Aerial shot progress

 

It's about to get busy with Christmas, just a bit of time to tinker with last night's previs shot of the ship arriving. This version has the ship dropping down through the clouds. It's a slower, more plausible staging for a ship that is hundreds of metres long.

The calm before the Christmas storm

 We're back from visiting Clara's dad for a couple of days. It's almost Christmas Eve, and we have a visitor coming: Clara's brother, Chris. So it's all hands on deck; housework, food prep, and buying the last gifts—we're terrible, I know!

Still a little time for Blender.

Terrain sculpting and testing. I've expressed my dissatisfaction to the director about my aerial shot output. I need to construct some rough previs tests that can demonstrate different approaches to the shot.

Separate terrain assets: foreground and background

Big looming peaks in the background

Playing with previously discarded terrains...

 Quick pre-vis terrain animation...

Another concept...still to animate...

Ship drops through the clouds..

True SKY 3 Beta 7

Oh my word, what an improvement!

Improved clouds: Performance, UI changes, and additional cloud presets/types. More to come in the new year.

Christmas is upon us

 Every December, I seemingly stop being able to use a calendar and fall into a state of shock when it gets to about the 20th. I become dimly aware of the need to buy presents and cards and wear woollen jumpers that are tastelessly decorated in fir trees. I've arrived at that festive finding out phase of the month. I imagine that my Blender output will be briefly knocked back for a few days.

Until then...

Yesterday was tedious as heck.

I explored how to reinstall the custom (Quixel Megascan) terrain materials library for use with True Terrain. It really doesn't look like True Assets can place materials directly in True Terrain's selector. I could be wrong, but it's too late now. I spent several hours manually adding the materials. I'll add one more set of materials later, the colour-based palette set for lightweight terrains.

Quixel materials in the True-Terrain menu for the win!

I continue to explore big terrain options for the aerial shot.

32km with a telephoto lens. Shoot long!

I'm thinking that you get more bang for your buck if you shoot with a telephoto, narrow the field of view and bring the distant places closer. This lets you amp up the terrain detail into the distance because camera culling will remove so much of the foreground. I will do a test render with a nearly static camera and a ship flying through the view. 

Instability testing

True SKY 3 has a final update of the year coming on Monday. I'll hold back on testing more until it's in place. No point in testing a version of the product that will be gone before the engineers can look at it. The chaps at TrueVFX are working full pelt! True SKY is their flagship product. Even in early access, they want to make a great impression, which they have.

Happy Blenderversary

December 19th is the day I decided to learn Blender and start this blog! 

Lets go on a journey; a purge and reinstallation journey

 The Blender stability problems I've recently experienced could be due to multiple factors. The most likely three causes are:  

• Blender 5.0 bugs 
• Addon incompatibility
• New bleeding-edge tech like True SKY 3 (which we forgive because early access status is a developer's way of coming clean about a product not being "perfected".)

They could also be caused by my too-expensive-to-replace machine rapidly going Kaput... let's not dwell on that idea...


Note: It's 13 months since my last deep-clean. See this November 2024 post.

It might have been okay to see how Blender 5.0.1 works out before doing this massive and potentially painful task, but cleaning up is good practice. I was running with a lot of addons that are just clutter. I should only install the things I need day-to-day and then install other stuff as and when I need them. 

So for future purges, let's make a "shopping list" and some per-addon tips. 

Key Settings changes:

Default renderer: Cycles using GPU, Optix and Vulkan

Narrator: Although these settings were applied, he didn't select GPU in the Render tab and spent several minutes staring in disbelief as his fastest-GPU-in-the-galaxy appeared to crawl like an arthritic tortoise. Proper settings soon applied, thankfully.

Basic Workspaces: A new one for my version of tri-view, plus one dedicated to scatters, and one for asset management.

Mission Critical Addons

• Node Wrangler
• Copy Attribute Menu
• CleanPanels
• Loop Tools
• F2 Make Edge/Face
• MACHIN3 Tools 
• Grid Modeller
• Geo-Scatter
• True-Vault
• True-Assets
• True Terrain 3.1
• True SKY 3
• Cableator
• Bagapie
• Photographer

Nice to have:

• HardOPS
• Box Cutter
• Fluent Materializer
• Arborea
• Render Raw
• UV Flow
• G-Scatter

I had to remove:

• Engon
• Lens Sim
• Light Wrangler (proven to have an issue with True SKY 3, but now apparently a fix was just released.)

Both were causing errors in the logging that might be nothing, but could be related to the problems. I want both back; Engon is required for interacting with some assets. Lens Sim offers the best approach to real-world lens work.


