Herculaneum Boat

The Herculaneum boat was found during excavation work on the ancient shoreline of Herculaneum in 1982. It was found inverted on the shoreline, with the fore of the boat having been stoved in by other timber and debris from the eruption and completely destroyed. The hot pyroclastic flows that hit herculaneum carbonized the other 2/3rds of the boat and buried it, preserving it to this day. The vessel is 8.6 m long, 2.2 m wide, and about 85 cm deep. It was preserved up to the oarlocks, and most of the sternpost was preserved. After removing the boat from the shoreline, it sat in storage for awhile until a method was designer of flipping it over and excavating the inside. The boat is now on display at Herculaneum, along with other nautical equipment found on the shore including oars and a rudder fragment from other boats (but used here). The boat is yet to be fully published, the main resource for this reconstruction was an unpublished 2005 paper by Richard Steffy: https://tinyurl.com/mr2nzm7x

All modelling was done in Blender, materials for the boat were done in Substance Designer. This model was targeted for Sketchfab, so I experimented with using Vertex colors to add shading and variation to the boat. Sails are driven via shapekeys and bones, and the oars are rigged to bones so can be independently controlled. The beach scene was rendered in Blender Eevee. Sand materials are tweaked versions of materials from Grzegorz Baran's scan library. Water is from the Aquatiq library. Sky is from the excellent Physical Starlight and Atmosphere add-on. Ground scatter is from Bagapie. Background landscape was taken from Blender GIS add-on, which sources from Google Maps and other places.

Tri count: 66.8k
Vertex count: 35.6k