Women of Steel

 Another trip into Sheffield city centre. Always a few things to scan. Today, I captured two city-centre statues. One is my all-time favourite. It's a bold, figurative celebration of the woman who contributed to the war effort (WWI and WWII) by taking jobs in heavy industry. In Sheffield, that was steel making.

Physical Open Waters and TrueSky help with the background and lighting

Clara with the pretty much brand-spanking-new sculpture, plus a quite new Leo.

Orca Challenge: A few details

 
I haven't forgotten or given up on the Orca challenge. Today I kicked the floaty can down the path with a few surface details. 

Details!

Various things

 I'll be candid. I've been doing too much gaming. A Command and Conquer clone called 9-bit Armies. So a bit less Blender over the last few days. 

I'll be better soon. Unless Pacific Drive turns out to be as good as it looks.

Quick test for a temple staircase.

Rockify rocks on grass

Objects that I scanned

Terrain. There must always be terrain

Fluent update tested. Pass!

Orca Challenge progress

 I decided not to restart the Orca Challenge. There are problems, but so far it has been possible to remedy issues by tweaking and rebuilding individual elements. There might come a time when the number of flaws mounts up to a critical mass that forces me to just restart from scratch. For now, it's mostly hanging together. 

Cabin boxed-in: 90%

Porthole rims. Not yet sunk. Main mast in place.

Tweaks to the forward sections and the roof plates.

The Nest!

Still a reasonably good match with the reference.

Next: The Bow Platform and more basic details, like steps, ladders.

Rickety boat, rickety start

 

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This ever Blender Gesserit knows.

Good balances

I think the first steps have gone well. Matching the overall shape took only a few minutes. I was delighted! This is going to be so easy. Hmm, not so fast. 

I had trouble with the keel rim. Then, the boat's interior really slowed down. It has been a long time since I had to constantly refer to reference images, which I found exhausting, at least in terms of that creative flow you aim for.

Look, ma, reference images!

Shape mostly matches.

At this point, I felt like I was compromising almost every step. I needed a break, or things were going to get very messy, maybe to the point where I'd need to restart. Right now, I don't think that's required, but some things may need to be redone, such as the dark edging, which needs to be thicker and less conformal to the Sub-D hull shape.

Heading for deeper, more detailed waters...

Challenge project: Orca

 I wanted to add a boat in yesterday's "Flower Island" landscape rendering. Only, I don't have a boat. So I thought about modelling one. *Sharp intake of breath* Difficult!

Well, I need something to challenge me. It's been weeks since my last Blender School session. Falling back into old tricks? Maybe. So, I've decided to throw myself into a big project. Build a great boat. Best boat ever! The Orca from the film Jaws, which the family watched together two weeks ago. The Orca is very memorable. It's a real character in its own right.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat."

References

I don't usually bother with using references. Because I AM RUBBISH. As I want to be less rubbish, I'm going to break with tradition and do the requisite preparation for the project. This starts with learning about the subject. To Pinterest! To Google! Then to PureRef, which is a really good image reference app. Highly recommended!

A good haul of reference images, mostly from scale models.

Starting point: Hull

Any boat is built upon its floaty part. The nautical term for which is "hull". That's where I'll start.

Blender references

Artisans of Vaul has a really nice tutorial on the best way to tackle two different styles of plank-built boats:

In the next exciting episode, you should see a hull. Fingers crossed!

Flower island

This is a little scene I created while playing around today. The background cliff face is part of a collection of mountains and cliffs that I just bought. To be honest, I wasn't that impressed by the quality. I had to put a rectangle behind this cliff so you can't see holes in the mesh. That said, once those holes are hidden, this looks pretty good. Maybe I just need to do some tweaking to make them work. We'll see!

More hidden, more moody...

Earlier...

The jungle crash scene... I just wasn't feeling it. This rough layout has voided my enthusiasm for the project for now.

Doldrums

 My next project is a crashed spaceship overgrown with tropical plants. Surely a cool fusion of the science fiction and landscape stuff that I love. The problem is that sometimes, it just doesn't happen. My ship idea was a large cruiser, but after restarting it a few times, I reset my sights.

I like the front, but I hate the back end

Blocking out for a Star Wars-style ship

Novel landing form

I really should go back to sketching and getting inspiration. Get a story of the design - what's its function, where was it going, why did it crash?