Very not critical: Chocolate background #3D393AFF
I like the idea of Blender 5.0 being colour-coded so that I instantly know that I'm using it. This is important when you are trying to use an earlier LTS version of Blender for the film project.

Back to work

Testing for the stability issue soon revealed that it is still present. Possibly even worse. I could get a render error without even using scatters.

True TERRAIN down the drain :-(

I proved that running with Geo-Scatter and True-Sky 3 is not working for me, but I need to prove that running without True SKY 3 does work. To this end, I've set up a scene that uses an HDRI for lighting.

Blank out the HDRI output from the background 

I'm now down a rabbit hole of creating a half-decent scatter that renders OK, which I can then switch to True SKY 3 to prove it causes the render to fail.

It's a mess, so I'm having another try...or three.

I need to read more about how to scatter grasses and small plants.

Before I finish this, a new beta of True SKY 3 might drop, which fixes the issue. There's a new version of True Terrain due in the new year, too. 

Bits and pisces

 Firstly, more crashes. It could be that I've slowly developed unrealistic expectations about the size of terrains that I render. Rendering terrains with 50+ million faces would have been bonkers not a long time ago. Although it's possible to render these massive terrains with Camera culling, when you add True SKY 3 and scatters to the mix, I'm likely experiencing memory exhaustion.

Release 5.0.1 

Expected today. Lots of bug fixes are incoming. Hopefully!

Marker style renders

One of the best near-future concept artists, Maciej Rebisz, has released his Blender Compositor group for turning Blender into a big pack of marker pens. Download it from Gumroad.

This makes my ships look more like Ian Stead's excellent stuff.

So good, you can smell the pen solvents!

Hitem 3D

I've now nearly exhausted my first trial month's allowance on the generative 3D tool Hitem3D. Will I continue to use the service? For one more month, maybe.

You get three free respins for each output.

There is no denying that a generative tool has its uses. How hard/long would it take to retopologise and fix one of the better characters it provided? I think the best outputs come from good photographs rather than Midjourney.

Sparrow Films work

I keep trying to produce the Sci-Fi mountains backdrop that Drew has asked for. I'm not quite there yet, but since I love creating terrains, it's not a big imposition, though it keeps me from making progress on my Shamrayev personal project.

Not what I need, but quite nice terrain patterns

Weekend Reflections

 We're soon going to be getting very busy with Christmas. There's talk of decorating Leo's bedroom before the holiday. It's only me doing the talking, though. I have four more days of work, which should mean lots of Blender time, but I should take a break.

Sparrow project:

I need to create some more landscape concepts. Drew, the director, wants to see more dramatic and more extraterrestrial terrain. I think we're going in a bit lower, which should make it easier to pull off from a viewing distance, but we'll need to account more closely for surface details.

The other landscape artists shared some valuable insights into Geo-Scatter's masking system. Apparently, using Bezier curves to cull scatters is not efficient because it still includes the full scatter in the pipeline, and then removes things under the mask. I've not seen anything documented about their masking mechanics, but Gabe says this comes from Maarten Nauta, so I should definitely take note. Actually, I should seek out Maarten's free YouTube content. Gabe is on his Patreon, so he probably gets 75% more of Maarten's genius leakage. 

Big terrains!! Drew wants the peaks more jagged.

Blender School

I quickly ran through the introduction to Matplus, the Substance Painter-like/lite implementation for a layer-based material creation tool. It's limited to Blender 4.5, and I only have it installed on my secondary machine, which does materials/supporting tasks. Nice! It wasn't wildly complex, and it's definitely inspired by Substance Painter's workflow. You must have really good UVs on your models. You start by baking out the PBR maps that you need. You can apply the layers using various masks and painting options. It is nowhere near as feature-rich or as performant as Substance Painter, but it's in its early days, and it's right inside Blender, so there's no need to swap between them all the time.

I must, must, must:

• Finish the environmental design course.
• Complete the Hard OPs course from the Blender Bros, which has gathered dust for a year.
• Prepare for a purge and reinstallation of Blender when 5.0.1 drops next week.

So key things to remember:

Matplus is a tool that you used in a self-contained workflow. You prep your model, get the UVs in good shape, and then go off and create your materials. Once you are happy, you export the PBR maps, which are applied like any others. If you need to iterate, return to the MatPlus project and repeat the steps. So Matplus is not an extension of Blender's own material/shader creation. 

One is a MatPlus project, the other has PBR map outputs from the project.

