Playing with Blender add-ons.

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere on top, World Creator 3 output on the bottom.

Additional mountain range mesh in the background. Can't believe I've never done it this way before, instead of trying to import a huge monolithic ground mesh.

 

Squished the mountain range to make it more plausible. Also made this a binary star system -- cool feature!

Added a human, generated in Human Generator 3. This is Hoff. Hoff is walking across this unforgiving alien world barefoot.

This evening I played with two brilliant Blender add-ons and a supporting realtime landscape creation app. This is rare for me. I prefer to be wrangling with vertices and modelling stuff, but its a nice reminder that not every part of your scene needs to be a creative labour. 

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

Human Generator V3 -
https://blendermarket.com/products/humgen3d

Worldcreator 3 (beta) -
https://world-creator.com/

Volumes

 

I just realised that I'd not used volumes in a render in many years. I wondered if Blender's implementation had improved. I did some quick tests.

World Creator 2021 output with volume lights

Principled Volume with a colour ramped noise applied to volume emission strength

Old-style volume node

Underlit

Backlit

Def Stah

What's been going on?

 
So I just realised that I've not posted in ten days. It's not because my Blender activity has slowed down -- although I've not made my progress with the Fire Shark -- still working on it though.

Busy at work, I've done more tinkering and learning and fewer things to show off. 

That said, I built a rough concept model of Gateway, the space station that features in the roleplaying game 2300AD. It sits part way along Earth's beanstalk, a giant cable that runs from Libreville in Gabon to a geostationary captured asteroid. This cable allows people to catch "cable cars" into space -- though the trip takes days because you no longer need to generate massive thrust to get yourself up to escape velocity, you slowly get it by climbing the space elevator.

Gateway

USS Jefferson - placed in the scene to give a scale reference.

This is the Kennedy-class Missile Cruiser that I built a year ago.
See here.

A third spin habitat is going inbetween the two existing ones. I need to add more framework for it.

It's the wrong orbital location, but it gives you the idea.

Other bits and pieces from the last week:

More procedural space rocks

I had a play with Human Generator -- something is going a bit wrong. Not sure if its me or a bug. Assigning a pose appears to be placing a duplicate figure creating super-imposition lady.

The latest version of Human Generator has some lovely incremental improvements. At some point I'm going to create a space suit for these people.

Jemima

Fireshark progress

Fireshark is slowly progressing. 

I'm keeping the original design's deep red colour. This was a story telling device so that the audience could instantly recognise "baddy" consortium ships.

Adding normal/bump map panels and more spot elements/decals.

I created a little video that tracked the design steps: