This morning I showed Clara the "dream" house. She had some constructive criticisms of the design, including a wish to have direct windows into the bedrooms and maybe a skylight option. It was fun to argue it all out. The project is dragging a bit. I'll maybe put it on hold for a bit as I think the furnishings and trimmings are a lot of work.
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| Lightfall |
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| The flooring tile scale is not consistent, but I love the Herringbone pattern |
I sketched out a big modern house. The type that is cut into hills and made of a million tons of concrete. Bond-villain postcode!
I finished the first bit of Fluent-based street furniture -- a camera thingy. Being quite satisfied with the result, I decided to build a slightly more elaborate "armed" monitor.
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| Armed Monitor |
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| Camera unit |
I love Fluent. Since the release of the latest version it feels more...well..fluent. That said, I still need to better understand the fixing regime. Like Hard Ops, this is a tool for people who understand the importance of righteous topology and flow. If your bevels intersect, it's going to be ugly and potentially crashy.
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| Street Furniture base |
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| Appliance Front |
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| Appliance Back |
Blender 4.1 gets its bugfix follow-up. See the release notes.
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| I can't explain |
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| Women of Steel in a rocky valley |
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| The valley without scatters or materials |
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| Another tiny terrain with grass scatters |
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| Greevian - a set of three terrains |
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| Scatter and True-Sky lighting |
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| Various scatters |
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| Earlier! |
It's Sunday. Not much going on.
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| New WC24 terrain with ice lake and rocks |
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| Before the ice lake idea. Rocks aplenty |
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| The naked terrain |
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| A concession cart idea |
After more than 5 months, World Creator 2023 is finally completed in 2024. So, say hello to World Creator 2024. It has rivers! Very impressed with many of the changes. Worth the wait, I'd say.
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| World Creator |
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| Same terrain in Blender 4.1 |
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| Just add scatter. Did it crash? No? Just add scatter... |
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| Add some True-Sky |
A change made in Blender 4.2 has caused a lot of annoyance. While the change makes sense on a technical level, it has thrown a curveball at many users' tried-and-tested workflows. Autosmooth was a quick fix for shading issues when you created a mesh with edges that wanted to be shaded smooth or sharp, depending on the angle of the normals on the bordering faces. Using it was super simple. You just right-clicked and selected Autosmooth. Easy peasy!
So what changed?
The operation to smooth was being handled at the mesh level, making it destructive. So, normals were taken out of the mesh system and now live as a modifier that is applied to the mesh in a non-destructive manner. That's good in many cases, especially if you are building with geometry nodes.
However, if you try to use the new "Shade smooth by angle" option on the right-click menu, the operation works completely differently. It applies sharp parameters to edges, which gives you different results.
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| See how the top edges have been automatically marked sharp. |
There is a solution! You can apply Smooth By Angle as a modifier using the following steps:
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| Note: You can ignore any applied Sharp edges using the "Ignore Sharpness" checkbox. |
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| Default Cube Machine in some water |
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| Rockify assets in a big scatter |
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| Original attempt at a rockify scatter |
Today I updated a number of Blender's addons. Fluent power trip, Machin3 Tools, MeshMachine, and Gridmodeller. Trusty old Gridmodeller.
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| Default Cube machine |
Random Flow is super-fast and super-flexible. Gridmodeller is just drawing surface details like you don't have a care in the world—at least not about mesh topology.
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| A bit heavy on the succulents... |
I may just into a Blender School lesson tomorrow. Maybe I'll start learning how to use Hard Ops. Maybe Geometry Nodes 101.
The release of a new version of Blender is always a cause for celebration. Although 4.1's changes are mostly quality-of-life or refinements to systems that I don't depend on -- animation, for example, it's all great.
I was worried that there was a performance hit from testing the beta and in the first few hours with 4.1. I'm not so sure now.
Running 4.1 through its paces, it seems okay—good, in fact. I'll push harder with the next set of tests, maybe a big terrain scene. I've not been feeling well for a few days, causing my output to slacken. There's not much chance I'll complete challenge-related projects. Here's a quick test scene.
On the system front, I've not shut my system down in four days out of fear that it won't restart, as it did last weekend. However, it just struck me that on Tuesday morning the system had automatically rebooted successfully after a Windows update. So maybe I can start to calm down. Maybe not...
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| Doranne |
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| Rocket - early steps |
I was getting cold feet about this sunrise challenge. I just went off and started playing and came up with an idea that I liked, although I don't think it's a super clever interpretation—not a winner. A rocket launching at dawn...
We're building something here, detective. We're building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.
-Lester Freamon, "The Wire"
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| A desolate Mars-like landcape |
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| A Hab Module with inflated tunnel sections |
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| A mini launch tower and some fuel processing modules |
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| Storage containers |
I need to build a lot more ground clutter. And a rocket. A really nice rocket. I then need to add materials to everything. Then polish, and polish. And polish some more. Almost finished, then! :-)
Ian Hubert is a Blender legend. He is famous for his ability to create Blender VFX that rivals or exceeds the stuff you see in Hollywood movies. He gave a must-see presentation at the Blender Conference on World Building.
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| Big terrain and test fog |
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| Moon with a surprisingly complex material node set |
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| Rough test scene for a callout to Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above a sea of fog |
This morning I showed Clara the "dream" house. She had some constructive criticisms of the design, including a wish to have direct...
