Star Dancing

 So I located the source of the Ralph McQuarrie illustration. Fascinating! So McQuarrie did concept art for an unproduced science fiction movie called Star Dancing. This was 1971, also the year I was born. The art never turned into a film, but it came to the attention of a young film maker who was trying to do a remake of Flash Gorden. He wasn't able to secure the rights so had to go off and create his own science fiction / fantasy universe: Star Wars.

So I'm making okay progress on the All Terrain Vehicle.

Still need to define details on the front. I think a personnel entry port near the base.

Big cargo ramp at the back. Maybe it needs a less steep slope, or a flatbed lift instead of a ramp?

Top details. I might redo this as a displacement map.

A few creatively "off" days

 You must get them. Days when you're just not feeling it. I've had a few. It's also half-term, so my sons are home, which means quite a lot of noise and fuss.

So I saw a concept illustration by Ralph McQuarrie, the Star Wars concept artist who most defined the look and feel of that universe. It's not from Star Wars but another movie concept that sounded very intriguing.

 I loved the idea of an endless grassy plane. The idea here is that the whole planet is a giant grassy plain. I'm not convinced that's plausible, but that's fine.

The design work is cool, "science-fictiony" while his Star Wars stuff is more stylised. This is sorta Battlestar Galactica - although I can't find the source, so I'm not sure of the film.

I'm going to recreate the scene. I'm terrified about working on the space traveller, but that's going to be tough. The All-Terrain Vehicle, I'll make a bit bigger, I think.

Rejected concept - a bit too Mass Effect

Rejected concept: The windows. Not keen!

Game on!

I don't want to go overboard in the detailing, but more details to come.

Bank holiday

I should have gone out for a walk. Bank holiday rain persuaded me to stay in and create my own countryside.

Homemade terrain with scatter assets

Work-in-progress TT5 terrain

 

Homeworld 3

 

Some days you just need to fight huge space battles.

I love the return to the Homeworld Universe, but are the Homeworld Purists unhappy? There was something about the first game, a quality that stamped your brain with a deep love. They hate every change; every difference is a bucket of niggles from which to scream their massive disappointment. Yes, it's simplified, but micromanagement of formations and built trees were never the game's strong suit. The campaign feels like a more generic space opera, but that's because Homeworld already did the best story.

Maybe in a year, someone will lovingly reconstruct the first game using the new engine. Then we'll stop hearing all the whining and teeth-nashing. Nostalgia is toxic. You can never go home to Homeworld again.

More Blender tomorrow.

HardOps & BoxCutter - Day 2

Feedback from Day 1

Firstly, I had several crashes on my desktop while playing with Boxcutter. That's unsettling! System stability has been good-ish. I had a couple of crashes last week with True-Terrain 5, but I think that was down to a particular blend function. Otherwise, that tool is rock-solid. To be crashing while performing very basic operations is making me regret the investment in the course.

We'll see how it goes. I don't find Boxcutter to be intuitive. That's maybe because it's hotkey-driven, while Fluent Power Tools has some clever UI elements that let you work off a grid face. We'll see!

 On with Day 2

More fun with the cutter.

References

HardOps Documentation: https://hardops-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Oh wait... a new version of True-Terrain 5

I have to test this!

Nice changes! I'm not totally sure what has changed, but things just seem to be working better. Added terrain layers seem to be blended automatically. I'll need release notes.

Nice environmental tutorial

New course! Hard Ops and BoxCutter

 The Blender community is going Sales-crazy! I picked up a copy of True-Sky for my youngest child for just five dollars! Blender Bros is also running a sale. I picked up their Hard Ops and Box Cutter course. I had intended to buy this about four months ago but ended up putting it off.

So here's the start of the next Blender School series.

Boxcutter

BoxCutter

Enable by selecting the left-hand menu button or entering "Alt+W."
Then, bring up the menu with "D."

HardOps Help Menu

To bring the menu up, select "Shift+Tild".

This is a super-convenient copy of the Main right-hand menu, available in your viewport as a menu box. The course will make use of the Workflow and Sharpening panels.

Under Workflow, use nondestructive most of the time. In destructive mode, Booleans are immediately applied, so you can't tweak the placement or results of the cutter.

Under Bevel/Operators, you might select HN/Hardened Normals for a more satisfying bevel.

