The game's afoot!

 Gabe has provided a Gaea-created terrain that I will attempt to match in World Creator. He's not gone out of his way to make this extra-difficult; it doesn't use any wildly complex erosion forms. However, it's still shows that Gaea output can just look very natural straight out of the door. This could still be a challenge.

I should have specified that the results should be shown in Blender, because the test is for terrain forms, not Gaea's native rendering/materials capabilities.

 Gabe's challenge. See his work: https://www.artstation.com/gabe_dobsky

Start of the week

Last week's aims:

Scene 002: I made progress by going to the asset preparation. Mostly the city and the depot, which are close to completion. That's a tick! I will finish the scene this week.

Superhive trades: Some thought. Nothing structured, nothing like a plan. Given that I paid out a fortune to get a porch roof repaired, I really need to focus more on bringing in some money. Put this into this week's aims.

Blender School: I actually looked into two areas:

Random Flow
I followed the more recent tutorial, and I have a practice exercise, the results of which I will show off tomorrow. It's still an amazing tool, but you need to use it right; too many users think it's all you need for surface detail, but it's got to be balanced with designed elements, or it looks obviously like a lot of random greebles.

Panels, Extrusions, and Slices. Scratching the surface of Random Flow!

HardOps/Boxcutter
Oh gawd, I think I have completely lost all the knowledge. I struggled to do something really basic with Boxcutter, and the notes I created in this blog didn't help much. A proper refresher will be required. Frustrating, but at least I know it's an issue.

This week's new aims:

Complete Gabe's challenge, today. Strict time-box! I need to complete Scene 002, this week.

The Random Flow practice exercise: Today/Tomorrow. This is a personal effort that shouldn't bleed into the working week, but if it isn't finished by the end of tomorrow, it won't be. One of the reasons it didn't get finished is that I am trying to be a lot more active during weekends. I spend much of one day getting out into the world and taking photos. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasdigital/

Photography

Some of yesterday afternoon's efforts:

City Centre from Parkwood Springs

Looking back towards home, from Parkwood Springs

Moments of Clarity

Yesterday, something happened. In a single moment, a destructive/wasteful thought-cycle went from all-consuming to nearly gone. Is it gone for good? We will see, but it feels good -- it's weird because we can end up clinging to these things, like an injury you feel compelled to keep prodding, until you almost feel like you need it.
 

Metabolic Clarity

I'm starting a ten-day period of continuous glucose monitoring to look more deeply into my metabolic health. I check my blood glucose levels a few times per day, but these snapshots can miss the bigger picture -- are insulin spikes happening between my checks? What's happening through the night? Maybe my regular waking up at 3am is down to glycogen exhaustion. Maybe not. We will see.

Blender

Scene 002

I made good progress at the end of last week, getting the city mostly done. I placed the city on the terrain and found that I'd underestimated the elevation changes, so the outer part of the city sits below the landscape. Next week, I will create a terrain cutout of the city area, add it to the city file, and find a way to map the city correctly onto the ground. I can also use this to better handle the city border, making the city's edge more gradual.

Tomorrow morning, I will do a Star of the Week post, looking at what was missed from last week's aims and what needs to be added next week.

Terrain therapy

I keep forgetting that the latest version of True Terrain has a broken loader for mask files. I confirmed this by loading up a backup earlier version of Blender and creating a terrain with masks. You'll see how the mask colours the rock debris correctly.

True Terrain 5.1

For now, True Terrain 5.2 displaces the mask files so they don't line up with the corresponding topology. Note the textures are different, but the masks are consistent, and you can see how the boulders and pebbles are painted onto the wrong places.

I hope team True-VFX can put out a fix soon. At least I have this workflow fix where I can do the initial creation in Blender 4.5, then load the terrain into Blender 5.2 to continue with working masks.

True Terrain 5.2

Blender-School: Random Flow

 The city I'm building for Scene 002 continues at a slow pace. I realise I could save time by using Blender Guppy's excellent Random Flow add-on. It's great, but I always struggled to remember how to use it effectively, so lets get into it...

Documentation (updated recently after a significant change to the add-on's UI)

Random Flow

"Random Flow is a random mesh generator designed for fast and easy hard surface prototyping and concept art. This is a fast-changing add-on with lots of new functionalities in the future."

For science fiction environments, you often need to model a lot of surface detail that isn't particularly purposeful. Often, you are breaking up empty space with geometry and lines. Random Flow lets you quickly apply surface details by creating face-based panels and extruding them.

Once installed, you bring up Random Flow's master panel using Shift+F1 (see above).

