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.