Cargo ship

Latest Blender project: build a simple ship for a fly-by space animation, but keep it simple!
Simple, sure! I won't get lost in the details. *Immediately gets lost in the details*

Cargo ship work-in-progress

I'm probably going to redo those canisters. In fact, I may design some variations. The idea was inspired by the PC game Hard Space: Shipbreaker, although it really doesn't take the simpler style of the game's ships.

Tracks trouble

I really struggled to get my caterpillar tracks to work, using a follow curve array.

https://www.cgtrader.com/tutorials/1669-how-to-repeat-an-object-along-a-path-in-blender

This little tutorial got me there in the end, I was not aligned along the correct axis, so the track elements didn't run along the curve as expected.

Bolton hiatus

Changes are coming

The creator of the Bolton-class ship, Chuck Gannon, has provided some feedback on the design that will require extensive reworking. So, no more Bolton for the moment.

I've been tinkering with lots of things...

Space Test

Weird wheeled vehicle.

World Creator 2

Andrew Bolton Cruiser

The Andrew Bolton-class Cruiser progresses. I'll be able to get this mostly completed at the weekend, if I can steal away a couple of hours.

On to another project

UV Mapping is a pain in the backside if you don't get your mesh built properly and I nearly always end up introducing modelling touches that make for sub-optimal topology. So, while I definitely will be mapping the tanker model, it won't be today.

Today (Last week, actually)

The ANDREW BOLTON-Class Cruiser is a starship from Chuck Gannon's Tales of the Terran Republic books. I've been mucking around with designing and modelling this badboy for a couple of years but my designed always got derailed. This time I decided to force myself to push on. I even showed off the early work in progress, which makes it harder for me to walk away from the work as people are now waiting to see the completed ship.

A starting point. A little too simple in form. Though it's definitely more elegant than the final design.

This felt a bit more utilitarian and less over-streamlined, given the design only enters the edge-of-space part of a planetary atmosphere.

Right off the bat, I wanted to prove that the spin habitats were looking okay extended. I did a ship for the 2300AD universe that looked very different from my intentions when I folded the habitats away. This time I wanted to check it early.

We ended the weekend with the half blocked out ship. Looks close to completion but it's not. There's a lot of add-ons in terms of drones, ships and some compex elements for the aft sections.

World Creator 2

Blender is firing on all cylinders but World Creator 2 is still getting some use.

Tanker nearly done

I still don't have a proper name for this bad boy. It should be named by my 5-year-old son, as it belongs to his Star Wars Roleplaying Game character.

There's a ladder and access hatch behind the front landing gear. There's also an elevator that drops out of the belly, although I'm worried that it's gone missing.

Those elevated engines are mostly for show. It doesn't take off using vectored thrust, as with most Star Wars ships, launching is via repulsor lift, with the engines just providing oomph rather than lift. I guess that the ability to shift the centre of mass helps when you have a big cargo bod that drops off the back.

Some teams and some blank areas that still need detailing. Otherwise, this is done.

Even more tanker

Doubled the landing gears which just looks more plausible. Given the tanker some ribbing.

Still to do. Top airlock, back-end detailing and the gun turrets.

More tanker

Progress made on the Star Wars starship.

More learning

Speculative purchase

So I hunted down expert tutorials for using World Creator 2 and found a promotional video for creating cinematic landscapes using World Creator 2. The related training course was a tad expensive for about an hour of video but then getting the right workflow tips can save you a mountain of time, so I spent the 40 Euros.

After watching the training videos I was a little disappointed. The author is incredibly talented and his videos are good, but they just don't provide enough knowledge. That said, the biggest takeaway was the strong recommendation for Octane Renderer, which allows you to push displacement maps into a Blender scene through the shader engine. This means that you can render huge detailed 8k landscapes with no actual geometry, which speeds up performance.

Now it could be that this one lesson "pays for all" as it does massively increase the ease of rendering giant landscapes.

Bacta Tanker

I'm planning to run the old Westend Games Star Wars Roleplaying Game with my family. To this end, I designed a Star Wars starship that the PCs will crew, a Bacta tanker which plies the galaxy hauling that healing fluid.

