Rock it! V2

 I bought an addon a few weeks ago called Rock it! It's a nice procedural rock generator, like Rockify.

I went to see the documentation before giving it a test and discovered that a separate v2 has been released. I was annoyed that it was released as a separate add-on, but it looked much expanded and was relatively cheap, so I bought the new version. If I had read the page more thoroughly, I'd have discovered that you can get it for free if you already have version 1. Ho hum!

So here's an overview of Version 2

Rock Type (1-9)

Choose from the following types of rock materials:

Resolution:

Sets the mesh resolution. Higher means bigger meshes, more detail, more resource-hungry.

 

Scale:1 with 86,000 faces

Scale: 3 with 3,357,000 faces

Extra Shapes

Places outcropping rock onto the underlying mesh.

Adjust the scale and density of these outcroppings.

S:3/D:3                                       S:7/D:4                                         S:4/D:7

Small Detail breaks up the surface of the mesh using finer details.

Small details

As you'd expect, Large Detail applies larger structures on the surface of the base mesh.

Large details

Suzanne Res:5 with 0.1/0.2 scale on small and large detail

Odd mesh. 

Early thoughts

This is a great little tool that has a lot of potential. The library of rock types and parametrics gives you nearly unlimited rock variations. Although getting exactly what you want will require some tinkering.

Terrain sculpting

 I'm currently focused on completing previs terrains for the Sparrow Films project. As I'm still working on this, it has sapped my general Blender time. Just a few things, here and there.

16km terrain test

Scatter practice, home-made rocks become mini trees or bushes.

Rock it! v2 test. Nice!

I need to put some notes together for using Rock it V2. It's very good, but the rock formation tends to appear as a regular pattern that doesn't look particularly convincing. It's been a while since I tried Rockify, which is also good and offers a similar workflow.

I'll post some Blender School content after work. Yesterday, I learned a nice workflow for setting up a camera rig, but I didn't quite get it working because I was animating on a path without placing the camera on the path correctly. This was all because I wanted to create a quick walk/fly-through animation of the latest terrain.

Not the last shift

 Apparently, we're in until next Wednesday. Although it's the end of term, they keep the school running for three training days. Never mind!

I did another sculpt. I like this one ..enough.

The next one has some cliff dressing. Megascan assets that are just placed along the terrain's wall to add real-world rock formations. Nice!

Last work shift of the term. Summer Break!

 One more shift between me and round-the-clock Blender!

The film project work hit a dead end yesterday. I did an update terrain and shared it with the team. It needed more oomph. For some reason, the terracing had disappeared as part of my efforts to increase cliff steepness.

Another iteration!

I worked up yet another version, this time ensuring the terracing wouldn't get blown away during the process. 

There's a little bit more sand buildup at the base of the cliffs than planned, but without it, the cliffs don't look natural. World Creator's sand simulation's minimum sand goes from nothing to a bit too much. 

Pumped up with some post-effects

Last week of term

I break up from my part-time job at the end of the week. It's then Blender all the way down...well mostly. We have a family holiday coming up, but I intend to be very productive over the summer break. I might even make some money again using Blender.

Blender 4.5 is now official

After a good month of testing 4.5, it has now entered general availability. So far, so good. It's fast and ...mostly stable. I suspect that a number of my commonly used addons will require some updates. 

Recent Work

A planet map...a bit of a change

Lens Sim practice

A depth of field test

Suddenly

I have a new production task on the animation project. I need to provide a terrain for the previs animation. Interesting!

A work in progress. Some changes have come from the director, but I had a good time confirming that the workflow is effective:

1. World Creator sculpt.

2. Export EXR heightmap.  
3. Blender/Import the EXR into True Terrain 5. Create the terrain material.

4. Bake the required terrain resolution, then bake the material maps. 

5. Decimate to reduce resolution for production

Stable test

 

Did it crash? Not yet...

A good sign, but this episode of multi-dimensional instability was a punch to my enthusiasm. I walked away from the environmental project for a bit.

Optimisation started

I developed various materials for the light rig, aiming to rig it so that it can be set up quickly in different configurations.

Athena Asteroid -Physical Starlight and Atmosphere sky

Thinking about a return to my Orbital Elements game over the summer. Next week, Blender 4.5 goes into full release (hopefully), and the road to Blender 5.0 begins. Exciting, but hopefully things will be more stable.

Environment Project - Part 1: Woe time

 Suddenly everything grinds to a halt. I was getting constant problems with my scene not accepting parameter changes. I'd adjust something, such as the exposure setting, and my change would be instantly removed.

