I've been laid off

 
The company I worked for found it necessary to drastically downsize. I was one of the employees selected for redundancy. This absolutely sucks, but you have to hope that better things are coming. 

In the coming weeks I'm likely to have a bit more Blender time, which is good.

Cutter progress:

50-ton Modular Cutter Progress

 

Work-in-progress 

"No, I don't know how we're supposed to get in either."

Traveller 50-ton Modular Cutter

 

I only found this after completing the build below. 10-years earlier!

This old build was done nearly 10-years ago, in 3DS Max. Below is the in-production update.

Cutter nose on

Plating and details

Bug Fixed

 

Blender 3.5.1 fixes some bugs

As per usual, I think the latest release will fix my instability issues. It never does, maybe because they are caused by add-ons or hardware.

Sanctus update

Another big update for Sanctus procedural materials. Pretty cool!

Scan table update

Scan table scale test -- with subject

 

Borked it. Fixed it

 I tried to install Renderman for Blender. There's an issue where the add-on element doesn't work because it can't find the Renderman installation path. The add-on panel gives you about four different methods for finding the path, but none seem to work for me. It's a mess!

I manually created environmental variables. I added and removed the add-on several times with no success.


I gave up.

I started playing with Blender. Every render crashed. I removed renderman, I removed the manually added environmental variables. Nothing fixed the issue. 

I thought back. Hm, you know, I accidentally unticked the cycles add-on in a fat finger moment. I instantly re-ticked it but on checking back I saw that the add-on I see that Cycles was no longer assigned to a rendering method. So no longer set to Optix or CUDA. 

I reenabled Optix. Saved and restarted. All is well...for now.

Scanner table

 
A couple of weeks back I sketched out an appliance using Fluent Power Tools. It was off the cuff, no planning, just a 3d doodle. 

Ultrastavian Machine

I liked the idea, both as an exercise in product design, and as a practice with Fluent hard surface modelling. So I gave it another shot this evening.

Scanner Table

Still lots to do. I'll probably make it a full scene with a backdrop room. More soon...

Street Unit 2

 

Gap week

Where's the Blender output?
 
I decided to give Cyberpunk 2077 a third play through, since the release of a new update that enables more realistic raytracing. It's great - although I'm not overtly aware of the graphical improvements. Cyberpunk 2077 is an odd fish, it often looks absolutely stunning, especially in the realisation of its futuristic city environment. However, it also looks like the technical challenges of a game world that has a lot of verticality and complexity result in some crushing but necessary optimisation. There's a somewhat blurry and dream-like quality to running through those mean streets.

I'm loving the game. The only bug I've experience is a regular crash to desktop while trying to use the fast-travel system. Annoying but nothing breaking, and to be expected given that this recent upgrade is actually a massive change in terms of technology.


Any Blender?

Well I got another bluescreen. Trying to render a huge World Creator output. I need to really par back and keep landscape work more limited.

Also some practice play

A Fluent-based gadget takes shape

Playing with UV and noise. Early stages!

A very quick test of a composite landscape. Isn't really working.

Courier finished for now

 

Courier got a bit crashy

 

Just before the crashing to desktop

I was unusually happy with how the materials were coming along. I then started to try to put materials on the thrusters. They have lots of separate pieces -- which is maybe part of the problem. I added computationally expensive procedural textures.

So I spent more than an hour rebuilding, aligning and assigning materials to the engines. It hasn't crashed agains, so far.

Composite and Courier progress

 

A bit of fun. Clara loves gardening. 

Courier - bits of progress

Fold-up array and some port plates. I need to return to the materials and UV work.

Broadtop forest as a composite shot

Projecting Sky onto a background plane

 Sky on a background - Great results with the need for HDRI.

Camera rotation matched and paired with plane

1. Create a plane - rotate it to fill the background.

2. Select the camera.

3. Ctrl+C and hit Copy Rotation. (This requires the add-on Copy Attributes to be enabled.)

4. Make the camera the parent of the plane. Ctrl+P, keep transform. Now any time you move the camera, the plain moves with it.

