Intro
After working on the engine room in the Ruby E, I figured I would tackle the engine room on the HMCS Yukon. The engine room in the Yukon is significantly bigger (of course!) and has all kinds of cool gears, pipes, flywheels, etc. and I figured it would make for a much “meatier” project.
Below are results of my engine room study on the HMCS Yukon.
Yukon Engine Room Photogrammetry
The first part of the project was to build a model of “just” the engine room knowing that I wanted to “stitch it in” to the overall Yukon model at some point. My point of integration would be the small entrance hole into the engine room near the lower half of the starboard side. The reason for this is that there are features that extend to the outside of the ship (as opposed to just a blank airspace leading to the entrance/exit). This is required to connect the model pieces.
Dive 1
My first dive was just a quick foray into the engine room while I was on my 7th dive of the overall Yukon project. My goal was really just to see if I could take some pictures of the engine room and connect it to the outside part of the ship. It consisted of 157 photos of the engine room. Below is a screenshot showing the result.
Below are a couple photos from the engine room and the “connective tissue” leading to the outside hull. Note that there were probably 10+ photos to stitch these areas together. You might be able to get a sense of the problem if you tried to do this in an area where there was just blank space.
Dive 2
On the next dive, I went back with the goal of building out the entire engine room area. I took an additional 550 pictures inside the engine room for a total of about 800 between the two dives.
The hardest part of these photogrammetry models is how to depict the inside spaces. There is an exterior “skin” from the model that doesn’t allow the viewer to really see inside. Similar to the Ruby E, I started experimenting with the best way to depict it.
One interesting aspect of this is that the “point cloud” allows the viewer to actually see parts of the wreck in a semi-transparent way which works pretty well.
Removing the Exterior “Skin”
Here is what the exterior of the model looks like without any of the “skin” removed.
Obviously, the “problem” with this is that you can’t see the engine room!
Challenge: What I did was remove the cameras that made up the exterior based on tie points. This can definitely be tricky. One of the “tricks” I used was that I separated photos into different folders and then “filtered” photos based on tie points and ONLY removed photos from the main model and NOT photos that were in the “Engine Room” folders. Again — be careful when taking steps like this on a model!
Below are some montages of how I filtered photos by tie points and then I could remove them before building the model.
Final Model
The final model has the outside hull removed and shows the engine room area in detail.
Next Step
After I finished with the engine room, I figured why not try to trace the entire corridor from the engine room through to the stern?!
Stay tuned for the results of that effort. It is pretty cool if I do say so myself. Here is a sneak preview of the point cloud. The engine room is on the left and the corridor runs to the right and you can see the props & rudders on the far right.
This is an extraordinary project you have undertaken. I look forward to continue my dives on the Yukon more than ever now.
Thanks, Paul! Wait until you see the corridor from the stern to the engine room. And, on top of that, I’ve got some immersive 360 degree video stuff I’m working on that is pretty mind-blowing!
This is amazing and mind-blowing work!
Thanks, Evan. Even better stuff to come in the next few weeks. 🙂
great shots of the props and rudder elevation
Thanks, Peter!