Crashes and render failures

 I've been unable to render any Geoscatter-based scenes that use TrueSKY 3. I get the following error all the time:

what is an ERROR Illegal address in CUDA queue copy_from_device (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array)

The AI search tells us is

"a technical error message primarily encountered during GPU rendering in Blender's Cycles render engine. It indicates that the graphics card encountered an invalid memory address while transferring data back from the GPU to the system memory (or within GPU memory), which usually points to a bug in the rendering calculations or an unstable system.

The (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array) portion of the message specifies the exact function within the Cycles source code where the error occurred, often related to ray tracing and shadow path calculations."

Potential Causes and Solutions

The error can stem from scene-specific issues, software configuration, or hardware instability. Common fixes include:

Scene Issues (Ray Calculations):
Limit ray travel: The error often happens if a ray of light "travels to infinity" outside the scene boundaries, causing numerical instability or invalid memory indexing.

A common workaround is to place the entire scene inside a large bounding box (like a cube) to contain all light paths.

Check complex shaders/geometry: Specific elements, such as volumes, complex materials (like Principled BSDF with Adaptive Subdivision), or the Vector Displacement node causing NaN (Not a Number) values, can trigger this crash.

Simplify the scene: The issue might be related to running out of GPU memory (VRAM), which can manifest as an "illegal address" error rather than a clear "out of memory" message.

Try reducing texture resolutions or simplifying geometry.

Software and Driver Configuration:Update/Reinstall Drivers:

Ensure you have the latest stable NVIDIA Studio Drivers installed. A clean installation of the drivers after completely uninstalling the old ones can resolve issues caused by corrupted installs or Windows updates.

Use OptiX instead of CUDA: In Blender's preferences (Edit > Preferences > System > Cycles Render Devices), try selecting OptiX instead of CUDA (or vice versa) if your GPU supports it. Using both simultaneously can cause conflicts.

Disable Open Shading Language (OSL): Turning off OSL in the Render settings has been a fix for some users experiencing this specific error.Hardware and System Stability:

Check GPU Overclocking: Any GPU overclocking (e.g., via MSI Afterburner, Dragon Centre) can make the render process unstable. Disable overclocks and run your GPU at stock speeds.

Monitor GPU usage/memory: Avoid running other GPU-intensive applications (like games or browser tabs) while rendering, as this can cause resource conflicts or run you out of memory.


There have been Python crashes too, and warnings about Maximum Number of Closures Exceeded"

The warning "WARNING Maximum number of closures exceeded: 96 > 64" in Blender's Cycles render engine indicates that a material in your scene is too complex to be compiled by the rendering kernel (usually the GPU). The number 64 is a hard-coded internal limit on the number of shader "closures" (functions or components) that a single material can use simultaneously. Your scene is attempting to use 96.

This is a common limitation when using highly complex or nested shader node groups, especially with the Principled BSDF shader or when using Open Shading Language (OSL).

Shamrayev rebuild

 

Shamrayev Rebuild

As I mentioned yesterday, I am planning to build a new model of the ship that I created for my design degree. The U.S.N.S. Igor Shamrayev is a fast courier intended for a fictional film project. It's a hard science fiction design, so not Star Wars or Star Trek, something with plausible propulsion technologies and no artificial gravity.  

Lets revisit the ship, the builds, and go on a whistle-stop tour of my 3D modelling history.

Design Inception

1991-92

The first model was designed and built in 1991 for my 1992 degree show. The whole project was about five weeks and involved learning to use Microstation. The university had seats for 3DS, but this was pre-Max and pre-running on Windows. It looked crude by comparison, although it was probably a better tool for this job. Microstation is a precise, engineering-focused 3D CAD application - perfect for product design. Still, its strengths simply wouldn't come into play when designing a low-detail object that is about 200m long. I do remember one of my colleagues on the course saying he liked the design but thought the crew habitat looked like a bottle of washing-up liquid. That was intended as a modeller-making Easter egg, given how all the Star Wars ships had bits from Airfix tank and battleship models on them. Cool, but not good design!

