Fireshark continued

Tonight I continued with the reboot of the Fireshark space fighter. Happy with progress. Happy that I recognised a couple of bad design decisions and backed out.

As the design spreads out, this version of the Fireshark is looking a little more elegant, also flimsy. I kinda like that.

Rectangular engine blocks

Too much rectangular. Too repetative and to be honest, they just don't look that convicing.

A more "rockety" approach to the engines looks better to me.

Time to block out the main gun. That forward section is intended to be a six-shooter particle gun. A couple of well placed shots could cripple a mid-range ship.

 

Fireshark rebooted

 The Fireshark fighter ship was a design I did for a proposed animated TV series/movie, back in the 90s. I always thought it was a cool idea, although the design elements never quite reached an acceptable standard.

So, lets try again!

This is the 2013 rebuild, done in 3DS Max:

Original Fireshark (2003)

3D Art shouldn't chain you to a single tool or a single way of working

 

Landscape generated in World Creator 3 (beta). Planet created in Blender. Astronaught is a downloaded asset, a pretty amazing one from Domenico D'Alisa.

All the good stuff was done in post, using Affinity Photo. It's not cheating!

Planet asset created with Geo-Sim 3

Source landscape from World Creator 3

Moah photogrammetry

I scanned Leo on Sunday afternoon. Turned out quite well, though scans seem to need a lot of light not to be dark as dank.

A closer look and you can see that some qualities are very ropey. This was captured in a few minutes using an iPad, so I'll not let it bug me. I'm tempted to try shifting over to the manual workflow, using my digital SLR. It seems like it will be a hell of a lot more work, but oh it would be nice to get the quality up.

Geo-planet 1.3 is out. It's such a good little add-on if you want to create nice planets. Shame that Blender tends to crash all the time when messing with my favourite add-ons.

Round 2 progress and photogrammetry foot in the door

The second UV-practice space vehicle is progressing nicely. Well, it's a bit better than the first attempt, which is entirely the point.The big improvement is in me seeing UV as a kind of jigsaw puzzel. If the unwrap has issues, I move islands around and reconstruct objects by putting its island faces in the  right places.

Cleaned up cargo container

Small surface-level geometry belongs in the bump or normal map.

Also, a quick test of Polycam, on my Ipad. It's cool and spooky to capture things. I could see me catching the photogrammetry bug. Obviously this was a quick test. I had no idea what I was doing or whether the capture would be successful.

 

And here's another one I did later

Reasonably happy with the materials -- but not deliriously happy.

 

I built another, slightly simpler design. The maps will be better.

UV practice - Lesson Learned

    

Medium Rig -Multipurpose Transporter

I'm very pleased with the progress of my UV mapping and finally doing the small details as displacement / normal maps. However, I just realised why the panels on the rear of this orbital rig don't quite match the panels on the front. That face as a moderately smaller texel density -- Zen UV let me take readings and compare, although you can tell from the relative size of the panels on the UV map that they're not quite matching up. Important Lesson!

Doodad test object

An earlier lesson, this time for my 6-year-old son, Leo. Teaching him how to use the mirror modifer.

    
 

Zen and the art of UV

 

Zen UV Plugin

My first proper tinker with Zen UV has left me feeling overjoyed. I have so much to learn, and my fundermental understand of UVs still needs work. However, this is the first time I've managed to quicky generate a UV map with useful islands. Without any real undstanding of what I was doing, I'd usually generate a UV consisting of every face on its own island. Useless for hard surface modelling. Further more, maps would be riddled with horrible distortions and artifacts, thanks to a complete ignorance of the importance of consistent texel density.

Play

I know! It's not a space ship or an alien world. Try not to faint!

Another crazy plugin: Terrain Mixer

 Terrain Mixer

(https://blendermarket.com/products/terrain-mixer)

When I first saw the demo video I was very excited, but I decided that, having spent serious money on World Creator 2, I would give it a pass. Well, yesterday I went back and had another look. I decided that there's maybe less overlap between the two scenary creators than I first thought.

World Creator is a full-fledged landscape generator, its enormously powerful, but what you generate then needs to be exported to Blender. That process usually ends up being lossy. On the other hand, Terrain Mixer runs out of Blender's node system, it uses a crazy node-spagetti to generate landscapes using lots of clever manipulation of super-high-resolution displacement maps. The results can look stunning but right now I'm struggling to intuit how the control the output. While it's easy enough to spin dozens of sliders, knowing what will happen as a result is another thing. I'm sure I need to watch more tutorials and put in a few more hours practice. It's been a  bit unstable, but I'm still excited at the prospects for this amazing tool.

