Substance land

 

I didn't think this would work, but it does. Rather nicely. Export the world creator mesh into Substance Painter and paint yourself some ground.

Tuts required

 My use of Substance Painter continues to be hampered by  poor UV management. I need to go back and get a better grasp of UV. ZenUV tutorials!

I did get something out, by keeping the mesh simple, and it still contained an error.

Substance Painter offers a brilliant set of tools for creating detailed and realistic surface materials. 

The normal mapped hatch is warped. 

This is presumably a mismatch between the corrected UV in SP and Blender. Maybe I should have exported the mesh from SP to correct?

Terrain Mixer gets an update

 Terrain Mixer is weird old thing. It's a massive node-based terrain generation system. It has a large number of somewhat abstract parameters that control how some underlying massive displacement maps are mixed together. I never fully got my head around the parameters. With the right tweaking some amazing results are possible. At some point I will invest the necessary time to get it understood.

Tinkering with Substance Painter

 So I need to watch a few more hours of Substance Painter tutorials before I can begin to unlock its full power. That said, I also need to really get on top of UV management, so I may also need to rewatch a lot of UV tutorials.

Take complex models with messed up UVs away and Substance Painter is an absolute blast to use. These were created in minutes with almost no knowledge. This bodes well.

Other stuff

I had a play with World Creator. Set up another big landscape. Got it crashing again, but not before setting up a promising basis for an animated scene.

This is BIG. BIG! Bigger than any add-on. I got Substance Painter 3D 2023 (Steam Edition)

 

Substance Painter is the industry standard application for texturing models. You import your 3D model into Substance Painter, then apply materials and paint stuff. Only its better than that. It's used in triple-A games and blockbuster movies. 

So I watched a 10-minute tutorial and wham! I can create really basic Substance Painter material. Pretty cool!

Attempt 3. First two got broken UVs. All my fault.

Two minutes to build. Five minutes to create the material

It is going to take a while to learn how to create high quality materials, but it's very gratifying to be able to knock a material out in a few minutes. In this case using a smart material that contains the usual set of channels that include colour, roughness, normals etc.

Other stuff

Random Flow FTW

Crash, crash, crash.....crash

 I had a couple of low days, this week. I spent a mountain of money on a PC that should allow me to create huge scenes. Turns out Blender has other ideas.

I gave up after about 12 concurrent crashes-to-desktop

The scene isn't all that big but I find that crashing to desktop happens all the time when I try to play with big-ish terrains. I might try to go back to the bad old world of importing massive meshes, to see if that  dodges the crash bullet. Using meshes instead of using subdivision on displacement usually results in a juddery and mostly unusable UI.

Other stuff

Lunar Lander

Building a space vehicle. The effort is hanging on by a thread but I will get it to a satisfactory level of completion. Note the engines are kitbashed from an earlier space vehicle:

St John Smyth - from a couple of years ago.

Other stuff

• I decided to invest in Substance Painter (Steam edition). However the 2023 edition never appeared. I'm informed that it was delayed but is coming out in a few weeks. Watch this space!
  
  - I really need to go back and improve my UV editing skills. I made a lot of progress and get some benefit from the excellent ZenUV but I still feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge.

New Add-on: Panel Cutter

 Me, buying a Blender add-on. Fancy that!

Panel Cutter, from Blender Guppy

https://blendermarket.com/products/panel-cutter

It's a simple panel with logical parameters. Panels are defined on your mesh using closed loops of edges that are defined as sharp.

Panels made easy.

Easy to use, logical and fits into hard-surface modelling workflows. Cool!

First play

This tool replaces a well know panelling workflow:

1) Create a mesh.
2) Duplicate the mesh, cut holes in the duplicate to describe panels.
3) Solidify the new panel mesh.

The end result is a separate object that overlays panels on top of your base mesh.

Panel Cutter probably works the same under the bonnet but it provides parameters for quickly applying your panel qualities, so  you don't have to do it all manually.

2023!

I'll be taking a bit of a break in the first days of 2023 as my mum has sadly passed away, a few weeks after her 80th birthday.

It's a sad time for the whole family. I'll still be playing with Blender because it's actually quite therapeutic, but I may not post again for a little while. 

Making places.