25 years of progress

 

I bought a plugin

 A couple of plugins have caught my eye, lately. One is a procedural landscape generator that looks smashing, although I have Worldbuilder, which is great for generating either geometry or height maps.

The results look good, although I am not sure how intuitive all the sliders are, compared to the amazing toolset in Worldbuilder 2. This is one I will watch.

 The other is Human Generator, which I actually bought, with my own money. In a few clicks, Human Generator creates fully featured characters that you can customise, pose, emote and dress with just a few clicks. The results are good, although these people are best suited for stand-in roles.

It's actually great to be able to quickly feature characters. I hardly ever bother to provide a human scale reference, which is really useful when building spacey wacy stuff.

I did that thing...

 I did that thing, where you look at something you modelled a long time ago and think, "how would I do that today?"



The Podule was built in 3ds Max, in just a couple of hours. The Blender version has taken a bit longer but mostly because I keep building rubbish storage bins. I prefer the flat nose of the original but I think the Blender version looks less like a submersible -- which is a good thing for an "orbital".

Geometry Nodes! This is going to be big.

The latest version of Blender was released this week. It's 2.92, and it includes one of the most exiting feature sets, ever. Ever! Geometry Nodes is part of the "Everything Nodes" project which is attempting to make all aspects of Blender creation available to the node graphing paradigm.

I watched a couple of videos to get me started, gut I still got stuck, because most of the tutorials were created before the feature went into general release, with important changes.

It's not working, its very slow! It was very frustrating, but I eventually figured out that you start by invoking a Geometry Node as a modifier.

After some fidling, I got it working as expected. You shouldn't be suprised to learn that the PC slowed to a crawl. That's a pig pile of medium detail rock.

Worldbuilder landscape fun

Taking a holiday from the hard surface modelling to have another play with landscapes. This one was built in Worldbuilder 2, a wonderful terrain generation tool used in the movies. A new version comes out later this year but I still have only scratched the surface of this one..no pun intended.

The original wavefront file was nearly 2GB. I wasn't letting that bad boy anywhere near Blender. This one was boiled down to about 100MB. Acompanied by a good normal map, it still does a reasonable job. I'm more interested in close-up work at the moment, I think vast panaramas are some way off.

While these are rendered in Blender (Cycles) they're probably best used on a composite. Sadly, I had complete forgotten how to set one up. I watched a youtube video to help me remember - here is the result:

The Scout ship was rendered in Blender but then composited into the background scene, along with a basic shadow map.

Kennedy-class progress

 Still reasonably happy. A key change to my workflow was joining elements together and correcting flipped normals. This was probably a lazy solution. I'm getting frequent crashes to desktop, I'm guessing that enough shortcuts and sloppy operations have resulted in some instability. There are still additional layers and extra details, this has mostly been done by a material that mixes a hand painted hull tile texture with a rough-edge procedural texture I borrowed from Danial Grove Photo.

Texturing not absolutely terrible

Shocking news! While the Kennedy is far from complete or correct (as in, material alignment and detail mistakes), it's actually looking like I just need to fix issues rather than soul seach about why nothing looks right or good. 

Lets see if I still feel the same in the next post. Maybe I'll change everything and it will all be bad again. Lets. Hope. Not.

Kennedy-class Missile Carrier.

 This is the second time I've built this badboy 2300AD warship, the last build was my first ever Blender project. Initially I was concerned the the first version looked as good as this one, but as the details accumulate, its good to see that in fact, some improvement in Blender modelling is evident. Hopefully bad geometry and a complete lack of planning for texturing won't scuttle the project again.

Still blendin

 It's been a fair amount of time since I posted anything about my Blender journey. I've once again fallen into a "just want to game" habit. I want to make things in Blender, but I struggle to get started, and when I do get started, I quickly become disappointed with my results.

I will push through!