Christmas Break

 I've been enjoying all the usual festive activities. Spending time with the family, spending too much time with food. Drinking! Watching some TV. Replaying Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Still playing with Blender, mind you!

World Creator heightmap using True Terrain and True Sky

Noisy water. Would need about 4000 samples to calm those fireflies. Noise filtering tends to make scenes like this go all mushy.

Starting point. 

Tiny hand made terrain with some Bagapie assets.

Same as above.

I've been experiencing more instability. More crashing to desktop. I tried to do a simple 2-second animation of the above nature scene. The scene crashed the moment I set keyframes. Gah! I remember that getting a lot of crashes used to sap all my enthusiasm for 3D work. I'd go away for weeks or months. I think at this stage I've woken up to the fact that crashing just happens. You rework to avoid the problem, simply or reduce the memory overhead. 

A day off work but not much Blender

 I had a day off. Horrah! I didn't get much Blender time. Boo. 

I went to see my youngest son's Christmas show  and then took a trip to Ikea. Still, in the afternoon I whipped up a lander bot. Something that I can dump into landscape scenes, when it's finished.

Lander Bot sketch

100th post of 2022!

 Horrah, this has been the year when I didn't walk away from Blender for months at a time.

Always Blender!

World Creator heightmap output

Random Flow, Creatrive Flow, Sanctus Materials (Experiemental world terrain)

Textures on the landscape!

Blue

 It's taken a month for my expectations to rise to unrealistic levels. This weekend I did a lot of playing around with landscape work. I spent a lot of time waiting for renders. Waiting!?! On THIS machine?

Well, I think that part of the problem is that I'm scaling the terrain meshes up to be hundreds of metres. This makes the texture and light more realistically, but it also pushes everything up. Scattering grass being a case in point. You just can't do a dense scatter of realistic grass over hundreds of metres. I know this because I tried this.

Green stuff

The viewport became unresponsive, even when most of the scatter objects were hidden. I moved the camera and hadn't realised I'd moved it way up. The resulting point of view captured the whole grass bank in the distance. Somehow it rendered (and looked a bit rubbish) but afterwards I couldn't even save the output because Blender was jammed.
 

Progress on the snowman 

I got better snow from Kaizen Tutorials. Very impressive!

The Case of the Missing Geometry [SOLVED]

Enormugantic displacement -> everything looks melty with soap-bar smoothing

 I've really enjoyed making landscapes using True Terrain. It's an amazing tool, but there was a catch: the terrain meshes, genereted using a huge displacement map, just wasn't showing the kind of surface details that you know are locked in there. Why? What's going on? Pump up the sub-div and you see no benefit.



Well I watched a Youtube video about True Terrain, by Berglmir. It suddenly bacame painfully obvious why the details were not showing: True Terrain's subdivision panel is intended to serve the texture maps, not the underlying terrain.

In order to make your underlying terrain more detailed you need to add a subdivision surface modifier into Blender's modifier stack, and, very importantly, make it apply before the True Terrain modifier. This ensures that the terrain displacement is applied after the plane has been made super-subdividy.

A couple more levels of subdivision ahead of True Terrain and whamo!

Other stuff that's cooking

A Christmas-themed illustration. Good snow is hard to make...

Blender 3.4 Released

 Horrah. New Blender! This one sneaked up on me, I'd forgotten that the release cycle now runs with a sensible cadence. 

There aren't any massive functional additions, just a large number of small improvements, some not so small if they impact a workflow that you depend on. 

Quick test render. Sanctus materials plus an old circuit board map displaced on Mr D. Cube.

Big Rig arrives at planet Blender 3.4

More true terrain

 
I was very happy with how the elements come together in this tight and rather basic scene. I wish I'd bought True Terrain ages ago.

Desert River

However, I did create a little scene using the old method. 

Displacement terrain + normal map

Mix shader - 1 material for the big details, another for the fine detail

Needs better feet

 

Space 1999-style feet. Clumsily blocked out.

Still a bit crashy. Stepped back from a material setup.

Survival Pod

 

I'm going to build a quick landscape scene. I need a focal point, something to place within a barren wilderness. A survival pod/shelter!

So here's a start:

Got a bit crashy! All that cloth or the carbon fibre procedural texture?

A weekend of Blender

 That rare thing! A weekend in which I'm able to indulge in a lot of Blender. Some Rainbow Six: Siege, also.

True Terrain practice

First, a new beta for World Creator. Horrah! Only my annual maintenance period expired. Boooo!
I wasn't enthusiastic about paying another year. The development of World Creator 3 has been bumpy for me. Where as World Creator 2 was like a therapy. I'd spend an hour making and dressing a place, World Creator 3 is parred back, it doesn't have any of that final stage stuff, so its all about exporting terrain for working on else where.

However, True Terrain is a game-changer. It's able to generate materials that scale effectively, it uses adaptive subdivision to give that foreground area incredible details. So, WC3 is definitely going to get some use. On Sunday, I bought another year's maintenance fee -giving me access to the new beta. It's going in a wild new direction. Simulation driven errosion/sedimentation. 

World Creator 3 -> Blender -> True Terrain -> True Sky

The default render sample setting is far too low. That's why it looks muddy/noisy.

