Tuesday, 27 May 2014

A change of heart about Photoshop plugins


Still learning what keys to press

I'm still learning shortcuts, critical ones too -- Cntl+Up Arrow for going full screen on your current view. I can't believe I battled on without learning that one for so long. I've been reminded of this little tool on Facebook's Blender group:
http://waldobronchart.github.io/ShortcutMapper/#Blender  This too: http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyReference.pdf


Digital Heavens cosmic pack 3 

I'm not very keen on quick plugin solutions because they can dull my artistic senses - if you use Photoshop then you'll have had that experience of seeing someone's work and immediately recognising the work of a filter, probably because it was applied with little or no tweaking -- it just kills the work for you. I held off buying Cosmic Pack 3 product from Digital Heavens because of this fear - that if I use cosmic pack 3 outputs in my work anyone familiar with the product will very likely recognise that I used it to shortcut the creative journey.

..and that's when I bought it anyway

Well, the lack of time that I have to spend being creative has forced me into a change of mind - I wanted to create some more planet maps but realised that I could spend a week just making a few maps without getting any actual work done. Not to mention that you can use these off-the-shelf tools as a starting point and make sure that you don't finish until the output is refined enough that it doesn't look like other example Cosmic Pack work.

Blender output using Cosmic Pack 3 starfield and planet maps.

I only had time to blindly run through a quick planet creation, there were some quirks that I need to research as I expected prompts for modifying masks and layer qualities, such as scale, however, I am instantly impressed. I'm seeing Cosmic Pack 3 more as an extended palette for space scenery and less like an stamp-on solution for generic space backgrounds.

Sunday, 11 May 2014

Still blending...


Just to be clear, the lack of posts isn't because I stopped working with Blender -- if anything I've become more focused since the last update, spending a  lot of time going back and improving work, tackling stuff that I've previously hated -- specifically UV mapping and texture mapping. 


Suffering for Suffren

I completed my build of the 2300AD star ship IFV Bassompiere - a Suffren-class cruiser and was happy enough with the results that I decided that it was going to get the full texture mapping treatment. That took ages! I restarted the process about three times, but the underlying workflow is steady and pretty easy - thanks to the regular forms that make up the model.


Boxing out the basic form - getting the proportions right. This was about the fourth attempt.

The Suffren has a really simple form. Getting a lot of detail onto those flat surfaces helps break up the form and give the viewer a better sense of scale.

Time to paint it up. Each section had its UV exported then applied as a mesh which gives an interesting 'look' in its own right. I did this stage three times, each time trying to optimize how the meshes unwrapped.

Texture mapping underway. With a good UV setup texture mapping gets a lot easier. I've spent years getting nowhere with mapping because of building out of lots of unconnected meshes. Finally getting somewhere!

Model -almost finished, here. Some glowing lights need to be added. The three Landers attached at the back.

For a brief animation I put together this wrap-around-a-globe background image, based on the Earth scene I downloaded from Blender Swap. This is a sample of a 10,000 by 8,000 render - the biggest I've ever done by a long long shot. Suddenly I realise why all my environmental backgrounds have failed in the past -- my background images were about one tenth of the size required to avoid horrible artefacts from appearing.

The edge of the Christmas storm

 Christmas 2024 is officially upon us. Family members are starting to gather, and presents haven't wrapped themselves. I've figured ...