• Usually, Random Flow details consist primarily of Random Panels, which break up surfaces without significantly changing the form of the target object.
  
  
• The details created depend on the size of the target faces; larger faces produce larger panels, while smaller areas naturally yield smaller panels. 
  
  
• Randomisation is applied to generated/floating elements that are cut out of the target object, ensuring all changes are non-destructive. Randomisation can be applied in Object or in Edit modes.

Random Panels Page 1

Random Panels Page 2

There are a dizzying number of parameters. As Blender Guppy says, he could make the tool simpler, but such an effort would rob you of incredible fine control. 

The operator presets are a great addition; I should get familiar with the effects of each one.

Stressy

 

What a strange creature is man, that he would choose to cage himself so willingly.
- Masamune Shirow (Appleseed)        

In a Dr Frankenstein move, I took my generative-AI head and placed it on some other generative AI-bodies. Cool, eh? <lightning strike>

Due to strike action, I am doing my work in the morning, so I can be back to see what damage the builders have caused. I am getting the skin-crawl feeling I experienced with dealing with conmen in the past. I will be watching them like a hawk. 

City build

 Scene 002

I'm taking a break from the terrain materials. Yesterday I took Gabe's previs depot model and shrank it down into something I could place into the scene. It definitely works better than my rushed lash-up. I may need better materials.

Next, I started to build out the city on the island/coastline. Creating a low-poly city that has enough detail to be sold as a real place requires quite a lot of mesh noodling. While slowly setting up a base mesh, I was aware of how well Blender Guppy's Random Flow would handle mid-level details. 

I haven't used Random Flow for a while, and I've forgotten the finer details of its procedural system. I should watch the recent beginner's video about it.

True Terrain Material Testing

Looking at the pre-built material, which I intend to do a breakdown for:

True Terrain 5.2 (there's more)

 I found another bug! Something stops rendering, resulting in an error message that warns that a blog directory was not cleaned up. Fortunately, manually deleting that directory allows rendering to continue.

The True-VFX guys are on the fix. Hopefully, TT5.2 will get a corrective bugfix-focused release quite soon.

To celebrate its release, I should create a quick terrain scene render. Ha ha ha ha ha...<that's so peak ADHD leaping onto another project>

True Terrain 5.2

 

I spent a lot of time on the terrain in scene 002. Not much to show for it because render times are fairly long. I hope to add a couple more layers to the materials without causing the blackout problem, which is reportedly being fixed in Blender 5.2/True Terrain 5.2. 

A snippet of Scene 002

I check that this is true, and discover that True Terrain 5.2 is OUT! What the heck!?!

<a few minutes later>

True-Terrain 5.2 installed okay. I did a render test. Okay. I created a new scene and got carried away with the polygon count, probably 200 million polygons. Hard crash with a system reset. <glum>

It seems stable when I don't get carried away, although new scenes appear to present a bug when using masks. 

The mask should match the displacement, but by default, it is offset. I raised a bug on True-VFX's GitHub.

Scene 002

Maximal effort today and the weekend to push the scene forward. I will see if I can add a coastline and maybe some mountain tips, with darker rock and snow.

Is it scatter time, yet?

Blender School: A look at rock scatters 

I still feel like I need either a system, an approach, or a workflow for handling pebble scatters. Geo-Scatter is an amazing tool for managing instanced terrain scatters; it has so many features and functions that I don't really understand, so I never use it. Deep-in-the-weeds GeoScatter practice should have been on the cards a long time ago.

Better...but not looking as natural as I'd like.

Clump Distribution

Changing to Clump Distribution often caused Blender to crash. This was probably because CD is expensive. A CD scatter places a mother object, then some child objects around the mother. It's great for dense formations, but you need to start with modest scatter densities, or you will exhaust your system and likely crash.

Temp rocks in the scatter. They do the job when scatter tweaking

The official docs are honest about CDs' cost:

JUUUUUUUUUNE

 Shout-out to the BBC sitcom from my childhood, Terry & June. Many, if not most, episodes would end with hapless middle-aged husband, Terry, in some comedic high-speed crisis calling out for his wife, "JUUUUUUUUUNE".



So it goes that hapless middle-aged Blender user, me, calls out that we have already arrived at the Middlemonth (t.m). Where does the time go? I can never find it, except in my failing memory.

I'm going to make Monday mornings my Start of the Week report, where I plan what I'll commit to and deliver on the upcoming week. Just like work! Maybe I should do a Start of Month too, but let's learn to crawl before we run a Marathon.

