Back to basics and some realisations

It turns out that maybe that there was something freaky about the scaling on my Geo-scatter source plane. I built a small scene that worked fine (below). It looks like the previous scene was much larger than I realised, so I had been scattering hundreds of square metres of biome. A crash was inevitable. This is a lesson; in the world of scattering you must be sure of your scale or things will break, or look very silly.

The scene that didn't crash. Yay!

A little ship

I picked up a sketch I did back in 1992. I ship for the High Colonies science fiction roleplaying game. Thought i might build it. Then I decided it was a bit rubbish, so I decided I'd build an updated version.

Enthusiasm ebbing away

 Installed Blender 3.5. Nice! Installed my army of useful add-ons. Two-plus hours of work -- okay.
So having adjusted my system's memory configuration, installed a new version of Blender, my troubles with crashing are surely over.

Not

So

Fast

Day-2:  GPU system errors. Then when I do some testing with old files, I get another Blue-screen-of-death.




I try doing some well controlled scenes with Geo-Scatter. Crash-to-desktop.

I run Blender in GPU debug mode, while also watching GPU and Memory stats... I get a system hang.

This is really making me not want to use Blender. That sucks.

Blender 3.5 released!

 I jumped straight into Blender 3.5 when I finished work and started to rebuild my configuration and reinstall all my add-ons. It took nearly three hours, partly down to having to watch a long of installation tutorials because I wasn't sure about all the required steps.

Everything seems to be working but I made the same mistake I nearly aways make on the first encounter with a new Blender version -- I forgot to set my rendering to GPU.

It was a silly error but it's easy to make when you never change or think about the setting. So what difference does it make?

Here's a quick seen I scattered together in a few minutes. I decided to use True Sky which can generate really nice skies but can be a bit expensive in terms of render requirements.

13 minutes and 37 seconds. For me, that's quite a long time.

When I realised that I was rendering using my CPU I immediately re-rendered again using my GPU, the Nvidia 4090, which you might expect is a bit faster.

Exactly the same scene rendered with my GPU: 23 seconds.

Oh yes. Quite a lot faster. That's 35-times faster, which is even faster than I thought it would be.

I've not forgotten about you Substance Painter...

 I've not forgotten about you, Substance Painter, but I have forgotten nearly everything about you.

So this morning I decided to start a refresh. One thing I didnt understand was how to select difference parts of an object to be treated as a different material set in SP. Turns out I just needed to assign different colours to objects in Blender.

Model the object: A lunch-box

Ensure that all parts are given a material. This way, when exported as a FBX, there will be separate colour for each object.

Import into Substance Painter - Paint!

Once you have exported your maps, return to Blender. 

In the shader workspace, select the material shader, select shift+Cntr+T. This tells Node Wrangler to bring in all the material maps and place them in the appropriate material channel.

A very rough output. I just went with a smart material with no modifications. Next time I'll fine-tune the materials.

Random Flow 2.0

Randow Flow 2.0 sketch

 

Blender Guppy drops updates

 Blender add-on creator, Blender Guppy has released updates for Creative Flow, Random Flow and Panel Creator. So much to absorb.

I hardly touched Creative Flow because its hot key doesn't work until you go into the settings. These tools are amazing but there's an overwhelming amount of functionality, and no real documentation. Youtube videos are great for seeing hands on but there's a lot of stuff you'd need to write down if you want to remember it.

Creative Flow - Draw Faces

A powerful tool for applying faces onto a mesh in order to boolean. There are so many hot-keys and controls that you need to absorb.

Geo-Scatter

Yes, I know. I need to stop buying add-ons. But not today.

I've been thinking about investing in Geo-Scatter for a while. As True Assets have helped me organise a good asset library, I've started to try my hand at natural scenes. Bagapie is an amazing free tool but I just couldn't get its affector system to do any clever scattering.

I watched a couple of hands-on videos and decided, yes, I will spend all my money on add-ons.

I installed the plugin. I installed "scat-packs" to make biomes available. In fact, Bagapie Assets has a great scat-pack and it was the first one I that I tried out.

I loaded a dry biome. It took a shockingly long time to load. Minutes! Several! My system suddenly got very slow and I started to worry that I'd made a terrible buying decision.

I turned off all but three of the scatter systems. Still chuggy but not on the verge of lock-up. I then worked out how to enable camera-culling for all the layers. Still a bit chuggy, mind you.

Set up a lighting environment

Select the flat plane and use the quick displacement system

Render...

Oh boy, this is amazing for a scene that literally was created in seconds. Although the view port is chuggy the render took less than a minute.

Happy!

Maisonette progress

TrueSky Volume quirk

Someone on the TrueVFX Discord showed a weird fringe artifact on their rendering of a CloudScape asset using TrueSky. I recreated the same issue -- look at that ikky border!

