at 2:05am that the forecastle head was just submerging then, its already submerging here. I can't resolve this without lowering the forward trim angle or raising the ship from the water. Boat C is lowered.

2:05 AM

The lights are beginning to dull further, and water has now reached the base of A-deck on the port side. Boat D is lowered and Bright observes that the forecastle head is submerging. Boat C reaches the water and occupants on board note the forward well deck was awash and is now submerged.

The forecastle can only be brought back above water to be accurate if the forward trim angle is reduced and the ship lowered in the water, which seems odd. why would the forward trim lessen? (or am I going crazy)

2:10 AM

Water reaches the roof of A-deck / floor of the Boat deck on the port side.

2:13 AM

The roof of the Bridge on the port side begins to submerge.

2:13:05 AM

Roughly 5 seconds later the ship dips downward at an alarming rate, and her port list lessens somewhat. A wave washes up the boat deck as this happens.

Just a short time later the forward funnel collapses as water begins to surround its base

2:16 AM

The 2nd funnel is submerged at the base by around 20 feet and collapses.

2:18 AM

The ships lights flicker then go out, just as the ship breaks in two.

Any thoughts on the waterline as shown here?

Regards,
Pheonix​

 

[Kyle Naber]

The waterline looks accurate to me. Especially just before the breakup. A lot of other animations show the ship too high out of the water, in my opinion. They forget that the ship isn’t just rotating, it’s sinking, therefore, the deck will be dissapearing as well as slanting steeper.

However, I think the port list would have returned after it settled on an even keel for a time. There are reports of the deck “rising” for a moment as the boat deck plunged, and I interpret that as the port list returning, as the port side dips down and the starboard side lifts up.

Also, this is quite a picky and spotty topic, but there are also a few accounts which talk about how some of the lights remained on after the break.

Overall, I can’t wait to see the finished product! It’s looking really good!

P.S. How will you depict the stern settling back?

 

[Titanic Animations]

Thanks, the port list does return a little. I'm away from my computer at the moment so I can't check but during the plunge the port list lessens to around 5 degrees, and then increases back to 7 or 9 degrees. I could be wrong about this though, I've changed so many angles and keyframes within the past 24 hours they're all a blur.

As for the breakup itself, I'm using this Breakup

 

[Itsstillthinking]

May i ask in what way are you basing this off? Obviously you are not basing it off the angles but the v-break theory? I personally think there is no real evidence for the v-break theory, but anyway keep up the great work!

 

[Titanic Animations]

Small update, the first 5 minutes are being rendered at the moment. I rendered out a frame from Murdoch's pov as the iceberg is spotted.

It looks like a black berg, but its actually textured white.

 

[Itsstillthinking]

Thats one thing i love about the 3d animations coming now, it lets us see views that otherwise we could not see. Amazing Murdoch saw it as soon as he did

 

[Kyle Naber]

Another thing I noticed in your original simulation was that the final moments seemed a bit odd to me. When the stern gets pulled back up out of the water, post-break, the stern achieves 90 degrees (which isn’t impossible) with the break location just below the surface. In my opinion, if the stern were to go vertical, it would do so very, very low in the water, probably at the well deck.

 

[Titanic Animations]

I agree, I would post and update on the breakup but there is next to nothing to show. Everything has to be scrapped because the angle and placement of the ship itself is off when the breakup begins. That is why I'm redoing the entire thing with 2.1. I only have 37 frames keyframed in the original 2.0 breakup which is around 1.6(?) seconds of footage. Nothing of which is visible above the waterline.

I'm loving the openness of everyone here though and the insights so many people have. In the past I've mostly just done reading and research by myself so being able to ask others questions or have them ask me something is a real treat.

 

[Itsstillthinking]

Lot of good people here!

 

[Kyle Naber]

Nothing of which is visible above the waterline.

I’ve wondered if survivors really saw the ship split apart, or if the stern settled back without the bow and they could see that it had broken.

 

[Itsstillthinking]

It all depends on where you where. Alfred White's position allowed him to see it clearly.

Also once the stern settled back, the break was then clearly visible so they might have reference that on seeing the front half of the stern

 

[Kyle Naber]

I’m sad to hear that the 2.0 version is cancelled!

 

[Itsstillthinking]

Luckily 2.1 is in the works!

 

[Titanic Animations]

2.0 was accurate to a degree but got worse and worse as time went on due to a keyframe mishap. The way my animation software works you can set one keyframe, then another, and the computer will "guess" where the object should be between those two keyframes.

So the waterline at the collision is simple, its where it normally would have been. So that keyframe is simple. I have to stop the animation one frame before the breakup because that is a separate file all together, so I know where the waterline should be at the moment of the breakup. The computer then guesses the vertical distance of the ship between those two keyframes. Now obviously I have to go in and adjust it because the ship just didn't sink sink sink sink sink, it sank to E-deck relatively quickly, then slowed down quite a bit, then sped up a little, and then plunged downwards.

When I was putting in the keyframe for 2:15 am, right when the plunge started, for some reason I raised the ship by an entire deck, 9ft out of the water. I don't know why I did it but it happened. The change was made right about the time rendering began on 12:15 AM, because that was the last keyframe that had the accurate vertical location. Every subsequent keyframe for the angle of trim down by the bow and the starboard and port lists were off because the ship was ever so slowly coming up out of the water. Practically unnoticeable until 1:15 am when the waterline isn't where its supposed to be, and then again at 1:30 where its about 5ft off, and then again at 2:05am where its nearly 9ft too high up.

I could have continued the animation, and chosen camera angles to mask the waterline to save time but I didn't want to. I'm striving for accuracy to the best of my personal ability. Everytime I find something new about the sinking, I add it into my "script" which has been constantly being updated since December of 2015. Things get moved around as I find out more stuff, deleted all together when something isn't true or based off a rumor, and added in when I find something I had previously not known.

So knowing that 2.0 was getting more and more inaccurate as it went along was enough for me to say "no more". I stopped the rendering process went in and fixed the keyframes and then I basically decided to start over from scratch. Both to include the new sky (purple sky is the bane of my existence) and to show better camera angles after taking a photography course online and playing around with focal lengths rather than having a static 35mm shot throughout the entire process.

Right now the renderfarm is proceeding with rendering out 11:38-11:39PM. It is going rather quickly due to the distance of the camera from the model (father away = less data to be stored in the image = = less render time per frame). Roughly 14 hours per minute of footage, once the camera begins the closeup shots its going to range anywhere from 28-34 hours per minute to render if it stays the same render rate of 2.0.

Hope this clears some things up.

 

[Aaron_2016]

2.0 was accurate to a degree but got worse and worse as time went on due to a keyframe mishap. The way my animation software works you can set one keyframe, then another, and the computer will "guess" where the object should be between those two keyframes.............

Reminds me of the problems I had with Daz Studios 3D. A single misplaced keyframe could (and frequently would) throw off the animation sequence. When I first toyed with the software my Titanic model kept levitating each time I rotated the model. It took a while to figure out what was wrong as finding the specific keyframe was mostly trial and error. Keep up the good work. The success of the finished project will make all the trouble and strife worth it. It also means future historians can view the video and incorporate it in their research.


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