Scene 002

Progress is being made slowly. But it is progress! I'm still not satisfied with the materials, as they're being applied. Let's do a proper evaluation, comparing what we've got with what we want. They think about what needs to be done to bridge the gap. The effort has felt too much about vibes and feelings. "Do I like this?" doesn't get you onto the next step.

We potentially have a new Environment Design lead. I should compile a list of questions to see if I can extract wisdom from the possible new team leader.

Aim: The material must be completed this week; in fact, dressing should be progressing, if not complete.

Side note: Gabe has been busy finishing an interior environment, so he hasn't produced his "challenge" terrain using Gaea. I eagerly await his challenge!

Superhivemarket Trades

I need to start making money on the Superhivemarket Store. The website I set up is going to cost me another lump sum shortly. It will cost much more than I earned from the product I created. I need to make way more products!

Things I can make:

Terrains: This time, I'd create actual baked scenes rather than just displacement maps. 

Space vehicles: I can make some cool ones. I think that one loosely based on Project Hail Mary would sell quite well. 

Planet: I can create giant planet maps. I could create a pack of 5-6 for £10

The aim this week is to develop a plan, not to rush into production. The aim should be to deliver something by the end of June.

Blender School

I think I need to start revising and push to complete more training on new things. I've forgotten most of what I learned about HardOps, although I think it would come back quickly.

I've not used Fluent or Random Flow in over a year. They're a mystery to me now. This is why writing down new procedures is so important to me; it serves as a quick memory aid, as opposed to redoing the work, which takes longer and often goes wrong. A case in point, though. The use of Render layers, which I thought I'd effectively recorded in a post, got me very stuck. I missed some critical element that seemed to reset asset visibility when shifting between layers.

Photography

I've had a small dip in productivity because I have been making use of the great weather, getting out and taking lots of photographs. So much so that I am glancing sideways at new cameras. <Slaps own wrist>

Loxley Valley from High Riggs

Blender School: Titbits

Blender 5.2 is coming with a really important new feature: Texture Caching.

 Christopher3D provides a concise explanation clarifying that using the texture cache feature incurs a small performance cost due to additional calculations, but it's worth it for the massive efficiency gains.

How to Use the Texture Cache

1. Navigate to the Render Properties tab.
2. Scroll down to the Performance panel.
3. Enable Texture Cache and select Auto-Generate. 

When enabled, Blender automatically generates optimised .tx (tiled and mipmapped) files in a blender_tx/ folder next to your original images. These are regenerated from the source image whenever changes are made. 

Key Features and Options

• On-Demand Loading: Cycles only loads the precise texture tiles and resolutions needed for a given render bucket/tile. 
• Cache Eviction: An optional cache eviction mechanism unloads old, unnecessary textures from memory during rendering, significantly reducing peak RAM and VRAM usage. 
• Simplify Panel: In addition to existing Texture Limits, the Simplify panel includes a Texture Resolution percentage (e.g., 50% or 25%) to further limit the max resolution.

Surface Blend

I looked at blending object materials with ground textures a few weeks ago. This free addon handles the work rather nicely.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/surface-blend

Camera Rigging with CableCam, the cinematic camera rig for Blender.

To add a camera, open the N-tab and Import Cablecam.

A cable camera is installed on a rig that usually hangs on a cable, like a tiny cable car. The camera can then follow a path through the air and can turn and gimble while it travels down the cable.

The rig consists of the following components:

CableCambase:  A spring-loaded base from which the rest of the rig hangs off the cable. The Cablecambase comes with Child of and Clamp to constraints.

Librahead: A three-part carrier that holds the camera and provides an axis for movement: Pan left or right, Tilt up or down and a ring axis that allows limited roll.

Camera: By default, a Red Epic Camera.

Create/Connect cable

Use this tool to reset the camera to the origin with an included path. You can then edit the path in your scene. Once you set a keyframe, you can then move the CableCambase along the path.

Must.Crack.On

 I'm neither enjoying the Scene 002 materials nor making any notable progress on them. I'm finding myself jumping on housework and chores rather than face another iteration. This needs to end today. I need to move into the assets and dressing stage, pronto.

It's shared on Patreon! I'd better finish it then!

Housekeeping

On that score, I note that my Blender directory has reached 656GB (28,000 files in 1384 folders). There must be a ton of duplication and backup files. Today I will permit myself to do a careful and rather late spring-clean.

Edit: Deleting some add-on install files and all the backup Blend1 files reduced the directory to 529GB (25,000 files in 1313 directories).