I did some further experimentation. One, I think the issue is mostly down to fridge particles being de-noised into meh. Upping the volume resolution using Light Paths - Max Bounces - Max Steps and the Volumes setting make the issue go away.

TrueSky Dusk pre-set - Volume Rendering Defaults

TrueSky Dusk pre-set - Volume Rendering LightPaths/Max Bounces 128 max steps. Volume 60

Same setup with Physical Starlight and Atmosphere

 

Some play

 

Testing asset plates

Local flats -basic layout

Bagapie camera culling

A working theory.... DDR5 voltage draw

Using the compositor to create a lovely glow

 I was really happy with the glow effect -- yeah, it might need to be dropped down a peg, but it definitely gives the scene a real-space feel.

However, I was getting constant crashing, then a right nasty blue-screen crash. Another that hung the system.

A crash so bad the bluescreen message died before it completed "blue screen".

It looks like the crashes might be happening when the DDR exceeds 5v. This is acording to my iCue system monitor dashboard. Its something to look at. Maybe I can limit my GPU to, say 85% power, see if that provides overhead, in case this is just not having enough juice for peak power demands.

Pushing too far...

I've bought True Assets. It's quite expensive for what it is - a bridge that helps you set up asset libraries. However, after investing a bit of time, I realise that this is a massive time sever. I had a whole collection of trees and bushes that I just didn't have the time to properly incorprate as an asset library. True Assets does a great job of automating some parts of the process. The one fault was that importing a mass of objects,  I still had to go into individual blend files to modify categories, or you end up with a separate category for each object.

Three slightly deformed plains, arranged as a landscape

Some grass. A few rocks

 This was fun to do, but Blender ground to a stop. I ended up having to stop Blender from the Task Manager. It wasn't memory exhaustion, it probably the sheer number of instances in the scene. Lots!

Human Generator v4 beta

I reinstalled Human Generator - going with the latest beta. Some nice refinements!

Blue screen blues

 I grabbed half an hour before work yesterday to have a play with Blender. It took me twenty minutes to generate a blue screen crash that wouldn't even restart Windows without me doing a power cycle. This is very disheartening! 

My old machine experienced about six blue screens of death only about six times in three years. This new machine gets about one a week. If Blender 3.5 doesn't improve the crash situation I'm probably going to do some poking around and deeper log analysis. Heat or voltage issues? I still hope it's driver based because those issues tend to auto-update themselves away.


Giant-scale landscape, though not massive in terms of subdivision/poly count. Add giant clouds. Blender filesize and VRAM useage is nowhere near the ceiling. 

Big lanscape bridged from World Creator

CloudScapes assets in the distance. True Sky providing the actually sky bit.

New Add-on -- True Assets

 I got a 30% discount on True FX's True Assets add-on. It's a pretty powerful asset  management tool that lets you add pretty much any asset-type into your browser. So far so good.

Also Physical Starlight and Atmosphere issued a fix for their small incompatability problem with Blender 3.4 where its stars stopped working.

The stars are right!

 Cloudsy experimentalo

Cloudy with a chance of add-on purchase

 I bought another add-on. Not exactly shocking news, given my track record for buying Blender stuff.

CloudScapes: https://blendermarket.com/products/cloudscapes

This looks great for the kind of cloudscapes that I always wanted to create.

A tiny bit of quantisation visible at the tops.

For really big cloudscapes, I'll need to build the scene in layers, then use a compositor to combine 3-4 layers.

Space station progress

Counter-spin spin-habitats

 Started on the central hub. Next I'll build a dock and a power station.

Catchup

 

The desert of Blender instability

Weird Bagapie test scene

Space Station - rebuild

Smaller with more details - spin habitat

Stilted

 

Sketching and Blender doodles

Space  

Space, also, I got a blue screen of death on this. Dang, my new system is unstable :(

 

Space Sation Sketch-turned-proper-model

Doodle to show off Blender Guppy's grunge groups. 

Grunge groups sketch

World Creator has a Blender bridge. Yay But Blender still crashing

 World Creator's long-in-development Beta has gone back into the workshop for major UI rework. Part of their thanks for our patience was the release of some bridges - like add-ons that handle the transfer of live World Creator content right into Blender, with the click of some sync buttons.

It works great, although it does suffer a bit when the underlying mesh's resolution doesn't match that of the Blender instance. You get banding.

However, the bigger issue remains instability. Blender is crashing a lot when I try to do landscapes. It's really frustrating.

I'm trying a few things.

1) Blender 2.5 Beta. It seems great. It crashes a little less, but it has now crashed.

2) Switched to Optix API. It's NVIDIA-specific but I always found it to be unstable. Well it didn't crash but it did make CUDA fall over in a less passive agressive way.

This is new

Having a quick read, this may result from a light ray that has escaped to infinity. One hack solution is to wrap the scene in a bounding box. That might not work when using a sky add-on. I don't know! Sucks, it does.

World Creator and Blender...BRIDGED!!

A scene straight from World Creator