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.