5. Get a sky image. Connect it to both the Base Color and Emission.

6. Align the sky image horizon with the scene horizon.

7. Tab A, U, C to correct UV.

8. You might need to flip the photo to get the light source consistant. Scale -1 on the x axis.

9. You may need to uncheck shadow on the plane's properties, if the some is casting from behind it.

The end result

Cliff Masking

 Yesterday I created a forest of giant mushrooms during my lunch break. As you do.

Rough/low-poly test for a Forest on Aurore

I'm going to do a proper version. First I'm going to need to build some "hero" assets. These broadtops are a bit low detail.


Today, I'm looking to get a base terrain finished. One thing I was keen to work out was how to mask the high slopes on a terrain so as to be able to texture cliffs.

Justin at The CG Essentials had just the tutorial:

This is pretty simple:

1. In the node editor, add a geometry node.
2. Add a separateXYZ node. Connect the normal slot to the geometry node to the seprateXYZ's factor slot. 
3. Connect the "Z" axis output to a colorRamp
4. Adjust the ramp so that it splits the terrain into steep slopes and everything else.

5. Use the  output as the factor in a mix shader that mixes a ground material with a cliff material.

And then I cover the entire ground layer in grass...

Early Blender

 I'd promised Clara that I'd get up early to take the bin to the end of the road -- normally done the night before but on School holidays we tend to forget. After the excitement of walking the paper and cardboard bin to the end of our path I decided that I'd do some playing in Blender.

By the time it came to shut down and turn my attention to work I'd build a bunch of low-poly assets and had created a satisfying scatter.

So if you stick with simle, low-poly assets, Blender and Geo-Scatter can absolutely rock the detailed landscape scenes.

Intially I tacked this as two separate passes. Then I tried scattering on the back terrain model in the same Blender file. It worked, maybe because I kept the number of different assets low.

I absolutely love Geo-Scatter. It's powerful and very easy to use.

Slow walk back into environmental modelling

 I think that building landscape scenes is the biggest revelation of the last few months. I really love the idea but I need to do a lot of work to bring all the elements together.

I watched a really useful video that covers a lot of great tips. It gets deep into the weeds, which is where  you need to be with good landscape design.

Takeaways:


1. Use lots of references. The more you tie your design to natural patterns rather than random patterns, the better results you will get.

2. Tri-planar projection: Texture Coordinate for Object into the mapping, then all textures are set to Box projection with some blend. Keep the scale small or you get too much repetition.

3. Scale of plains is huge. Roughness is a micro element.

4. Best atmosphere is volumetrics. Expensive compute! Don't even talk about the flicker.

5. Cloud gobos produce an amazing sense of scale and epic feel. Thank you, Ridley Scott.

6. Absolutely don't try to place high-poly objects like trees in the view port.

7. Subdiv is very memory expensive. Sometimes better to go with base geometry rather than using subdiv modifiers.

Geo-Scatter rocks

World Creator terrain

I tried creating a obj version of a World Creator terrain. It worked, but you can't have the really fine details from a super high resolution displacement. Its a trade-off.

Terrain Mixer update! Now with curve objects to displace rivers and roads.

One day I will get my head around Terrain Mixer's mad wall of parameters.

That little ship

 

Ship concept from the early 90s.

I like the concept, but it needed a lot of refinement. I ended up going in a different direction. So here we are, many years later. I decide it would be cool to do a quick build of the concept, but when I actually opened Blender I decided that the design needed too much work to justify building it direct. So, instead I took the basic idea -- a dual-hulled ship that slipts between lander and engines and rebooted it.

The engines are no longer blocks and no longer off-set from the main axis of. Four mounts instead of two.

The lander slips through a slot rather than just connecting face-to-face.

Basics

Refinements, here and there

Still of details to add.

More detailed thruster assemblies