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.

World Creator 3 has a new Beta! I must refresh my export procedure

 World Creator 3 is an amazing realtime terrain generator. It has a really nice render engine that gives nice and fast results, but Blender obviously has more power and flexibility. That said, I have never been particularly happy with my workflow. Mostly because the texture maps that you generate in World Creator are too small for big landscapes.

I'm going to sumerise the steps to take -- to help me keep them in mind. They're taken from Blender film-maker Martin Klenker's youtube tutorials.

1. Don't export meshes, in most cases they'll be far too big to store (Gigabytes) and squeezing such a file into your Blender pipeline will just make everything slow and maybe run you out of memory.

Instead, use giant 32-bit height maps. In World Creator, this is though the Exr format. Otherwise go with all the default values.

 In Blender 

1. Create a plane, 2000 by 2000 units    
2. Subdivide to about 80x80

3. Fix the scale, making the plain 1-scale. Ctrl+A, select Scale.
4. Add a displacement, set its coordinates to UV

5. Create a New Texture.
6. Go to the texture panel. Select Open. Navigate to your Exr Hightmap and load it.
7. Ensure the texture maps colour space is set to Linear.
8. On the displace panel, adjust the strength. The large dimensions of the plain will probably mean that you need to go with a high strength value.

9. Add a subdivsion surface modifier to increase the mesh density and bring out the terrain's fine detail. Select 5 for the render level, something less for the display port.

In case you get raised edges on your terrain, where Blender hasn't displaced them:

1. Select the edge rows.

2. Add them to a new vertex group. Add the edges.

3. Under the displace modifier, add a Mask modifier, select your vertex group, then invert. This drops down any raised edges.

Material Steps

In the shader editor:

1. Assign an BSDF shader to the plain.
2. Assuming you have Node Wrangler, click on the shader box and select Ctrl+T. You'll get a pre-mapped texture. Select your colour map and plug it into the base colour.
3. Add an additional map, this time connect it to a Normal Map Shader.

4. Add an RBG to BW filter, apply it to the Specular, using your colour map as the input.

5. Increase the roughness value. Maybe 0.8

6. As colour mapping from Blender is usually too dark by default, you might add an RBG colour ramp to the colour output. Tweak to make it brighter.

Typical basic material setup

Terrain Texture

As the texture maps are usually too small to do a good terrain justice, this is where you use the splat maps, these are a set of masks that you can use to separate different textures. You'll need to use a photo editor for this work.

 That's it.
I should sign up for Martin's course.

Fridays are for housework and space craft design (Orbital Elements)

 

A generic spacecraft from Orbital Elements. This is maybe heavy rig, or a larger-sized medium rig. I started to fill in the holes in one of the landing legs.

GSC1 - detail

Bulking out the command module with some rather muscular thruster pods.

GSC1 - Thruster Module

Somewhat overexplosed, but I'm loving the sky.

This is tru-sky, an addon I bought in last week's sale on Blender Marketplace.

A first stab ant the scale, with that woman standing (precariously) on the thruster module. It might go bigger.

Orbital Elements - Heavy Rig

I've started designing a ship for Orbital Elements. It's bigger than it looks. Not a small Eagle Lander type thing.

 

Onwards and up-to-watching-more-tutorials-wards

 

The new "workstation" has given me a renewed appetite for learning and developing. These blog posts prove that I'm spending too long tinkering and trying. Now is the time to start investing in much more learning.

Substance abuse

Last night I managed to get Substance Painter 2 working -- it needed a replacement DLL dropping in because Adobe has abandoned the old product versions. It only took a few minutes to figure out how to get a mess into place and start painting. What I did was complete rubbish, but it really sold the idea of painting textures onto assets.

Physical Celestial Objects add-on absolutely rocks, and there's a lot still to do. I've been happy with the quick gas giant textures that I cooked up using NASAs Cassini and Juno photo data.

Take the biggest map of Jupiter that you can find. Multiply it. Recolour it.

I think it hard to overstate the importance of the add-on's physical and optical setup. Even the biggest and best texture maps won't make a good planet.

The atmosphere is somewhat overstated. That's on me and my parameters.

Why so shiny?

Terrains imported from World Creator have tended to look a bit weird compared to their better look within World Creator itself. Ohe thing that seems to happen in Blender is for the normal map to produce dark patching -- maybe a limitation of normal mapping, and a there's a shiny quality even when the material is completely mat. I need to investigate and read up.

Normal not applied.

Normal map applied.