AttributeError: Writing to ID classes in this context is not allowed: Scene, Scene datablock, error setting option.running

Info: Saved "DreamlandSheffield01-Blockout06.blend"

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\Users\mark\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.5\extensions\user_default\TrueSky\scripts\DevOps\ui.py", line 519, in _set_toggle_input

    self.input.default_value = int(value)

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then I'd overcome the problem by saving and restarting Blender.

This morning, I removed Blender 4.5 and reinstalled the latest build, so my copy should include the fixes from the last week.

So onwards!

 So far, so good. Now, the area where the city is going needs to stretch out more. I couldn't get the horizon line high enough. My lensing is off! I need to use a longer focal length to bring the foreground in and stretch the view into the distance.

Better! I also added a simple plane to create the flat open areas (a plane) for the city.

Only I then got CUDA errors...

Maybe the scene is too big in terms of the render area? The plane and background terrains are enlarged, not to scale so the view stretches off into the 20,000m range. That seems excessive; it really should be all done in a 10km stretch.

I restarted and made changes. Removed the distance terrains from the final render. Only to crash on startup.

# Blender 4.5.0, Commit date: 2025-07-10 00:47, Hash 4a68512db9fd

# backtrace

Exception Record:

ExceptionCode         : EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Exception Address     : 0x00007FFB9920F255
Exception Module      : python311.dll
Exception Flags       : 0x00000000
Exception Parameters  : 0x2

    Parameters[0] : 0x0000000000000001
    Parameters[1] : 0x00007FFB98FDFF8B

I restarted my machine and did some basic renders. Seems fine for now. The most likely culprit is that light rays are going out too far. I know that problems like this have been fixed before by enclosing a scene without a box, to trap light rays that might zoom off to infinity and beyond.

I may restart the build later with a view to keeping it smaller.

Environmental Scene Project: Pastoral Sheffield

 I once had a dream in which I lived in an idealised pre-industrial Sheffield. From my cottage on the outskirts, I could see the familiar skyline, with a handful of towers projecting from the built-up city centre, but everything was leafy and rural, with elegant stone-clad buildings. This dream happened years ago, but it created such a sense of dream euphoria that I became depressed on waking. A severe case of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, a place people go to that becomes more real and more important than their waking life.

What a subject for an environmental project. One that will pull together the lessons I've gained so far from Piotr Krynski's course.

Midjourney

It started with a Midjourney output that evokes pleasant feelings of familiarity. I particularly like the Gothic mansion in the middle ground. The City isn't quite right, but I can work on the details as the scene gets put together.

First, I need to break down the terrain elements. These are the most significant components, and it's crucial to get the scale right if you want lighting and environment to behave realistically. It's not that you can't fake it, but you might end up where you need to add too many fake or botched elements to overcome inconsistencies in haze and overall lighting.

Foreground: A steep element that supports a single tree and a flowery meadow. This area can support densely scattered grass.

Middle ground: Fields and dense copses break up the elevation ahead of a grand building at the top of the hill.

Background: The most complex element is the plain broken by hedgerows and individual trees, which leads into a city element, which fades into the background several kilometres away. 

Rough blockout using random terrains

This could be best done on three plates: Foreground, Middle ground, and Background. This requires more planning and effort to coordinate, but you can utilise all your system resources for each element, resulting in a final scene that would be impossible to render in one shot. Challenge accepted!

So I'm going to start by sculpting three separate terrain elements.

More Project Assets

 This one took a couple of attempts. It's not 100% complete or right, but it came together without me hating it.

Lighting Rig

It was one of the things that a base needs. I decided to go mobile instead of using a built-in option.

I'm going to briefly halt the Environmental course to actually create a scene with the lessons I've learned so far. Some of the lessons are subtle and about judgment rather than Blender techniques. I'll forget them unless I apply them soon.

I'll continue to work on the project assets and scene. I've been asked to halt work on the location, either because the script may be changing or I'm not going in the right direction.

Piotr Krynski's Efficient Environment Design for Blender #7 Scene optimisation

 Keeping it smooth

This

Holy crap! What an example!

10GB scene. Already packed. 4000 files!

1. Unpack the scene so that all its file assets are saved into a scene-specific folder.

2. Run the To Optimise Tools. Change PNGs to JPGS and reduce file sizes.

3. Use the 3D scene checker to see which meshes are too dense for your scene's needs. Limited Dissolve Modifier.

During the lesson, I keep getting reminders of how useful HardOps is. That might be the next course to complete.