trueSpace-era

After finally getting a PC of my own, I rejoined the 3D modelling club after getting a copy of TrueSpace 1 on the cover of a magazine. Remember those, fellow old person? I was so excited by the prospect that I soon used a windfall of about £300 to pick up a copy of the newly released TrueSpace 2.0

TrueSpace was unlike any other 3D software. It was strongly UI driven, when most tools felt like CAD. Building models was fun, though it had limitations; it took years for them to impact most users. I was very sad to learn that trueSpace creator, Caligari, had shut its doors. A casualty of the Microsoft acquisition as it grasped for a 3D builder of its own.

Built in trueSpace 5/6, probably in 1998-9

The trueSpace version was only a little more detailed than the original, but we're talking  Windows 97-era with 16MB of system memory and 4MB of VRAM. 

Max Power

A few years later (2000s), I found myself helping to create a potential TV project (The Master Squadron). I was a 3DS Max user! I had a seat for version 4, although I never really learned how to use it properly.

I liked some of the design changes. Those sails look more structural and plausible, but could be so much more realistic-looking. The crew's hab is a double-hull that counter-spins, although the ship's propulsion system can accelerate continuously at up to nearly 1g. Hence, the crew enjoy simulated gravity through high acceleration. You don't need spin habs, you need a big ladder running the length of the ship because it's like a 200 m-high tower with the engines at the bottom and the command module at the top.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, now. Space vehicles in my Orbital Elements game use (near) continuous acceleration to simulate gravity. Having a small spin habitat might be helpful when the ship is coasting or in orbit.

3DS Max was a powerhouse, and I was, the whole time, tinkering in the evenings and sometimes at weekends. I wasn't driven, and I could go months without touching it.

Blender (first-bash)

This was built in 2018, some 10 years after the 3DS version. It's a lot more detailed overall because we're now running Blender. Ha! That said, having done a good job of bringing the command section into a more "SCI-FI" futuristic style, the rest of the ship wasn't all that different and, really, quite crude. This time I plan to go back to the formula and do a lot more reinterpretation, reimagining and a whole lot more detail.

I had intended to do a big animation fly-past, like the one I created for my degree show. Alas, the design looked shockingly bad when I tried to light it. My space lighting was rubbish, and, in fact, after downloading the file and testing in Blender 5.0, I see I made the classic mistake of not building the ship to scale, so the lighting would not behave correctly. Notice that I put an angel statue on the command centre's roof to show that the ship is about half to a quarter scale. 

These days, I have more time and patience. I can really go to town on the details. *Rubs hands in glee*                                                  

Monsterland

 

Monsterland

Since the release of Blender 5.0, I've been obsessing over how its improvements should unlock the power to do much bigger renders, or at least do them more reliably and efficiently.

So I gave it a smoke test. A smoke test is when you run something harder and faster until smoke starts to come out. If testing for smoke is the aim, I succeeded:

Your device ran into a problem. System automatically restarted.

Oh boy, it's dark in this resource-hungry terrain generation rabbit hole...  But interesting!

I created a 32km x 32km terrain in World Creator, which I exported as four 1GB EXR height map tiles. 

To bring this monster into Blender, TrueTerrain 5 is a great solution because it lets you import tiles and place them on a single terrain. World Creator as a Blender Bridge, which is good for some things but not nearly as powerful or flexible as True-VFX's terrain powerhouse!

1) Opening the True-Terrain tab, I created new terrain, setting the size to 32,000m. You'll definitely need camera culling enabled on this mission, but not yet. You need to get the tiles aligned, which is easier when you can see the whole thing. 

2) Load your first EXR tile into True Terrain, making the terrain your full size, but then adjusting the displacement map so that it's (in my case) a quarter of the terrain's overall size (16,000m). I also exaggerated the displacement so I could more easily check I had the tiles loaded in the right places. At the 32km scale, even great mountains aren't much more than bumps!

