Christmas Break

 I've been enjoying all the usual festive activities. Spending time with the family, spending too much time with food. Drinking! Watching some TV. Replaying Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Still playing with Blender, mind you!

World Creator heightmap using True Terrain and True Sky

Noisy water. Would need about 4000 samples to calm those fireflies. Noise filtering tends to make scenes like this go all mushy.

Starting point. 

Tiny hand made terrain with some Bagapie assets.

Same as above.

I've been experiencing more instability. More crashing to desktop. I tried to do a simple 2-second animation of the above nature scene. The scene crashed the moment I set keyframes. Gah! I remember that getting a lot of crashes used to sap all my enthusiasm for 3D work. I'd go away for weeks or months. I think at this stage I've woken up to the fact that crashing just happens. You rework to avoid the problem, simply or reduce the memory overhead. 

A day off work but not much Blender

 I had a day off. Horrah! I didn't get much Blender time. Boo. 

I went to see my youngest son's Christmas show  and then took a trip to Ikea. Still, in the afternoon I whipped up a lander bot. Something that I can dump into landscape scenes, when it's finished.

Lander Bot sketch

100th post of 2022!

 Horrah, this has been the year when I didn't walk away from Blender for months at a time.

Always Blender!

World Creator heightmap output

Random Flow, Creatrive Flow, Sanctus Materials (Experiemental world terrain)

Textures on the landscape!

Blue

 It's taken a month for my expectations to rise to unrealistic levels. This weekend I did a lot of playing around with landscape work. I spent a lot of time waiting for renders. Waiting!?! On THIS machine?

Well, I think that part of the problem is that I'm scaling the terrain meshes up to be hundreds of metres. This makes the texture and light more realistically, but it also pushes everything up. Scattering grass being a case in point. You just can't do a dense scatter of realistic grass over hundreds of metres. I know this because I tried this.

Green stuff

The viewport became unresponsive, even when most of the scatter objects were hidden. I moved the camera and hadn't realised I'd moved it way up. The resulting point of view captured the whole grass bank in the distance. Somehow it rendered (and looked a bit rubbish) but afterwards I couldn't even save the output because Blender was jammed.
 

Progress on the snowman 

I got better snow from Kaizen Tutorials. Very impressive!

The Case of the Missing Geometry [SOLVED]

Enormugantic displacement -> everything looks melty with soap-bar smoothing

 I've really enjoyed making landscapes using True Terrain. It's an amazing tool, but there was a catch: the terrain meshes, genereted using a huge displacement map, just wasn't showing the kind of surface details that you know are locked in there. Why? What's going on? Pump up the sub-div and you see no benefit.



Well I watched a Youtube video about True Terrain, by Berglmir. It suddenly bacame painfully obvious why the details were not showing: True Terrain's subdivision panel is intended to serve the texture maps, not the underlying terrain.

In order to make your underlying terrain more detailed you need to add a subdivision surface modifier into Blender's modifier stack, and, very importantly, make it apply before the True Terrain modifier. This ensures that the terrain displacement is applied after the plane has been made super-subdividy.

A couple more levels of subdivision ahead of True Terrain and whamo!

Other stuff that's cooking

A Christmas-themed illustration. Good snow is hard to make...

Blender 3.4 Released

 Horrah. New Blender! This one sneaked up on me, I'd forgotten that the release cycle now runs with a sensible cadence. 

There aren't any massive functional additions, just a large number of small improvements, some not so small if they impact a workflow that you depend on. 

Quick test render. Sanctus materials plus an old circuit board map displaced on Mr D. Cube.

Big Rig arrives at planet Blender 3.4

More true terrain

 
I was very happy with how the elements come together in this tight and rather basic scene. I wish I'd bought True Terrain ages ago.

Desert River

However, I did create a little scene using the old method. 

Displacement terrain + normal map

Mix shader - 1 material for the big details, another for the fine detail