CG Characters

This time last year, I downloaded a free sample from CG Characters, a team that was creating really cheap, mid-quality human scans. Their library contained a wild array of genre figures in cool poses. I was tempted to get the set but forgot about it. Well, I hunted them down to see if their library has grown since then. Naughty tinkers have not grown their library as promised; they have a second library that is focused on science fiction characters, available both in various poses and as a T-posed animatable character. Not rigged, though. These figures look slightly better in terms of capture, and their costumes are certainly better -- still a bit cos-play, but the details are more than good enough for background figures.

Not super detailed, but great for medium to far shots

Alexa in her various action poses.

Shamrayev Project

Critique time!

It's dawn on a Sunday morning. The house is quiet, and I'm two coffees down. Lets do some crit!

I stopped work on it last night because it felt like I was tired and letting compromises creep in. A fog had dropped on my critical faculties, and I was at that stage when my modelling carried on by itself, without enough care for design or build quality. A perfect time to stand back, reflect, and take a look with a fresh eye.

So, actually, I'm still happy with the overall effort. There are some places where more care and some rebuilding are needed, but not too much. How is the 70-30 rule applied? Well, it's slightly off, but not enough to worry about. There are areas where the ship is not too cluttered, where the details are already in the realm of the small. So the Big:Medium:Small approach also isn't being applied perfectly, but it's better than it usually is, for sure.

There's no wild rebuild required, just lots of refinement. The next significant effort will be the engineering section. I originally planned for exposed detailing and pines to go behind the shield, but I have decided that some of it will go in front and help pipe up those water tanks. The tanks could become a torus. Are the "ball" tanks too testicular? I still want to include a fold-away mechanism, but I'll not worry about that during this initial design pass.

More later!

Shamrayev Project: Big to Medium.

 Progress report on the Shamrayev. It's holding on by its fingernails. The muscle memory is so strong and so hard to resist. I build something and automatically have the urge to noodle out nurnies and greebling. It always adds up to fine details that don't stay coherent and nearly always clutter ineffectively.

Be cautious. Be consistent. Waiting until the final step to decide where to add the tiny details. Mostly. There are a few elements where I stepped too far, but not too far. The hanger doors are verging in small details, but I have forgiven myself. The Comms module at the front briefly went into small detail, until I deleted it and started again.

I decided that the mission capsules are too sticky-outy and relegated them to a more enclosed space that is flush with the command section.

 

The Comms module looked interesting, but every time I added something to it, it ended up messy. I elected to go simpler.

Three hanger doors built. The hanger is hollow and will be dressed out with two shuttles and a chargo handler drone. 

Next: Run down the whole ship and ensure that I'm happy with all the big shapes. There needs to be some breakup, here and there. A big radar dish assembly somewhere near the comms module. I may add some cargo canisters in the spaces between the mission pods, hanging on racks. Stuff like that.

Shamrayev Project: Block-out finale

 I'm happy with the overall proportions, but the "big" (big:medium:small) details, such as the shapes of the command module, propulsion until, et al are still to be finalised.

I'm seriously considering adding a fold-in mechanism for the sails. It really should not be too hard. I have a Rigify course that mainly covers using the free rigging addon for humans, but it should refresh my memory on how bones and armatures work.

First, I'll look at the command section. It's going to carry a lot of the detail of the front of the ship, which is going to limit the amount of detail of the hab module section.

This makes me think that the hab modules won't be as padded/inflated as earlier sketches suggest. There are padded plates, but they are really in the fine details.

I think I need more sketching before I progress.

Shamrayev Project: Test Trusses

 After yesterday's progress, I turned the block elements of the structural trusses into actual, detailed trusses. They are detailed, and we're not about details yet, but I really needed to see what delicate structures would look like. They took a couple of hours to lash together; they're not accurate, but are close enough at first look.

Do the rings need to be rebuilt so that the framework gauge matches the straight trusses? Probably. It always looks a lot better when truss frames have a consistent size, but I will investigate. It could be that so long as all the rings match, that's enough.

I'm reasonably happy with the results, but now I see how the masts are screaming to have a working mechanism, so that they can fold in. It will be last year's rigging torture all over again? Hopefully not!

Shamrayev Project: Block-out one

 I didn't want to jump into modelling until the ship's overall design was finalised. However, my shonky drafting skills make it harder to make precise ship layouts, so we'll use Blender to quickly iterate form changes...importantly, none of this is going to be a final model. It's just another kind of sketch.

I might print out some layouts, then sketch over them for when I want to produce some more detailed illustrations without modelling fine details.

First Block-out

The core. A first bash at the proportions 200-ish metres long, 10m diameter (narrowest)

After some playing around. Two beams at the back for extra support

I wanted the engineering section to have more mass, so I duplicated the main cylinder and gave it a taper. It has just enough of the Soviet rocket vibe to give me good feelings, and it may be here to stay.

