November had a theme...

 

Landscapes! True-Terrain 5 landscapes, to be precise.

Other things in the works -- more lessons with Gaea. More practice with new add-ons. I spent a lot in the Cyber sale on Blender Market.

Rapid progress

 My first foray into Gaea was a success. After thirty minutes of tutorials and toying about, I managed to create my own terrain and export it successfully.

Made in Gaea, rendered in Blender with True-Terrain 5

I'll go back tomorrow for more learning and practice.

I spent some more time playing with True-sky, including creating a new "hero" rock using Rockify. As an add-on, Rockify is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it does its trick really well. This is another use of Physical Open Waters, which is turning out to be pretty amazing.

True-Sky is great. The Fog elements might be better, though

Gaea, I'm in you

 

I watched a teaser for Gaea 2.0. Amazed, I was. Cyber Friday upgrade deal, there was.

Gaea 2.0 is due for release in the near year, so this is a free copy of Gaea 1.3 that you get for pre-ordering.

Everyone says how powerful Gaea is for the procedural landscape generation --- World Creator is more sculptural, and I love that you have that hands-on control, but sometimes you want the process to drive the detailing. Gaea is mostly graph-based. You drop in nodes to set up a series of actions. It's not as satisfying, but the results can speak for themselves.

So, this morning is Gaea 101. I'm hoping to have an exported height map made before too long.

Another TT5 test.

Another day, another True-Terrain 5 test. This time, the challenge is a small but highly detailed scene. The land is just 100m x 100m- tiny! However, the resolution is ramped up to create about 16 million vertices.

I struggled to get rid of the noise, but in the end, I created a render that is intentionally suboptimal with the atmospherics and glare, so it sort of holds together.

Viewport without the scatter objects

Viewport solid mode

 In other news, I ordered a Wacom tablet. It should come tomorrow. It will help with sculpting and painting.

Grassblade

 I bought something.  Again. Black Friday! Grassblade. A vast collection of grass-related assets, along with scatters and a small add-on to apply them, although you can also add them via Geo Scatter.

A rugged rock biome, along with some grass

The endless grassy options of Grassblade.

Work in progress Stoney land

More, more TT5

 

Fireflies! Well, this is probably the result of me throwing too much into the scene without planning. The base render featured lots of annoying white pixels, which denoising turned into delicate but distracting light smudges.

The earlier iteration without True-Sky's lovely Alien atmospherics -- which may have partly caused the firefly attack.

The base terrain, created in True-Terrain 5. I'm getting to grips with more of the features. 

A terrain that I created using TT5's noise system. True Sky brings so much to the table.

More True Terrain 5!

 

Some crashes, but on the whole everything is stable, and I've created some massive scenes without issue. Most crashes have been caused by UI interactions rather than in the render pipeline. 

I'm still generating most of my topology using World Creator 2023. It is still the king of natural landforms.

True Terrain 5 has its own erosion system. I had a play. It's going to take some practice and a little more documentation before I can use it effectively. It's very promising, though!

More TT5 testing and cool new stuff

 I've delved deeper into the mud and rock of True Terrain 5. I've had some crashes, mostly random, but the overall experience has been very positive. Good performance, mostly.

The terrain editing is really flexible, although World Creator 2023 makes it easier to generate complex natural-looking erosion and landforms. That said, most of these examples incorporate some TT5 noise-based elements.

Physical Open Waters!

A brilliant new add-on from Physical Addons, the people who brought us Atmosphere and Planets.
https://blendermarket.com/products/physical-open-waters

This looks up to the same very high standard. Physically based for great realism.

BagaStreet

A second brilliant add-on. This one from antoine-bagattini, the creator of Bagapie. It's a big library of street furniture. Perfect for any arch vis work, integrated into Bagapie's tool kit for great scatter and placement tools.

True Terrain 5 - More testing

 I love TT5, although we have yet to see the scattering functionality. Terrain generation is really flexible and I don't think I'd ever go back to 4, even though version 5 is still in early development.

My trusty old low-poly Assets scattered with Geo-Scatter 5.3

Alien dawn!

Same terrain with more terrestrial scatters.

True Terrain 5 - Class 101

True Terrain 5 is a terrain creation tool for Blender 4. It retains the basic concepts of True Terrain 4 but uses a brand-new application platform that offers more power and flexibility than an incremental update of True Terrain 4 could have provided. The most significant change is the move to a Photoshop-style layer-based system that unlocks terrain creation compared to the somewhat baked-in limits of version 4.

Today, I played with the built-in terrain system. I've been exclusively using my height maps from World Creator 2023. Given the extensive terrain editing options, I decided to have a go at creating my own terrain. It works pretty well, although you need to call on a lot of advanced knowledge to make realistic land forms. I didn't get into the erosion system, which probably helps make things look like they are possible in the real world.

True Terrain 5 is really stable, and I slipped into silly territory and exceeded my GPU's VRAM, which takes some doing, given my RTX 4090 has 24GB. It would be good to have a review process to recognise when a set of parameters will cause the system problems. Geo-Scatter does a great job at this.

True Terrain 5 Early Access

 The wizards at True VFX have a new, rewritten-from-the-ground-up version of True Terrain. It's Blender v4 only and is now officially in early access.

I've had access for several months, but I didn't want to test it while my system was experiencing extreme instability. I would have been raising issues caused by my system issues rather than application bugs.

But that issue is now resolved, so I've installed and started testing. And it's really great!

I need to review the documentation to better understand blending. The scene below shows some limited blending of two material textures. One is applied to the slopes, and the other covers the flats.

Favella sketch - Lighting Test

Tonight, I did some quick test renders using True Skies. The building asset was built in about 20 minutes and then replicated to create a concrete highrise complex. True Sky is giving me better results than before; maybe it got a bit of an improvement in the last update?

 

Testing, testing...

 I've spent the first days of release updating and testing Blender 4.0. I still need to learn more about the cool new features, but at least I've got most of my key add-ons installed and working.

Fluent and Sanctus - check!

True-Sky with a very old unfinished scene - check!

Geo-scatter and assets - check!

Sanctus Library and weird-looking white choco milk.....erm check.

Blender 4.0

 Out of the blue!

I'd forgotten that this was being released this year. Great news, significant changes, but it also means adding all my add-ons again. This is further complicated because upgrading to the next major release causes more work for add-on developers. So, some important add-ons are not yet available for this new version.

I'll spend much of today getting set up with this exciting new version.


What's new:

World Creator Bridge test

 

More testing of World Creator 2023's Blender Bridge. This saves a lot of tedious work importing, aligning and applying materials. Instead, you click on a Sync button. Easy! That said, there are still signs of resolution artefacts. It's better than before, and they'd probably disappear if I used more involved materials with displacement/normal maps.

Another Rockify asset sketch

More practice with Rockify. I got the workflow set now. I've yet to produce a "hero" asset, which I assume requires higher voxel resolution when baking the mesh.

 This time, it's a bigger asset. My first attempt resulted in a system hang because I set the voxel resolution too high (0.05) instead of the usual 0.2.

Base fit for a Bond villain

 It started out as a reasonably nice Rockify asset. I did a test render with True Terrain's water. It needed something. A modernist building suspended between the rocks. Ten minutes later...

More tentative World Creator output

I stopped trying to create landscape scenes when my system became unstable. The stability is back since I now drop the performance core ratio from 55x to 52x when I boot up.

I've been steadily importing terrains into Blender using World Creator's bridge. This lets you build in World Creator and then sync with Blender. Being able to iterate changes on the fly is very helpful. Sadly, the nice Substance Painter materials I'd set up couldn't be brought into Blender. I'll export the maps manually next time.