3) Load in each of the times, adjusting its size and using the transform tools. Use the File settings to adjust the tile size, then place each tile in the appropriate location by assigning offsets in the Location fields. For example, the first terrain was set to 8000 m on the X-axis and -8000 m on the Y-axis. You might see a seam where the tiles meet in the viewport, but I think this is a resampling artefact, as it comes and goes with changes to the terrain resolution. 

Check that your tiles are correctly aligned. Then, if you exaggerated the terrain's Height multiplier, now is the time to correct it.

4) Adjust the terrain's resolution to meet your needs and match your system's capabilities. Definitely use camera culling if you can; it can allow you to render more detailed terrains, since anything not in the camera view or padding isn't sent to the renderer.

In the last few years, Blender has seen some incredible leaps in performance, culminating in Blender 5's increased frame buffer that enables support for huge meshes, free normals and some really nice optomisations, such as with Adapative Subdivision, with the new "Object Space" option that allows a single high-detail mesh to be instanced many times with minimal memory usage, as the subdivision is calculated once per object, independent of the camera's view. This drastically reduces the memory footprint for scenes with many repeated complex objects, like environmental assets.

Stop holding Blender in portrait mode! ;-)

Home truths

Throwing more vertices onto a screen doesn't make better art or bigger, more engaging terrain renders. It's a capability worth measuring so you know how far you might go when needed. I made some heavy volume adjustments while testing and got my entire system to auto-reset. This is likely not a deficiency; it's just asking Blender and your computer system to do something that is the rendering equivalent of jumping off a cliff. You can forget doing elaborate animations or terrain-wide scattering, unless you add some optimisation steps. 

Trees - Asset Catalog

 Yesterday, I struggled to find the specific tree types I needed for the biome I'm designing. There's little point in having a vast library of assets if you don't know what you have or where to look for it. So here's the first instalment of a pictorial asset catalogue.

Trees

Bagapie Assets

The first asset library that I purchased. Oh how this became a crutch. It's still a fab collection because it's got such a wide range of trees and other assets.

Service Road: Biome design

I've been itching to learn more about biome design. At some point, I'll be putting together a test scene for the Production version of the service road -- even if I'm not officially assigned that work, I want to test my ability to polish the previs up to production quality.

Biomes are about creating natural scatter systems that reflect reality. The right plants growing together in realistic patterns. When I start creating half-decent scatters, I'll then learn how to animate them.

Environment notes

The service road is located in a Mediterranean-like location modelled on the biomes found on the Greek islands. Not a wild leap from the setting of the Game Arma 3, which was used to create the film's storyboard.



The following plant life is common to the biome.

Trees

• Olive trees (Olea europaea)
• Cypress trees (Cupressus sempervirens)
• Plane (Plantus)
• Pines (Pinus halepensis, Pinus brutia, Pinus nigra, Pinus pinea, Pinus silvestris, Pinus heldricheii, and Pinus peuce)

Also, deciduous trees, such as 

• Beach 
• Chestnut 
• Oaks
• Fruit trees (various)

The forests mostly have fir, pine, and bush trees. These trees are commonly found in the northern part of the country and in high altitudes in Sterea and Peloponnese. Forests at lower altitudes mostly have poplars, plane trees, oaks, and cypress. At the foot of the trees, various bushes and flowers grow.

Bushes

• Oleander (Nerium oleander)
• Pomegranate (Punica granatum)
• Bouginavillea 
• Cistus incanus and slvi folius
• Erica manipui flora
• Pistacia
• Buxus sempervirens
• Juniperus
• Arbutus unedo and andrachne

Small plants and flowers

• Common Poppy 
• Wild irises
• Cyclamen
• Anemones
• Sea thistles 
• Caper bushes
• Daffodils and Daisies

First test

Big Gripe Tree

So you need to search for particular tree types in your extensive collection of nature assets. No problem, just use the search field. Actually, a big problem. There's no naming convention, so different packs name their trees differently. An even worse situation is that lots of packs don't live in the asset library. True-Vault, Arborea, Grasswald, et al. So I need to do about five searches using both Latin and common names.  So in the next post, I'm going to record my current tree catalogue. Be prepared for a LOT of trees.