Free-Trader Coasting

 

I moved into materials work a little early. There are some important elements, such as the vernier-style thruster ports on the nose and a few more surface details here and there. So I'll declare this Not Finished. An advancing work-in-progress.

Free Trader - Midpoint Burn

 I'm making great progress. There's a problem with everything moving fast, and your design steps feel fluid. You may not stop and check things enough. In my case, there's a serious issue with lateral symmetry. It's not obvious from most angles and at a distance, but I may need to do some serious rebuilding later.

Progress shots:

Roof cabin windows

Engineering details and Air/Raft Garage Door

Tail Mast and Turret

At a distance. Looks fine.

Next.. I'll move back to the front. I'll get the main airlock done. They get the main elements of the belly sorted. Hatch and landing leg doors.

Free Trader Start

 

Okay, this sort of worked out.

Second attempt on the nose section

Bridge incut, Roof cabin and engine cowlings

The first attempt at the rear section. Still need to tuck this in.

Free Trader - new project

 I was delighted that my recent Traveller illustration was selected for the Traveller Facebook art group's cover. I am encouraged to do another Traveller scene. I realised that while I'd built the Scout about four times over the years, I'd always given up on the Free Trader. Not this time...probably.

I took Rob Caswell's excellent technical illustration from the book as the reference. It has a modern look while keeping true to the original look of the ship.

Reference from the Digest Groups MegaTraveller Starship Operator's manual 

We'll see how this goes...

Bits and pieces of weekend

Nothing much cooking in the Blender oven. I spend some time playing and experimenting. Here are some of the things. 

Old transporter with Sanctus materials makeover

Pluto-like terrain sketch

Sand and rock test material

Big terrain sketch

Noise and noise makes land and water

Long walk and a bit of Blender

 Today, Clara and I walked up Winn Hill, near Edale. About 22,000 steps when all done.

Winn Hill

A quick terrain I made before going on the walk

The walk left me with some time but almost no energy for Blender. I took inspiration from a fellow member of True-VFX's Discord community, playing with a noise system he demonstrated.

Magic Noise from Berglmir

Giant land ripples!

Not much, today

 I played with True-Terrain 5 in the morning. I got crashes. A few! I think that I may have experienced the old instability problem. I found that my CPU power adjustments were no longer being applied so I put those back. Otherwise, this could actually be a TT5 issue concerning its zero-border modifier. We'll see.

A  "producty" thing type render

Shiny things on a shiny table

I had instability problems with terrains but not in all cases. Artefacts on some trees here, though.

That deeply sh!t thing happened again

 On Saturday night, we had a brief power cut. It only lasted a few seconds, resulting in a hard shutdown of my workstation. This is the workstation that I've not actually fully shut down in over a month. I experienced a problem where the machine wouldn't start up. I managed to get it running, but it took many hours of hair-pulling.

It may be a power issue. I'm not sure.

Just like last time, I spent about five hours working to get the machine back on. I'd reset the CMOS to blank the machine's BIOS settings, which would automatically start the machine up. I could recover BIOS settings, but the machine would default to the built-in display instead of the RTX 4090 GPU. I'd go into the BIOS and switch back to the GPU, but the machine would then fail to start back up.

I updated the BIOS firmware, which hopefully is a long-term fix for the stability problems since it's now known that the Intel Raptorlake processors don't have stable defaults for their power draw.

Eventually, as if the machine was resigned to being reset to death, it decided to come back on.

That's a big relief, but I have no faith that the machine will be fit for purpose. I will send it back to SCAN for investigation, but I don't want to be without a machine. I also don't have the box required for safely shipping back to base. I'm thinking about getting a new machine with the same type of case and then using the new machine's box to ship this machine back. We'll see. That's a lot of cash, and it's about a year earlier than it should be upgraded. I'd want a faster GPU for any "next" machine.

If I did need to send this machine back, I do still have a backup - the previous machine runs an i7 with the RTX 2080 Ti. I wanted a reminder of the performance difference between machines:

Athena - i9, 64GB RTX4090 - 18 seconds

ISAC - i7, 32GB, RTX 2080Ti - 2 minutes 25 seconds.

Gulp! This might be a sample render where the new machine's advantages create an unusually big performance boost. I was under the impression that the machine was giving me twice the render speed.

MPU27

The latest version of Fluent Power Tools seems much less prone to going wrong. This is a quick sketch thing that took about twenty minutes to build.  

Fluenit MPU27