It's taken the whole weekend to sync data and install a handful of games.
Blender assets are mostly in place, so I should be able to get cracking...
New plugin alert! Physical Celestial Objects -- early access
This comes from the team that created Physical Atmosphere and starlight. On the strength of how good that add-on is, I jumped straight onto this early access version of PCO.
This works in a completely weird way, but when you see the results you understand why this is the way to go. Instead of created a false-scale planet in your scene, this generates the planet in the background -- because planets are obviously behind the scane of geometry. The optical physics part of the planet is great, the ring system is great. It's missing a lot but the potential is amazing.
Bagapie scatter scenes just work, now. I mean they don't become slow after a couple of moderately dense layers.
Playing with quick-and-easy terrain. The material is beach rock from Wales.
So this was the first try. It used adaptive subdiv and I might have got the settings too high. It took 20 minutes to render and took more than 30GB of memory. OOPS!! It doesn't even look good, but that's probably because the maps are not intended for super detail.
The new workstation, in place (on the right). It's a colossus, even if it actual has the same make and model of case as the last machine. I name my machines. This one is called Athena.
My blender is momentarily in disarray. I've gone through the new installation and configured the basics. I've had to stop installing my large number of add-ons because I'm still waiting for my onedrive directory to sync, so that the installation files are in place. Still, I was able to do a couple of 1-minute tests.
Is Athena fast? Oh yes. Hard to quantify but renders that would take a minute now take about a quarter of the time.
This scene actually uses yet another plugin - tru-Sky. It looks greats, but I'll need to have a proper play with it when everything is in place.
Tomorrow, the new workstation arrives. I'm so excited! My current PC was bought just before the arrival of the last generation of CPUs and GPUs, so I'll be jumping two generations. It's going to be amazing, if it doesn't catch fire.
Sanctus Library just got a super update that includes a lot of new and very cool materials. I give you dirty ground:
Lots of parametric control!
New smart metals just look amazing.
Quick animation test. Took about an hour. Still and animation file:
I bought this amazing Blender Add (age-old story!) Now, months later I have completely forgotten everything I learned watching the tutorial videos (well some of them).
So I'm going to summerise the steps here, so when I forget the basics again, I can just come back here. For some reason the developer hides the starter tutorials, you need to go to a stand-alone HTML file that comes with the installation.
Why it's here:
Step 1
Use the correct shortcut. It's not "f" because that's used by Fluent Powertools.
Go into a view that shows both a shader panel and a render window set to full render.
Select an object
Ensure it has a material assigned.
In the shader panel use shift+ctrl+f
If you were selecting the material shader the new layer will automatically connect to it.
From the Materializer "N" menu, add a mask.
Plug the mask into the appropriate input on your layer. Tip: Before plugging in to the layer, you can shift+cltr+left click on the new mask to preview it into the output. This gives you a clearer view of what the mask is adding to your material. Once you finish your preview, re-attach the actual material shader.
The basic method of using Materializer is to stack various masks one after the other to get interesting and compex surface effects.
A crate object quickly created to help do the testing.
Mixing surface qualities with Fluent Materializer.
By comparison, a Sanctus procedural texture. Super easy to get "roughed up" with minimal inputs.
I have a 3-4 year PC buying cycle. It was interrupted in 2020 when both my desktops died within a few weeks of each other. My main machine died because the graphics card had become more clogged with dust that I'd realised. So I bought a new PC a year early, missing the Nvidia 30-series by a couple of months, although in reality the crazy supply problems that applied to GPUs would probably have made it impossible to get one of the new cards anyway.
(To be clear the main PC brought back to life with a Nvidia 2060 which is now used mostly by my sons for playing Roblox. My youngest son even plays with Blender, sometimes.)
So here we are again.
I decided to get my new machine as the latest generation of Nvidia GPUs are released. By complete coincidence, the next generation of Intel CPUs are also available. So when Scan.co.uk send me my new workstation, next week, it should be an absolute performance monster.
CPU Today: Intel Core i9-10900K CPU @ 3.70GHz- Median score: 253.64 CPU Next Week: 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900K - Median score: 575.01
Okay, so synthetic benchmarks are designed so exagerate performance differences, but the new machine is surely going to be very fast. It's also equipped with 64GB of system ram, in case I want to go absolutely crazy.
It's ended up costing as much as the last two computers I bought, put together. Crazy money. Also the end of my buying cycle. This beast will need to last 5-6 years. I can't imagine I'll have the money to spec like this again.
Fuel Storage Station
Ships in Orbital Elements still need reaction mass. Here's a refueling station idea. A bit like a gas station, in orbit around a moon or asteroid.
Sometimes I reach a point in a build where I fall out of love with an idea. Or just get a bit bored with it. The lid was originally going to hindge on one side. I then decided that the auto-openning of such a big lid would be too difficult, so I split the lid in two. Problem is, I'd left the original hindge-side of the lid much thicker than the other side. Now it looks odd. Maybe I could select one side and create a mirror duplicate.
I'm also struggling to integrate an ammo belt.
At this point I go and do something else, with a high chance that I never return. This is my problem.
Another ring system for a space ship. I like it, but the ship is supposed to be quite small. I'll restart and leave this as an asset for use on a later project.
I love messing with Bagapie assets. However, I don't really know how to use all the features of the scatter tool. I need to go back to the documentation and do some more structured learning -- rather than just playing with what I know.
The British government has announced that HMS Queen Elizabeth II, the last remaining Monarch-class battle cruisers will be retired as the fleet's main training ship in December. An Admiralty spokesperson has confirmed that it has given its blessing for a plan to incorporate the 85-year-old battle cruiser into the Royal Space Navy Museum, at Gateway. It will be the first time a British warship of this size will be accessible by the public. Constructed ten years after the Second Battle of Alpha Centauri, the Monarch-class battle cruisers were intended to reaffirm Britain's control over its interstellar holdings, and provide a modernized space warfare capability, to support its allies and ward off adversaries. In fact, only four of the planned six Monarchs were completed, and none ever saw combat. Historians have argued over how effective the Monarch-class vessels would have been in a real fight. Often described as a lumbering white elephant and a 3000-ton prototyping platform, the Monarch-class was the first warship to feature many systems that are now standard on modern warships.
The build needs to match the actual 2300AD ship construction process, so I have to balance creative whims with the volume requirements of all the ships elements. For example, the twin spin habitat rings each take up about 500 displacement tons. That's about 7000 cubic metres.
The total displacement of the Monarch is 3000 displacement tons. I need to make sure that hangers, engines, weapon systems, all that good stuff, fits into the remaining parts.
A problem I have right now is that the ship's hull is supposed to be more enclosed. It's maybe looking too distributed along a spinal tube.
I'm going to rebuild the forward section -- the one here was more of a 3d sketch. I like it overall, but I need to take more time with the elements.