Pretty shocking!

 

Yesterday, just before I headed to work, I received an email from Superhive informing me that my account had been restricted, and that I needed to verify my identity. I was in a rush and wanted to resolve the issue before leaving. So I checked the email was legit—it was. It came through Superhive. 



However, my spider sense was tingling. The language in the email wasn't quite right. The link formatting was inconsistent with everything else they'd ever sent me. I didn't even read the security warning, which is telling you this is not a legitimate email.

I clicked on the link...and.. oh gawd. 

That URL is a fire alarm. The dressing isn't terrible. The support chat window is reassuring but also not quite right.

So the email looks to have been sent through Superhive from a compromised seller's account and is dressed up to look like it came directly from Superhive. I messaged support through the website's main link, and received a reply very quickly that told me this is a scam and that prompt action has been taken to prevent the rogue account from sending any more messages. Not great but not terrible. Some kind of text scanning on the seller's emails might be in order, as they'd quickly identify suspect URLs. That linked page is under the top-level domain intended for clothes and fashion vendors?!


Terrains

Because I am addicted to the sculpting steps. I really need to use some of the scatter tools and MOVE ON.

New cliff assets. I spent so much money in the sale.

Sculpted steps. About 5 biome masks made this one crashy (in World Creator)

Details: nice. Too washed out.

Final hours of the Superhive Black Friday Sale... Spend Moah?!

 So I did pick up MatPlus, the layer-based material system that gives Blender a built-in Substance Painter-like functionality. Expensive! But it looks like it's from a reputable and dedicated provider.  I installed it, and found out that it doesn't yet support Blender 5. Erm, no worries. I installed it with Blender 4.5. Still not working. I tested and toyed with it until I was pretty sure this was probably me having missed a prerequisite or an installation step.

I raised the issue on their Discord, providing all the information they might need—and a few hours later, they gave me a workaround (leave the project root directory blank) and promised a fix would be in the next release. Pretty good experience.

The tool looks really good, but I will watch a few tutorials first. I also need to get my UV unwrapping a lot better, which is a sign that my modelling is a bit slapdash.

A better UV unwrap tool may be required. Strokes chin and looks at UVFlow's sale price...

Work for the rest of the week:

• Updates to the next previs service road
• More learning: MatPlus test before I forget I have it and never learn to use it. 
• Practice with TrueSky 3. Some space scenes?

A bigger project for the near future

 While at work yesterday, I thought about the first 3D spaceship that I built. It was part of my undergraduate degree course, using Microstation. That's about 33 years ago?! It would be cool to do a rebuild in Blender 5? I actually did a reasonable rebuild a few years ago (2018?! yikes that long ago), but I had no idea how to light and stage it, so all the renders looked bad.

2018 build

What I would do differently. EVERYTHING.

Firstly, I did my old and bad trick of building everything to its fine-detailed final quality without doing a proper Big:Medium:Small blockout. 

There are some nice detail elements, but the forward section looks more Sci-Fi compared to the central part of the ship, which looks like hard science fiction. I would really sweat the engineering details. The superstructure frame doesn't look structural, like an actual load-bearing system. 

I'd build to a much tighter and finer level of detail, using what I learned from the more recent ship projects:

Bayern build. 2300AD game ship: not my design

Bayern used the Big:Medium:Small approach, and I think it was to scale.

Orbital Elements warship. Needed a bit more work, but I would change a lot now.

So the Ukrainian Space Navy Courier, Igor Shamrayev, is coming soon.

Blender School: Making assets using Polycam scans

 Polycam is a super-convenient phone-based photogrammetry application that I used to create simple models for use in Blender. See their Blender help page.

More Polycam tutorials.