I might restart the giant mobile starport. I'd use what I'd learned from my hard surface modelling courses this time.

Scanning addiction

I can't stop doing photogrammetry. I use Poly.cam on my Galaxy S23 Ultra. It works rather well!

The big rock is located in a park called The Bowl Hills. I used to play on it as a child.

Back to landscapes

 I've not gone back to TT5 scatter testing. I'm sure I will soon, but there's going to be some hefty configuration changes that I'll need to make. All of the native scatter objects need to be manually enabled.

After building a ship for a few days, I really did fancy creating a big landscape.

Well, it's big, but will it be practical to scatter across 2000m? There's always AlphaTree, which projects an image of a tree on a plane aligned with the camera, so you can't tell it's not a model -- though the trees do have a slight flatness due to lighting interactions, I guess. AlphaTree "cheats" but you can have scenes with uncountable numbers of trees.

Not a bad start! Especially with True Sky haze helping to create the impression of distance. Needs a bit more drama. Maybe a rolling fog.

Great! This is nice as a quick study, but it needs a subject. It needs a focus. Maybe some buildings?

I remembered that I've got a Blender Addon that autogenerates buildings using geo-nodes (Procedural Building Generator 2). I'd only recently realised that it was Blender-4-compatible. I had a quick play with it.

PBG2 test render. Three minutes to build and render. Grass from Grassblade add-on

Like many auto-gen assets, they have a bit too much randomness. I'd reduce the density of plant pots or make them more varied, if I could --- but given this was a simple cube with about twenty seconds of extrusions, it's amazing. Good enough for a quick series of buildings for my scene.

Oh, I love this! The building is exactly what I wanted. It's a shame that its scale is way off. Guess who forgot to rescale the base mesh? If I correct the scale, the building components will shrink, making the building look closer to the scale of the surrounding trees.

Hurrah! Scale fixed. You'll agree that the buildings now completely lack impact. They're too regular -- more brutalist than the Kowloon city style provided by the PBG2 add-on.

Cooking on gas! Scale adjusted to what I consider the "sweet spot" between being consistent with the surroundings yet still breaking up the outline of the buildings. I can see about twenty things I'd need to tweak to improve it. I've got time to do five of them. Foreground grass needs to be a bit less patchy. It could be broken up with some shrubs, small plants and rocks, but those elements could easily take another hour, which is outside my timebox.

Let's get that lighting amped up.

So, at this point, I've run out of time. I love sunset/sunrise scenes. I used to take lots of photos that tried to capture those moments and that amazing lighting you get when the sky and sun work together. I wanted slightly more definition in the foreground, as per the previous/first version of this scene layout. So, I'll dial the ambient lighting up.

It's a wrap! Finished? Oh no. Far, far from perfect, but it's time to move on.

WIP Wade Racine-Class

 

Not a hundred percent complete, but done for now. I might also create deck plans, although I think another day of polishing and fixing will first be required.

Radio Silence

 
I've not posted for a few days. Not for lack of Blender activity. In fact, I've been rather productive and frustrated and pleased. It's been that kind of time.

New True-Terrain 5 version

The latest test version of True-Terrain-5 is out. Horray! It's causing me a lot of problems, though. Crashes to the desktop, performance woes, and a significant bug that stops any of my TT assets from displaying, although the cause of that issue was discovered yesterday in consultation with the developers.

Blender 4.1 is out in just a few weeks, so the developers wisely chose to make this version for 4.1 only. This way, their add-on won't fall over when the new release comes out. Still, I'm not keen on using the beta version. Stability is always a lot more important than new features.

Island of Blender stability

Scatter systems come to True-Terrain 5

U.S.S Wade Racine

Wade, a member of the Facebook 2300AD group, passed away a few days ago. Back in 2018, he received risky life-saving surgery. The group created a starship in his honour. At the time, I did a sketch.

2018 sketch

I thought it would be nice to finally build the design in Blender as part of a little commemorative illustration. I might even go so far as to complete deckplans. First, a model, though!

Blocking out

Refined the block-out

Test the spin habitat arrangement

Time for mid and fine detail...

I think it's 80% complete, but that last 20% might take significantly longer than 20% of the time already spent (about 6 hours).

T

 

I bought a Blender T-shirt. So cool, so clever!