Digital Sketch (based on a paper sketch)

Digital Sketch

Modelling (about 3 hours in)

Modelling (about 5 hours in)

New world ...creator

New world

In the space of 3 weeks, both my desktop PCs died. My old machine completely gave up the ghost, given that it's 8-years old I decided not to bother trying to bring it back. However, my main machine then died. It turned out just to need a replacement graphics card, but by the time I worked that out, I'd already ordered a new machine. A monster!

The new machine, "ISAC", is a 10-core INTEL i9 with 32 GB of system memory and a Geforce RTX 2080 Ti. Yeah, this wasn't bought with a view of value for money, rather maximum performance for the pot of money that I had.

The high-performance RTX card opens up a lot of more up-to-date rendering technologies. I got hold of the Octane to test it out. I also decided to get a piece of software that I'd had my eye on for about a year: World Creator 2.

World Creator 2

If like myself you love 3d landscapes,World Creator 2 is amazing. AMAZING! The horsepower of my PC allows World Creator to interactively generate landscapes in real-time.

The real challenge will be getting the cinematic look after importing the heightmaps into Blender. The challenge is accepted!

Just one touch

The city of Tzook, work-in-progress

Tinkering but no learning

Two rocks - a refresher on how to do low poly boulders

More rocks. Smear in the textures. Need better UV projection

Ancient city of Tzook (Tseuq) for Quest RPG

I've been poorly - so not much Blender time.

Leo wanted to make a table. I added the lamp to add a bit of interest.

I've fallen out of love with the overall feel of the current Fire Shark. I may give it one final tweak-to-save attempt.

PBR texture test. What's with the black areas? Possibly artifacts from the normal map.

Rocks on a landscape.

Tested an approach to realistic space scenes. Nice, but not nearly as nice as the results shown in the tutorial.

A Ziggurat doodle, showing the use of noise displacement on the left-hand side.

Landscape Therapy

I couldn't face Fireshark, I just didn't have the critical faculties for stripping back and restarting something. I created a few reasonably sized landscape meshes.

Pre-mesh-smoothed.

Fireshark Progress, maybe

Last night I continued the Fireshark build. Some progress works, while other elements fall down the old pit of adding detail without enough thought to the overall flow. You get lots of surface detail but it looks cobbled together and not unified.

Areas like the winglet root, where lots of elements flow, but almost nothing lines up.

The lower components were built really quickly just so I could see how the cabin looks on a perch. Tonight, I will probably rebuild all of those parts, if not more. Hell, I still want to start from scratch, but I think, at this point, I need to just complete what we have and then decide about restarting.

The bigger part of these models is temporary blocking, so I can see what it will look like.

A weekend tonked with many tinkers

A Storm

A weekend of stormy weather resulted in the most stay-at-home weekend in ages. This translated into a fair bit of gaming -- resulting in the death of my Level 25 Division 2 Hard-core character (Boo!), although quite a lot more Blender work got done afterward.

I find landscape generation therapeutic. I'm doing too much of it.

I love building giant landscapes, but they don't hold up very well to close up view.

A mesh with more sensible dimensions. 

I did a silly thing. I created a moderate mesh, then applied the subdivision surface modifier for at-render-time smoothing. The result swallowed up about 6GB and crashed Blender before the render even started. I think I just found my very first 32GB system memory use case.

(Saturday) Leo asked if he could help me build a model. So we built a chair! I had a bit of fun with the textures, but the model took about 3 minutes.

(Sunday) Flush from Saturday's success, Leo and I built a table.

I love that Leo has taken an interest in 3D modelling. He's more artistically included than Noah, although his 4-year-old hands don't lend themselves to Blender's keyboard shortcuts. I ended up pressing the shift and ctrl buttons for the basic operations.

Fireshark version....well quite a few.

Rough lashup of the Fireshark.

A rough model can make for a good template for sketching, getting details designed quickly.

Project ideas are now stacking up, but I am determined to build the Fireshark and not move on to something easier. The reason I've failed, so far, is that I reject all my efforts after an hour of modelling -- because bad modelling creeps in by then.

Last month's rejected effort, with a scaled-up cabin. Looks cool but I have rejected the long-nose design.

The last thing on Sunday night, the building begins again.

Some mesh errors resulted in artifacts when I applied the solidify modifier to the main body.