This marrying up of close-up and far away, without a lot of staging is why I love this workflow so much.

Big Rig Progress


I'm still working on the Big Rig.

Applying the first layer of materials. Changing out stuff that wasn't working

New tanks

I'd make a right mess of the UV on the reaction mass tanks. I decided it was easier to rebuild then with cleaner UV.

I then decided that I'd have slightly different tanks across the ship. A break in symmetry that, I think sells the idea that this is a really big thing, not an appliance. Big things tend to have slighly more inconsistency as parts are chopped and changed. I ended up going back to the nicely rounded caps, while keeping the inproved panelling (displacement maps).

I've been trying test renders using three appoaches:

Native Blender (bottom) -  that one's a bit flat but it is quick.

True Sky - Rich and pleasing, though a bit complex and I had a bad system hang when changing to it while in viewport render mode.

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere - Crisp, simple and realistic. In this setup, a bit overexposed.

There's a use for each setup. I like PSA as a starting point as it's realistic and usually makes a scene look better. I think True Sky is a bit more fiddly and produces richer, more complex lighting. Base blender is still pretty good. You'd just need to invest a lot more time and have a lot more knowledge (than I have) to make it sing.

True Terrains Going Awry

 I planned to make great progress with True Terrain. Instead it's suddenly not doing what I expect. I'm not seeing any material masking. I'm wondering if my viewport is glitching. More likely I'm just blundering.

So in this blog I'm going to run through the workflow, as best I can, to create a starting point for future projects.

Narator's voice: While writing his tutorial, Mark discovered that he'd been assigning added layers as brand new materials. He'd woken up that morning and lost the memory of a critical part of the workflow. So, yes. Just blundering.

So running through the tutorials a couple of times, I noticed that I'd made a mistake. It's not the cleanest workflow (in my limited defense). 

Normal service resumed!

Progress:

Scatter distribution unlocked!

Fogmospherics unlocked!

True Sky enabled!

There was another update to update to the Physical Celestial Objects add-on (I've never seen the add-ons get updated all together, before. I'm guessing updates help to generate a Black Friday sales proposition. Anyway, I installed, turned the add-on on and had a play. I tried to change from Eevee to Cycles which gave my new PC its first Blue Screen Of Death. EEEEk!

So I may give this version a pass. 

Digging deeper into True Terrain

 

I managed to get all the way through the workflow without getting jammed or crashing. I'm quite pleased with the results, given the complexity of the system and the high demand. I can't imagine this add-on would be suited to a low-spec system.

It seems like Thanksgiving and the Black Friday sales drive a lot of activity in Blender add-on land. The add-on Planetarium has been renamed "Cosmo". It boasts lots of cool stuff, though I'm not sold on the changes from my first impressions.

The coastline is amazing. The node-based terrain is pretty good, and super detailed, but pure-noise based planets tend to lack some element of reality.

The issue becomes more accute on the Earth model. Altough with more time and experimentation, these issues may go away.

What is payday...

 What is payday, if not a vessel upon which to sail the seven seas of Blender add-ons?

The True-VFX team celebrated their birthday with a hefty 50% discount. I've had my eye on their True-Terrain add-on for some time. Since I got their brilliant True-Sky add-on.

Yes, it's not very good. Consider that this was hammered after watching a single newbie video. While the add-on seems well designed with good workflow -- it's still quite a lot to take in on your first session. There's lots to learn but I'm excited about the brilliant collection of ground materials, and the blending system.

Add True-Sky too

In other news, Sanctus materials updated to 2.2. It now has wood! I'll have a play with it tomorrow.

Random Flow - new release (v1.7.5)

 

I try not to rely too heavily on generative modelling. I want to craft the focal point of any rendering project. However, when you're building vast space stations or insanely intricate machinary, it really pays to have a tool like Random Flow at your disposal. 

Random Flow is not a particularly intuitive modelling tool. It's ui has a lot of obscure parameters to tweak, and without some understanding of the tool, you can change a lot and not any change to your model. But once you get it, you really get it! 

I've not got my head around the changes that come in 1.7.5, but it seems like a lot of nice improvements are in place that impact the underlying geometry generators. I should watch a tutorial video!

More more big rig

True-sky gives this work-in-progress shot a loverly blue hue

Erm this went a bit crashy -- cloth padding on the shield disk. I might try to create the padding using a normal map.

Progress slowed, but I'll try to get the model finished tomorrow.

 

More Big Rig

 

Maybe I went to town on the smaller details too soon

I'm stuggling to get the detail level consistent between lander and main hull.

Tru-Sky gives a nice spacy lighting

Cheating

 

I wanted to show off all the lovely assets that come with Bagapie Assets. However, this will probably set even my super powerful new PC on fire.

The answer of course is to create the image out of several passes, so that no more than two rows of grasses are rendered in a single scene.

For example... an actual render

Progress on Big Rig

 Today I gave my space ship some strap on tanks and a new command hub.

Space lighting!

This was a test. The top part is actually a space station that I designed a few weeks ago. 

Bell nozzles dropped in favour of more futuristic thrusters. I will add a grill plate or something to those openings.

Some equipment and tanks planned for the command section. I might change the top, tomorrow.

When complete, this landing vehicle will be complimented with a large space engine module.