The edge of the Christmas storm

 Christmas 2024 is officially upon us. Family members are starting to gather, and presents haven't wrapped themselves. I've figured out that my wife, Clara, wrapped the presents, leaving me just a couple to do. I'm rubbish at wrapping.

So, Blender activity will slacken off for a few days while volleys of festive cheer fly between various camps. Before then, here is some progress on the competition entry.


Perfect Water

Single unit mostly completed.

I reached a point with the apartment block where I felt I had to move on for a while. I'd come up with the idea of using graffiti to break up some of those walls. I figured out an easy way to apply graffiti without getting into UVs: Just apply them on a plane with a transparent background. It works well, except for some cases where the scene's volumes mess up the transparency.

Let there be cluttering!

Approaching a focus, nearing a point

Lens Sim experiment

On the apartment walls are slogans: "Is this our destiny" and "Perfect Water". These are taken from a Blue Oyster Cult song, the theme of which was the pursuit of perfection, or a cautionary song about global warming, and certainly a component of Sandy Perlman's Imaginos story.

Perfect water

The dark wind braids the waves.
The crazed birds raid the trees. Is this our destiny?
To join our hands at sea - and slowly sink, and slowly think:
This is perfect water, passing over me

I really want to lean into the Blue Oyster Cult references. I'll add their symbol, the astrological symbol for Saturn. Some more graffiti, maybe a reference to the rebel Imaginos.

Slow progress better than no progress

 

Checking how it clusters

The final render will include some repeated blocks. I don't know how many or how they'll be arranged. This was a test!

Graffiti Test

Challenge Progress

 

Slow progress on the challenge

 

Happy 11th Blenderversary!

 That's right! It was on this day in 2013, after a chance encounter with a company director who noticed that I'd installed Blender on my MS Surface. I'd explained that, coming from 3DS Max, I'd been unable to make sense of Blender.

He had an installation on his laptop and gave me a tour of his hobby work. It was amazing. He was doing it all: modelling, materials, end-to-end animation. At that moment, I realised it wasn't Blender being a problem; it was me. I'd just expected it to work how I expected and in ways I was used to.

After watching several hours of introductory videos, I suddenly realised Blender had some odd conventions. It was about as intuitive as getting in a car through its sunroof. At once, I understood its reputation for having a steep learning curve and that, in fact, you don't need to get to grips with everything on day one. It's okay to not know stuff. Start simple. Learn only what you need then and there. Go on a journey. Get stuck? Try something else...

I recognised my poor track record for staying interested when things get difficult and frustrating, so I thought it useful to keep a blog to track my progress and record tricks and tips I'd picked up.
See my first post: Welcome!

Working out how to do a background image plate

An early attempt to use nodes

True-VFX Discord Water Challenge 

I'm slowly working my way towards a submission. I'm at the point where I feel overwhelmed and a bit disheartened, but I will submit something, even if it's not all..that...good.

A rethink! I've abandoned the idea of the hut. It's a concrete favela, instead.

A terrain created in World Creator and used with True-Terrain 5

Concrete shell, built in a separate scene.

A bit meh after my COVID jab

 I've not been very productive for a couple of days. This morning, I felt terrible and immediately blamed yesterday's vaccination. I'm feeling a lot better now. 

Backup

It struck me that I've run out of cloud storage for Blender assets and stuff. I back up most of my work files and scenes, but not consistently. Big chunks are now stored on a secondary storage drive on my workstation.

We've been here before. Data loss often comes out of the blue! A few years ago, I lost a huge number of digital photographs and other backups when I lost my two backup drives in two weeks.

It's also a mistake to think that storing files on Microsoft's Onedrive cloud service ensures that no loss can occur. The platform has let people down in the past. So I picked up a Western Digital Passport drive, a whopping 4.55 TB monster (that fits in the palm of my hand).

I'm currently backing up all my Blender Add-ons and Support files. Next, I'll back up my scene files and some height maps.

Playing with terrain and a Beetle.

Last night's effort.

I created a very short test animation of the grassland. It suffered greatly from "noise boiling" where the grass clump placement changes slightly from frame to frame. The result is an extremely weird shimmering as grass jumps around as the animation plays.

Blender School - CGCookies Core: Sculpting 2 (Brush settings)

 

Digital Sculpting with Kent Trammell 
Lesson 2 & 3: Brush settings

Colour coding

Blue-tint icons are for the "additive" brushes. This is no longer applicable as Blender 4.3 made big changes to sculpting.

Blob: Create balls of clay on the surface.
Clay: Flatten and smoothen the surface.
Clap Strips: The main way to apply strips of clay (C).
Clay Thumb: Simulates the movement of a thumb over the clay.
Crease/Polish: Brush with a pinching effect
Crease Sharp: Much sharper and stronger than the crease brush.

Draw: No used much (by Kent).

Draw Sharp: Like Draw but with a sharper falloff.
Inflate/Deflate: = bulge or revert clay (I).

Layer: Create a layer of clay with a fixed depth on the surface.

Note: Invert brush:  Hold Ctrl.

Subtractive brushes

Fill/Deepen: Pushes surface to a flat plane

Flatten/Contrast: Pushes verts to an average height to create flat areas

Plateau: Locked orientation and depth to create a raised effect.
Scrape/Multiplate: Scrape the edge with two angled planes to create an effect,

Scrape/Fill: Common for filling or flattening. Great for rocky surfaces!

Smooth: Common for smoothing surfaces

Trim: Cut sections away

Housekeeping

 I remember receiving an email from Quixel that warned that free access to the old Megascans asset library would be withdrawn at the end of the month. Literally days away! I resolved to ensure I didn't lose access to these incredible resources, even though getting them into Blender is a pain.

I downloaded and lined up about 100 materials and about 50 assets, and I'll now slowly process them. No rush, now I've got them stored locally.