4. Check that you are using object duplication for maximum efficiency. However, instanced collections are where you save the most memory. Instanced collections are not editable.

... Decimation continues...

Piotr runs through and is shockingly destructive, and yet all the meshes that he decimates down into a ragged mess doesn't impact the scene's visual quality. This is an example of watching a master do work and making the effort look easy but in fact they are using excellent judgement that is hard to replicate.

Tweaks lighting

This was a hard lesson to learn from. It's Piotr adjusting his lighting setup to get what he wants out of the scene. Strong and clear reflections in the mud pools from a much stronger sunlight. That's the lesson, the rest is his rather brilliant artistic judgement.

Shrink Wrap

Deformed low-poly spheres to act as rocks.

Piotr says "I don't use scatter addons"

His flow:

1. Create some scatter objects, give them some basic low-resolution rock textures. Rotate them to sit flat on the ground.

2. Add a plane and subdivide a bunch of times. Add as a collection.

3. As a particle system: Render as a collection.

4. Toggle object rotation. If they end up rendered with the wrong orientation, select the source objects and rotate them as required. You can use the particle systems Advanced: Rotation settings too. Deselect Show Emitter in Render settings.

5. Add a shrinkwrap modifier. Select Wrap Method to Project. Select the particle system and shrink wrap around your ground plane. Move the Shrinkwrap modifier up the stack.

"Not a huge fan of scatter addons. This method is simple and effective. I hate doing weight painting... The seed changes so your placement is not as controlled in the render."

Piotr can copy(Alt+D) and paste the particle object, then move and scale it, achieving an effective and automatic fallout. 

I can see how Geoscatter can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Geonodes are now a lot more stable since Piotr first tested them as a scatter solution vs particles. However,  you can see that Piotr has a lot more exacting control over replicated shrink-wrapped particle systems.

I'm not sure I'd use this method, but there's no denying that his placement is excellent. The rocks look so much more natural than my efforts.

"I want the rocks to work with my composition, not take away from it" -- Don't overdo scatters so that you have too much visual noise."

"I don't want to overdesign things. Use cheats and shortcuts to get what you need out of modelling effort."

Next: Real-time compositing.

This may be another case of having a preference for an addon solution, but I should take the time to learn the manual approach. It's also possible that Blender offers improved compositor integration.

Piotr Krynski's Efficient Environment Design for Blender #6 Towers and pipes

 Piotr works his way through builind the background elements. Really good, but hard to record specific steps or lessons. There's an approach to simple model bashing, a way of creating pipes and wires by drawing curves onto a plane (because drawing in mid-air always causes the curve to be misplaced.

Textures are bashed from big textures and UV unwrapped by projecting from view.

Quickly made but kick-ass assets

Grabbing more assets from Sketchfab

Piotr likes to get extra assets from Sketchfab. He runs through his workflow.

1. The Sketchfab shader setup causes performance issues due to a complex shader setup.

2. Try using various search keywords as there's a lot of content in Sketchfab with poorly handled metatags.

3. Decimate the shit out of stuff. A lot is high polycount and you're often making them tiny in your scene. Balance asset density to its place in your scene.

4. Cloud planes. Heavy png!

5. Decimate will eventually start to deform the mesh. When this starts to happen shift to the Planer option which uses different methods that don't break the lines so much. Then use the modifier  Merge by Distance. 

This merges vertices that are very close to each other. Also, Limited Dissolve. There's also a Hard Ops function called Clean Mesh. This lets you control some parameters for Limited Dissolve.

Use case: Create a high density ground plane. Decide what parts of the plane are out of shot. Select the parts of the plane that are not going to be visible and apply the Clean Mesh by Selected, selecting the out-of-view parts. 

Looks messy but optimised

6. PNGs for their alpha channels, but JPGs compress better.


Reminder: You can't definitively complete these tasks until your scene is in place and you absolutely know the importance versus resource cost for all the assets. Get most of the way there but don't worry about fully completing the step.

Shot 1

* Starts with Albedo and bump on the meshes. Piotr doesn't worry about specularity for now.
* Adds a sky by cutting out just what he needs for a giant 20k panoramic sky.

This lesson is very stream-of-thought and applies all the earlier lessons. So not much to add here.

Building nicely!

Turn up the Volume

When starting off, try to avoid placing a super-heavy volume right in the foreground. A volume will unify a scene but will wash away the textures you want to pop.

* Go to Light Paths and make sure that you have sufficient volumes.
* Anisotropy affects how light is scattered through a volume.