Dressing her up

Animated wire-frames and simple 3D primitives in all their glory, but a pirate ship needs to be dressed up in a crafted 3D model and textures with a layer of fresh paint. 

Ready-to-use low poly models

ForPirate Sea Jam I've chosen to head over to the Unity Asset Store and buy an adorable low-poly pirate ship set from the good folks at Polysquid studios. 

The original asset set contained the whole ships as individual units without the possibility to separately manipulate parts of the ship. 

I thought it would be interesting to add animations like a turning wheel when the vessel is changing its course or a rotating top flag that moves according to the wind direction, but the original assets would not allow for that. So I sent an email to the creators of the 3D models asking if they please could split up the ships into separate parts. 

To my pleasant surprise Polyquid Studios replied and had published an updated version the next day on the Unity Asset Store. Yay!

The updated ship models now consists of several pieces that can be individually animated, including:

• Flag,
• Sail and mast
• Ship's wheel
• Hull
• Canons

The current version of Pirate Ship Jam does not yet include animation of the separate ship parts but the wireframe from the previous version has been replaced by a friendly pirate ship drifting on a stormy sea.

Jumping through file format hoops

Pirate Ship Jam is written in Rust using the game engine Bevy, which is not compatible with the file format provided by the Unity Asset Store. 

Fortunately there is a utility called Unity Package Extractor that can extract .unitypackage files and expose the models as FBX files. However, Bevy uses a format called GLTF for 3D assets.  The computer graphics software tool Blender to the rescue. It can be used to import FBX files, prepare the textures, and re-export the 3D models in a format suitable for Bevy, and presto we have a pirate ship in the scene.

Next up

As the 3D asset loading is in place, next up is attaching a rudder, setting sail, and finally making it possible to navigate the ship. 

Ship ahoy!