Queen Anne's Revenge (QAR)

While on vacation several years ago, Engineering Design Technology department head Jeff Levy and his family visited the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. The featured exhibit was the reclamation and underwater archaeological excavation of the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR).

A private dive team from Intersal, Inc. discovered a number of artifacts/items on the seabed near the Beaufort Inlet and it was determined that this was the ship wreck of the pirate Black Beard and his flagship the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

After Levy had many conversations with the museum’s curator, Paul Fontenoy, they decided that a digital reconstruction of this ship needed to be done. New River was selected to undertake this project due to the extensive background of the college’s Engineering Design Technology program in working with large 3D modeling, rendering and animation projects.

This project evolved into an in-depth 3 year multi-team project that involved reverse engineering drawings from archives that dated back to the 1600s. It also required the translation of French dialects and measurement systems that have not been used in nearly 300 years. The final project entails large format 2D prints, 3D models of each and every timber of the ship, assemblies, animations and an interactive 3D model that allows the museum’s patrons to navigate the ship in Real Time.