I have some reasonable captures and want to make the most of them, maybe even start sharing them. Before I do, I want to ensure that I'm setting them up properly. So here's today's revision: 

The Best Workflow for Polycam Captures

1. Set up the model to be the best it can be. Consider in-app tools such as remeshing. Do any cropping or cleanup on the capture.

2. Export using the Glb format (GL Transmission Format Library). It works well and stores the texture information in the Blender file, so you don't need to hunt it down. Consider unpacking the stuff if you make changes, though.

3.  Import into Blender

4. Review the object's mesh quality. Make sure you have statistics enabled.

a) Are there artefacts or errors in the mesh? There could be capture errors that leave elements of the model misformed or missing. You can use additive modelling in Blender to boolean your own parts.

b) Are there holes in the mesh? Try using the Gridfill tool to repair the hole. 

When you do repairs, don't forget to unwrap the new faces and match them to the existing UV map.

UV Unwrapping Methods

• Smart UV Project: Automatic unwrapping for complex shapes
• Unwrap: Standard unwrapping based on seamsCube/Cylinder/Sphere 
• Projection: For primitive-like shapes
• Project from View: Projects from the current camera angle
  
  

UV Editing Tips

• Use the UV Editor workspace for detailed adjustments
• Pin important UV vertices to prevent distortion
• Check for texture stretching in the viewport
• Test render frequently to verify appearance

For the absolute best results with a model that requires extraordinarily high quality, consider retopologising with Retopoflow. It's a lot of work, but you can turn a complex capture that would be extremely hard to create by hand into a model fit for any purpose.

Blender School: Material Tips from Nico Linde

 While I wait for a long render to complete, let's do some Blender School.

Tips for perfect textures, every time

1) Always mix two textures to provide that surface variety and to help hide imperfections.

2) First material! If you are not unwrapping your mesh before applying a texture material, do the following node setup:

3) Use Node Wrangler to add a texture ( Shift+T after selecting the shader)
4) Use the generated coordinates and then select Box projection. For most regular shapes, this works fine.

Blender Friday

It's Black Friday! It's also Blender Friday as Superhivemarket starts a store-wide 25% sale. Cool! I picked up some more rock brushes. Once again, I struggled to get them to install. I finally added them to my main machine, so I don't have to swap scenes around when I want to do some sculpting.

I will pick up a few more things before the sale ends. I'm tempted to get the addon that lets you import stuff from Quixel Bridge. I downloaded a lot of stuff, but it takes so much work to clean up and fix badly converted material nodes that I have hardly used any of the stuff, which is a shame because it's of super quality.

I still have my eye on Matplus, the addon that gives Blender a Substance Painter-like layer-based material editing system. I fear that it needs very good UVs in order to work correctly, and I'm not very good at making high-quality UVs. I could look at some UV tools.

Weekend plan

Keep an eye on Blender 5's instability. If it doesn't improve with the 5.0.1 patch release, I will consider doing a wipe and then installing it from scratch with a gradual approach to addon installation.

The Foundations of Science Fiction Design

Yesterday, I daydreamed that I wrote a massive textbook on the subject of science fiction design, one that became THE seminal reference work for budding science fiction artists. Dream big, eh?! 

This is a concept that I could chip away at. Not because I'm a super science-fiction design artist, but by producing notes for such a work, I'd improve my design skills.

Foundations-of-SF-Design

1. Big-Medium-Small

Designing complicated things that look good is hard. A good approach is to do your design in a strict sequence that helps ensure that your process isn't five steps forward and six steps back. Start with the big shapes, the most significant elements of your design. Don't worry about anything else until you love the overall shape. My old illustration lecturer used to tell us to do a "squint test" to evaluate the composition of elements in a work.

Next, move on to the middle-scale details. No fine detail, only the elements that significantly modify your top-level big shapes.

Finally, only when you love where you are on the big and the middle stuff do you attend to the small details.

2. Shapes have make feelings

Even simple shapes can invoke an emotion. 

