Back in the mountains

Last night I ended up mucking around with World Creator, spending some more time using its powerful landscaping tools. I love adding complex erosion patterns to things!

Small landscape file. Nice erosion patterns but not detailed enough for viewing close-up.

Simple shader 

A second hand made landscape.

I realise now that the odd blurring is part of the river filtering. There are lessons writ in these rough renders.

Eevee video renders are so freaking fast! This one was done in less time than it took to make a cup of tea.

Tonight, back to school, back to something more buildy.

Quick touch

I was too tired to get much done with Blender, last night. I'd attended a night walk with my eldest son and his Beavers group.

Quickly whipped-up interior scene

Watch this space!

Weekend efforts

Boolean-modified cube mirrored and repeated.

The weekend offered some time for Blender training. I watched a number of episodes of my Hard Surface Modelling course, which is great. I realise now that I need to repeat watching followed by lots of hands-on practice.

I made a start with the Boolean approach to modelling. It's so powerful but just tends to leave me with a horrible mess. The training videos, while they didn't give me an instant fix, they have left with a much better understanding of what pitfalls to avoid.

 However, Saturday's efforts to reboot the Fire Shark model got nowhere. Here is how it tends to go: I make a start, I make promising progress. After an hour I'm already struggling with bad topology, constrained by shading artifacts and or just feeling like I've not improved on the existing attempt, which is passable, mostly.

Simple Stools. 

More Boolean play.

For the rest of the weekend, I tended to do more quick exercises.

Tested if I remembered how to make simple stones. I overdid the smoothing for boulders but liked the quick results.

A vast landscape mesh, coming in at about 300MB. Really, too big as you can't get all the polygons into view.

Last thing on Sunday, I built a huge landscape mesh, using World Creator 1, which I bought in a Steam sales a few years ago, but never really made use of it.

Blender started to chug, but then when I realised how big this model is, I was quietly impressed by the cycles render engine performance. Thanks to Hardware CUDA support and some denoise filter work.

Fireshark Space Fighter - but not right

Started off okay but It's lost the sleek rod form, looking instead like a car.

Friday night, I had another stab and it got a lot closer. I've not rejected this one yet, but we'll see how I feel about it over the weekend.

Another stab

Brutalist platforms and stairs.

A rough layout

A bit more architectural

Staircases and walkways are just a little too narrow.

Week beginnings

Another stab at the gladiator tower. It got a bit too modern, but it was fun to build. Having kept the quads intact, the mess UV. Keeping the quads flowing over the mesh made UV work without the usual mess to clean up. I picked random concrete textures, used a simple shader mixer and a filter map.

Overall, a good couple of hours of play.

The new ruins

A little overwrought and lacking in clear function, but easy and fun to build.

eff

Screenshot of Blender in action

Not enough. Not nearly enough

Weekend

I had a weekend looking after the boys, while Clara worked night shifts. Sometimes I get to indulge myself but this weekend I never really got focused enough to progress much 3D learning.

Noah woke up at 5:20am, on Saturday. He went downstairs to watch youtube videos, which got me up. Unable to get back to sleep, I decided to crank up Blender and do some messing about.

Fighting towers mk2 -- too far apart!

As often happens, in the second attempt at something, you manage to dodge the mistakes of the first attempt, but you also end up losing something, a quality that you only notice after you have invested quite a bit of time. Attempt three pays for all! I'll try again, next week.

Fireshark

Rough sketch of the Fireshark Mk2 - Consortium Multirole Fighter

Blender screenshot

I made a tentative start on the Fireshark space fighter on Sunday evening. By tentative, I mean that I probably made about 4 starts, but quickly rejected the mode early on. I decided that I needed a stronger starting position - based on more precise sketches.


I must learn to get the basic shape right before making the detail cuts that break up the quads. I have HardOPS, which is a powerful set of workflows that use intelligent beveling to manage a non-destructive boolean workflow. I feel that I need to nail down the basics before I go down that rabbit hole.


The design is a bit stubby, I want the longer hose back. Although the side stubs are looking better than the sketch, they might make the winglets look a bit funny though. Definitely work-in-progress.

Probably rejected cabin design.

Light of day

Cassero Fighting towers - v1

Last night I followed a brief tutorial on using HDR lighting. I remember using HDR in trueSpace 6 and loving the rich and lifelike quality it brought to a scene, although its use guaranteed a lot of waiting around.

The scene is of a mythical gladiatorial arena, composed of interconnected towers with unguarded staircases running along the outside walls. A scary place to wander, even before sword-wielding maniacs start chasing you.

Lessons learned: I don't really understand HDR. Some tutorials impart knowledge that you can use to make creative decisions. Other tutorials are a set of steps that you try to follow faithfully, without really knowing what you are doing. This was definitely the latter. I was extremely disappointed that the scene resulted in CUDA errors, forcing me to render via CPU.

I'll complete a write-up of the HDR workflow. I may check out a couple more tutorials to see if there are other approaches. Everyone is so in love with Eevee, but I prefer the qualities of Cycles for final output.

A shout out to the newly integrated denoiser filter -- applied here to reduce the grain that cycles render often produce. The filter drops into the compositor so it applies post-render and produces great results in most situations.

Tonight

I'll return to the Fireshark when I have nailed down the design through more drawing work. First, I'll do a more detailed version of the towers.

Tinkering in a sea of tink

Last night

Some stairs that don't go anywhere.

Stairway scene

A quick video of a little staircase model. I never got into animation and struggle. I need to watch some tutorials and complete some basic exercises.



Eevee landscape vs Cycles.



Here are the mountains (relief map) of Kent. Time to render was about 2 seconds.



Same scene in Cycles. Significantly longer render time. Looking a lot less washed out but the lighting is not really being implemented properly.

Next

I decided that I need a project. You can never fail if your aim is to tinker. You need failure to be an option or you don't really know if you succeeded. So, I am going to rebuild my Fireshark space fighter, from 20-odd years ago.

The sleeper must awaken! *big yawn*

It's hard to believe that I've been tinkering with Blender for so long. Alas, I have failed in my promise to invest and become truly proficient. That is, until now.

In 2020, this changes. Commitment renewed!

I need a plan, some real goals. I have training materials aplenty. The wealth of excellent free Youtube content ensures that anyone willing to put in time and effort has a vast amount of demonstrated expertise on tap. I've also got some really good paid-for training. Including a 2.8-specific course on Udemy (Blender 2.8 The complete guide from beginner to pro) and through Creativeshrimp.

I'm going to blow the dust off of this blog because it's really useful to record my thoughts, track progress or current problems.

Multiple iterations of mirror turned this simple frame into a huge lattice

I started my own "cute room" diorama. Also available in isometric view.

Note to me

It's important to keep plugging away. Having time away from modelling makes the return harder until you can't face making that climb again, really getting to grips with 20 different tools that would have made your last effort so much easier.

Notebooks

I'm scribbling what I learn down in a (paper) notebook. I hope that this will help to cement what I learn and make it easier to relearn when I forget a particular thing.

Use it daily

Having 10 minutes of hands-on time helps. Like any kind of practice regime, you get out what you put in, and you tend to get out more when you make practice regular.

Keep watching

Tutorials give you a chance to learn different/better workflows. They can give you insights beyond how Blender works. You can jump-start expertise by seeing how more experienced and more talented users strut their stuff.