Tidy up the forward beams. Running the front beams further along the hull.

Ball tanks FTW. They've become clichés, but if handled well, they could be nice.

Critique time

So what's good and what's not right?

Good

1) Overall, happy with the proportions. Smaller spin habs, a bit shorter with a bigger diameter. That would be a design concession to reality. For 1g of simulated gravity, you would need these habs to be spinning at mad speeds, resulting in a sickness-inducing Coriolis effect. The compromise is that these habs generate 0.2-0.5g. They are not used in transit, only when "parked" in orbit.

2) The superstructure is already looking a lot more like engineering and less of a modelling riff. The 2018 version was a step in the right direction, but the design now benefits from two supporting aft beams, which look like they could handle more plausible loads, without magical materials. 

3) The detail of the engineering section was a break in the rules. It's a detail, and maybe too soon, but It gives a new Soviet rocket vibe that suddenly has me wanting to add some more historical references. That said, I'll wait until the main Big and Medium elements are tied down before I start making any more references.

Not so...

1) Currently, the lines of the main body are a bit broken by sections all with seemingly different diameters. It could be cleaner. Although this might be nullified as more details are finalised. I could shrink down the gaps and unify some of the sizes to make it look cleaner? I'll try that.

2) The earlier sails were more interesting. The originals didn't bottom out so close to the centre. The 2018 versions have a cool shape. I like some of the elements and will change the shape to test various sizes and configurations.

3) I wonder if I need to build the superstructure first. Currently, the superstructure is solid, but it needs to be trusses and structural elements that will look more spindly. I think it's important not to get locked down yet. I'll keep an open mind and be prepared to shift away from any particular element.

Shamrayev project begins

 I'm not rushing into modelling. I wanted to do some sketching out to make sure that I do a proper rethink of the design. The early sketches have guided me to the following decisions:

1. The configuration should be structurally sound. The sail masts could be more efficient at bearing load if they're biased toward forward acceleration. This means that the aft beam is angled more steeply and might be larger.
   
   
2. The superstructure mustn't be too chunky. Load-bearing beams that are the wrong proportions (too thick) would weigh too much themselves and be self-defeating.
   
   
3. Modular, as each component of the ship could be detached from the frame, and swapped out with a replacement, which just then gets wired and piped up to the rest of the vessel. And yet unified; all the older designs look mismatched, with some parts looking a bit Sci-Fi, while other parts looking realistic and NASA-like.
   
   
4. Test the design against all criteria at each step of the design process. This means designing with the Big:Medium:Small principle and the 30/70 rule. Maybe get a second or more opinions as the design progresses.
   
   
5. Strictly no greebles. If it's in the design, it fulfils a specific purpose.
   
   
6. Keep to the spirit of the original design. Through the redesign process, let's keep one foot in the old design. Keep the component list and basic arrangement. I like these aspects of the design; it just needs a lot of refinement.
   
   
7. No compromises. If I get tired, I stop and recharge rather than rattle off work to race to the finish line.

Early design notes and sketches

Mood board 1

I looked through some designs, new and old. The 2010 Leonov remains a favourite, although I'm aiming at something that looks more spindly and structural. The starship from Avatar is a brilliant example of this - I love how organic the core truss looks. There's the movie and concept version of the ship from Project: Hail Mary. Really cool work by Ivan Weightman, who started out as a concept modeller on Gravity, which is a perfect fit for the film. The personal piece by Maciej Rebisz is way closer to the book's version. I love Maciej's work, and he primarily works with Blender. On the subject of Blender users, Rasmus Poulson (AKA Technouveau) remains a huge inspiration. His work is more on the Sci-Fi side, with his Star Wars-inspired designs being some of the best -- better than some of the official ships. One ship he designed that took my breath away:

This is an incredible "have your cake and eat it" design that combines the fun and creativity of a Sci-Fi combat carrier with plenty of plausible engineering. The yellow superstructure gives a sense of something real, not a bunch of hollow 3D model parts. Although I'm not super keen on how the structure connects to the main ship, that visual mess is, in the end, a feature, not a bug, as it breaks away from the ship designs that are too sleek and regular...dull, dull, dull.  

Takeaways for the Shamrayev:

• A balance between the cool overall shapes and a sense of visual mess. 
• Maybe the crew hab module needs to be a smaller part of the overall design?
• Maciej Rabisz Mars Cycler has fold-away masts. These look very cool. Something to think about? Some element of folding away might make sense. Possibly for high acceleration (2G+ spurts)?