Sketching some more

Some 3D sketching...

Fluent sketch - baskets of colour

A Space caravan. Who might tow it where?

Space Caravan with mini carrier unit

Space Caravan with 4 thruster pods.

Easter Holiday's end

 A long weekend that included lots of messing around in Blender. Wonderful!

More fun with Fluent 2.0 Power Tools. It's a mysterious retro SF appliance. It took me back to my undergraduate studies in Product Design. The reason for the build was really to prepare something to practice with the Fluent Materializer. Screenshots of that work will come later.

More Fluent 2.0 modelling. This time a "space caravan." I'll expand and add materials soon.

Easter Sunday

 

Materializer basic scratches and grundge (first pass)

Blender Marketplace Sale: time to spend some money!

 

ZenBBQ  (https://blendermarket.com/products/zen-bbq)

Impulse buy. This is a really interesting new approach to bevels. Dodging all the warped geometry problems you can suffer, handling bevels in the shader. 

Fluent: Materializer (https://blendermarket.com/products/fluent-materializer)

With discount available, I finally bought Fluent Materializer. This is a powerful yet easy to use workflow for assigning material effects like grudge, scratches and dirt to your excessively clean models. I built this quick box using Fluent Power Tools. I should have rendered closer to the material to show off the effects.

Our groundfloor extension is progressing. Time to choose some colours. I whipped up a quick model of my new stuff to consider feature wall colours.

New beta (World Creator) moah scapes then

 
I record my World Creator activity on this blog because I see it as part of my Blender workflow for landscapes. Last year, WC2 and Blender 2.9x didn't perform very well when trying to create big landscapes. Between the Cycles X improvements of Blender 3.x and World Creator 3, that feels like its all changed.

Granted, I now know to import landscapes as high-bit-depth hight maps, rather than baking into vast meshes. This makes a world of different when interacting with them in Blender.

The WC3 made top-to-bottom changes, including the limitation of the size of your land tile. It meant that WC3 isn't ideal for creating a huge landscape. However, the latest beta includes a feature that lets you make the land tile seamless, so that you can join copies together.  

4 tiles. Repetition, yes. But also huge landmasses

I need to work on materials. 

Here's a 3d scan that I created on recent wander around Sheffield city centre. I need to shift to SLR capture and one of the scanning services, so that I can get production quality captures. It's nice to be able to capture 3d modules just for reference, though.

Blender from bleh

 Still under the weather. Still messing about in Blender, but not actually doing anything significant.

A new beta from World Creator

World Creator -- tiled terrains for epic scale

World Creator

Asteroid Base

Fluent 2.0  play

Low ebb!

 

Sinus pain and cold continue to drain my power and productivity. Still a bit of time to play. 

I stopped importing World Creator into Blender because it usually resulted in slow and unstable efforts. Now that I'm importing heigh maps into Blender 3.0, the results are much easier to work with. Renders are much faster.

World Creator 3 heightmap import into Blender 3.1

Another World Creator 3 import.

Fluent 2.0 

Randoms with Random Flow 1.6B

 

Random FLow space station.

Kool Coffin box

Physical Starlight And Atmosphere · Basic - better clouds

Landscaping

 

A landscape created in World Creator 3 (beta). Imported into Blender 3.1 using the material node system. This now seems to offer the best results by far. Firstly, it seems to more readily support 32bit height maps, in this case an EXR format, usually used for HDR maps. The performance is better than if the displacement is stored as a mesh.

Mucking about with some standard Blender fog. Nothing clever, yet.

A bit poorly

 I'm suffering an infection, not COVID, thankfully. It's knocked my productivity back a bit.

Some Fluent 2.0 practice:

It's so good!


Inport from World Creator 3 Beta. The results are so much better when landscapes are imported as a displacement map from within the material workflow.