Hail Mary!

 I just finished Andy Weir's Project: Hail Mary on Audible. I absolutely loved it! 

It made me want to build a quick model of the starship featured in the book. So here we are:

It's not a super-quality build, but it was a fun diversion from the other jobs I should have been doing. It is a clever design with a centrifuge to simulate gravity using cables to reverse and extend the habitat pod, then have the ship spin on its own centre of mass. A lot simpler than hamster cages and rings..

Underground Station

 

I've started a little project to build a concrete tunnel that I've been thinking about and occasionally building since I started with Blender.

It's going to have trains and track bridges. So I better have a train...

Train "sketch"

Underground station - starting point

Light at the end of the tunnel

 

I played around with an old idea. Originally a concrete tunnel complex, it soon became an old metal tunnel. It then got an elevator platform with some small lights. I would animate it, but there are a lot of light sources and expensive atmospherics. It would need to include many exciting elements that I'll probably never add.

Still, it was a fun exercise.

Hip Hip Blender 4.2!

 It's released! 

I screwed up! Saving Blender's settings without importing everything from 4.1. Sometimes, this makes sense; start clean and add things gradually, testing that it's stable. However, it now takes hours of work to re-add all the addons. It's now more likely that I'll break something that I re-add than something breaking during the automatic settings transfer. 

Well, there's a quick fix:

1. Close the new version of Blender.
2. From Explorer, go into the application settings (for me, it's C:\Users\mark\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender).
3. Rename that new version folder. For example, /4.2/ -> /xxx4.2/.
4. Restart Blender. It won't detect the renamed directory and will bring up the options splash panel again.

Importing from 4.1 took several minutes because it contains 88GB of data. Holy moley!

Blender 4.2

A week in the doldrums

 I didn't muster much enthusiasm for Blender work last week. I focused on the 2D design work for deck plans, but even that wasn't pushed forward enough.

I'll do better this week. There is still a chance to finish a submission for the True-VFX community challenge. Let's see if that's where I put my focus.

Tomorrow we should see Blender 4.2 enter general availability. It should have been out last week, but I guess they found issues. Instead, the foundation called for last-minute testing of the beta. I may invest the time in doing a clean installation, fully cleaning out all the data stored in my app folder and beginning from scratch. I don't know. The very large number of add-ons that I use makes that hours of work. I also believe that architecture changes in 4.2 might make this "spring cleaning" unnecessary. I'll look into it.

Some stuff from last week:

Big landscapes! 4KM

I have enjoyed working with World Creator.

Stepped terrain

True-sky binary system

Another play with the cave -- I prefer the piles of rocks in the previous attempt.

A tower for a city scene.

A cave sketch

I'm still focused on 2D illustration work (deck plans for the recent starship that I designed). I still hope to submit a cave-based render to the True-VFX community competition on their discord.

Election Day

 So we're voting in the General Election. We're finally getting a new government. Things will change for the better, but it will likely take much longer than we'd like. Ho hum!

Blender crashes continue. Not consistently, but it's the CPU again, I'm nearly sure. I am toying with ordering a replacement system. I'd hoped to delay getting a replacement until the end of the year when I can order a machine with an RTX 5090. That will surely be the new god-king-level GPU.

We'll see!

Today's toying around

Terrain created in World Creator 3

I love playing around with weird terrain-forms.

After some crashes, I tested a big terrain with plenty of scatters. Stable!

Performance woes - maybe

 This weekend, I took a break from the deck plan work. Inspired by a cave-themed community challenge on the True-VFX Discord, I built caves. 

Adding scatters caused a lot of crashing, so I gave up with the scatters.

This last test was used very high settings and took a couple of hours to render. Afterwards, I got frequent crashes. Heart sinking! One possible silver lining is that I may have disabled the CPU profile settings that have kept things stable. We will see! My biggest fear is that the instability is creeping forward and will slowly get worse. I pray that this is not the case and I had simply turned off the necessary changes. We. Will. See.