• Triangles that sit with the base towards the ground imbue a sense of strength and can symbolise power.
• Rectangles and squares invoke a sense of stability, order and balance. At the correct scale, they can turn on your "I love brutalism" light.
• Curved shapes provide a sense of movement and are positive, more approachable, and humane.
• Circular shapes convey a sense of unity and are visually peaceful. Is the Death Star in range yet?

It never takes much work to defuse these traits, but it is worthwhile to have a kind of visual syntax to start a design.

3. 70/30 Rule

A rule of thumb is to ensure that 80% of your design is "clean", and only clutter about 20-30% of the design with little stuff. Often referred to as the "70/30 rule", although this is a line in the sand. Just remember that you don't want to overdo surface detail, as you will end up with a very cluttered design.

For some things, you can throw these rules out if the design you want is an industrial/military design, which isn't built to win design awards. Go cluttered, go ugly, but if so, it better look cool!

4. Emphasis and movement

Imagine that your design is a painting or a photograph, to be judged according to aesthetics. The viewer gazes on your design and, if you have done your job well, their eyes go on a visually stimulating journey. If you can chain together design elements that naturally lead the eye, it's a quality that can translate into the viewer judging your design to be good.

Take care to avoid overdoing it when adding visual interest. It's another application of the 70/30 rule: you want enough eye movement to feel like a visual journey, not so much emphasis that you end up with a wall of detail that might as well be no detail at all. Movement creates a dance for the viewer's eyes and can be used to build a story.

5. Variety and repetition

The use of novel and repeated elements is a useful device when carefully employed to ensure visual balance. Too much variety, and your design falls into the "emphasis trap" of having too many interesting elements, leading the viewer to lose interest. Too much repetition just doesn't excite the eye.

6. Size, scale and proportion

Using reference elements to set the correct space. The ratio of elements can be crucial in setting proper proportions.

7. Unity

Unity can be created through patterns and themes. The highest level of echoing. One risk of kitbashing is that it can create conflicting patterns that break unity. 

Gaea 4, but why?

 I received an offer of 40% off for pre-ordering Gaea 3. Now this should just pass me by, but the first thing I did when I woke up was watch a video by a 3d creative using Gaea 2. It immediately struck me that the terrain he created was bigger and more detailed than my World Creator output. I decided to finally dive into Gaea and start using it to create terrain heightmaps. That seems a long way from putting up the money for next year's version, but there you go.

I opened Gaea 2, set up a very basic terrain—pretty much a default canyon — and set it to export at 16k. Half an hour later, I was still waiting for the build to finish; it had been stuck at 33% on the second of three tasks. What the hell!? It's going to force me to read some instructions, or at least watch a few videos.

Expect to see some Gaea School posts, right here, right soon.

Lesson 1: When setting up an export to an EXR height map, select all your nodes for export with F3. Otherwise, the export process chugs along, waiting for steps that will not be included. 

Promising, although not revelatory

Sparrow's road

I have more changes to make on the service road rally point. It may entail sculpting more rocks to match the storyboard. I'll then move on to the larger task: the ambush point.

Blender school

CDMCGI has created a really nice texture mixer for ground meshes. He's giving it away for free, although I will definitely go back and tip if it works half as well as it looks.

Noise Texture added to the breakup mask.

Explanation

The tool comes in three parts:

1) The texture mixer panel that accepts four input materials (Materials A, B, C, and D). Note: You must include a displacement in the material that is plugged into the material group output.

2)  The Texture Scaler is a work in progress and will allow the tool to handle larger terrains in future. Still some quirks to iron out. Right now, it handles vector and texture scale for each material.


Adjust the base height of each material so it protrudes through the mix.
In the Material Mixer, you can add noise textures to the breakup mask to stop the resulting ground from looking repetitive. Use a colour ramp to soften the blending. The breakup sharpness slider helps with this. A splat map will work too!

Use the false colour mode to get a better handle on how the mix is applied.

3) A Waterline shader provides a softer shoreline with rings. Works well at high subdivision levels.

Hoping that Blender 5.0.1 comes out soon. Blender 5.0 has been crashing a lot.