Render from above!

Default settings

Fake sky FTW. Impressive slick rocks eh!

The detail. The DETAIL. It's incredible.

                  As impressive as these landscapes are, they're little changed from the default. I'm beginning to understand how changes to the node system can result in big significant alterations, such as the addition of canyons, or a different material selection.

Trusty old World Creator. Getting comparable detail in a WC terrain usually entails the importing of a gigabyte-scale mesh. 

There's still room for World Creator, which feels more like you are painting the landscape rather than tweaking sliders.
                                                

Time of the year

 January is the month where I traditionally set unrealistic targets for self-improvement and positive habits. I'll be honest, "do more Blender" is an annual target that often gets pushed to the wayside. 

I've found myself making more notes, in paper-and-pen format. It makes a lot more sense to make these notes in this blog. So, that's something I'll honestly try to keep up.

Recent developments:

Blender 3.0 

The first major release in my Blender journey, I started with 2.69, which surely is a very short hop in terms of versions compared to the nearly decade-long stretch in time. That said, the "0.31" worth of software update has been massive. In 2.69, Cycles was the new rendering engine kid on the block (introduced in 2.61). Blender 3.0 has added the first major update to Cycles, an upgrade so significant that they labelled it "Cycles-X". It looks like even more improvements are coming soon, caustics in 3.1 -- finally Blender users can create the swimming pools and glassware scenes without elaborate fakery.

I'm very excited about finally, finally pushing my Blender skills to the next level. Over Christmas I made a big investment in terms of commercial plugins:

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere

https://blendermarket.com/products/physical-starlight-and-atmosphere

Scene without PSA

Scene with default "earth" profile 

Landscapes come to life (if they don't crash Blender to desktop)

A plugin so good I you end up playing with it for hours

Physical Starlight And Atmosphere isn't cheap, but there are few plugins that do amazing things the moment you turn them on. Now a lot of Blender users with more expertise with lighting than myself probably don't need the plugin to get great results, but judging from the testimonies, this is a tool for serious work. Now, I'm experiencing a lot of instability, usually when trying to render stupidly big scenes, though not always. I've found it more reliable when I activate the Lock Interface option, under the Render menu. This is an option that I couldn't find in the documentation, which apparently stops UI interactions from impacting an in-progress render. It's claimed in a blog to speed up rendering, although it seems more likely that it safeguards against instability.

All said, PSA is probably the best plugin I've bought, maybe because I find good natural lighting setup to be both mysterious and painful.

Zen UV

- https://blendermarket.com/products/zen-uv

This one is brand-spanking-new, so I've yet to learn how to use it. My first test proved to be very helpful. Managing UVs is a great weakness of mine. I just never seemed to get my hear around how it work, or how to handle it effectively. After a couple of tutorials I just felt like I had sunk deeper. I'd created seems, as if cutting the surface of my mesh into a flat piece of paper, but the end results were a mess. I did tests, using simple meshes, suddenly it mostly worked. I think years of UV-unwrap unfriendly meshes were the cause of my pain. Lots of people had raved about Zen as a powerful tool/workflow for good UV unwrapping, so I invested.

So far it looks pretty incredible, but I only just learned what Texel density and island packing all means, so I still need to cover the basics.

Other Plugins:

Bagapie - Just an amazing, random set of scripts that do instant joy -- Scattering, Arrays, Auto-ivy, Wall generation. This is really super. I'm tempted to invest in the asset library add-on which provides a lot of very scatterable assets (plants, rocks, trees, etc).

See https://abaga.gumroad.com/l/BbGVh

By-Gen - A tool for generative mesh creation that has huge potential for creating interesting complexity such as organic forms, fracturing, stuff like that. Probably best to watch its creator, Curtis Holt talk about it on Youtube.

See https://blendermarket.com/products/by-gen

Random Flow - Another generative tool that adds complexity to meshes. This one looks amazing and reminds me of a tool in 3DS Max for adding Greebles. This one looks more powerful but is not so intutitive. I still don't understand how it works, but finally managed to get something out of it, last night. It has 107 pages of Google Documentation, so I'll trying reading more.

See https://blendermarket.com/products/random-flow

Random Flow tweaks to some Kit-bash objects - PSA sky in the background

More soon!