Note to self: As I don't have the space in my cloud storage for everything, I should buy a portal hard drive. Do a big backup before the end of the year.

Quixel Bridge is supposed to support direct import into Blender from Bridge. However, it doesn't bring in any material maps, probably due to changes in Blender since the plugin was written.

Assets don't look as good as expected. I should check the LOD consistency! Normal mapping?!

Quixel materials are perfect for True-Terrain

Messing about with rivers... TT5

Puzzle solved!

Seeing objects in the Outliner that appear under multiple collections. Just unlink them! I can't believe I didn't work this out myself when I first noticed it happening.

Tomorrow: Must Blender School!

Stunning

 I have new assets. Black Friday will be my ruin!

These are, without question, the finest Blender assets I've ever had. Hollywood-standard triple-AAA super assets. Astronova from Big/Medium/Small Assets

So good!

So very, very good

I will be creating a science fiction scene very soon.

Blender School

I didn't have time to complete more training, but I will complete 2-3 more Digital Sculpting lessons before the weekend.

New from Sanctus!

Sanctus 3.2 is now out!

Some nice things!

Another True-Terrain off-the-cuff piece.

Lucy finds the Mhenga hive.

Blender School - CGCookies Core: Sculpting

 Digital Sculpting with Kent Trammell

The first Core course begins! 

C01L01_sculpt-mode-overview

How to enter sculpt mode. Note that it's context-sensitive, so the object you actively select must be sculptable, so it won't be available if you select a camera or a light.

In Sculpting, you need to have a lot of vertices for the magic to happen. Consider using a subdivision surface modifier to create a suitable starting object. 

Tip: Apply a selected modifier by hovering in the  N-panel and using Ctrl+A 

Brushes can be selected from the Tool menu (T) on the left or the N-Panel (N) on the right. Having them on both sides at once is redundant.

Using a pen and tablet is advantageous. You get a more intuitive feel for sculpting and better support for pen pressure.

C01L02_sculpt-mode-settings

A Rundown of the main Sculpting tools/brush controls.

In Drawing mode you use the sculpting brush:

Radius (F) sets the size of the brush

Strength (Shift+F) sets how strongly you apply the brush

Weight/rotate brush (Ctrl+F) reorientates the brush/changes its weight

The middle-mouse is to rotate the view. I need to know what the stylus equivalent is.

+/-  Apply the brush (+) / Invert the brush (-)

Brush Settings

Automasking Topology - for meshes that have islands, this ensures that only the select island's vertices are moved. Example: Suzanne has separate eyeballs. When this option is selected the eyes don't get distorted when you sculpt the head mesh.

Front Faces Only - Key setting because a brush will deform hidden vertices. It's not good behaviour by default. Select this to ensure that the brush only moves the vertices on the side of the object facing you.

Other brush settings will be covered later (apparently).

Stroke

Another important setting is the option to stabilize stroke. This can take the shakes and involuntary movements for your inputs -- also helping the UI become less responsive?

Falloff  Sets how the effect of a brush is reduced over distance.

Auto-symmetry is a useful tool for applying changes on multiple mesh sides.

In the symmetry menu is an option to Symmetrize. This lets you retrospectively apply changes across the three axes. Very useful. Somewhat hidden!

Dynotopo is an important tool for making areas of a mesh or less dense for applying different levels of detail. It will be covered in a later lesson.

First bash! Clay material from Sanctus

Focus Required....also...Blender School is open

Blender Bug Fix!

Horrah for corrective fixes, Horrah for Blender 4.3.1. 

Focus Problem

I'm darting around doing ten different things badly. If I were in the business of New Year's resolutions, getting things back into focus would be top of the list—and finding employment. 2025 has to be the year that I go out and make regular spondulicks. 

Triangle Canyon

Focus priority

1. A asked the True-VFX community's unofficial godfather, Berglmir, to set up a new community challenge to coincide with TT5's full release. It would be ruddy rude of me not to then submit a piece. This should be my focus. Water Challenge!

2. Something to sell!
I can put something into the Blender Market. Maybe a collection of Photogrammetry artifacts, a collection of terrain maps and textures cooked up in World Creator, a space vehicle model, or a cheap kitbash set. The ship elements kitbash was another project idea I floated, started, and then seemingly abandoned.

3. Keep learning, keep improving

I spend too much time repeating steps that just scratch a creative itch but don't push my Blender boundaries. That must change! On that, lets go back to....

Blender School

Last night, when I realised that I'd lost track of time and really needed to be asleep, in bed...I noticed that AskNK, the creator of Blender YouTube, had posted about another Humble Bundle tied to Blender. CGCookie's Core course - the entire run of training videos that covers all the...well, the core, going for a rock-bottom "stealing from blind grandma" amount of money.

Naturally, I threw more money at Blender. See https://cgcookie.com/p/core

As I did last year, I will watch, absorb, and respond to each video with a summary and set of key things to remember. I will do this right here, under the Blender School tag.

1. Digital-Sculpting
2. Mesh-Modeling 1
3. Mesh-Modeling 2
4. Lighting-Videos
5. Materials-and-Shading
6. Animation
7. Texturing
8. Rigging
9. Physics 1
10. Physics 2
11. Physics 3
12. Compositing

Substance Painter

I don't use this amazing tool enough. I need to get conversant with the workflow so that I can use it when I need it.

Maybe another Christmas image?

It's a low priority, but it could be fun. It could also be yet another drift from important things.

Last year...

Practice, Practice...

 I'm still working on the Community Challenge but have focused more on learning to get the most out of the water system. So, there is nothing specific to show on that.

Alien dusk

Scatter and lens testing

Dawn Flight

This one took up too much of yesterday. It started out as a test of the water (ocean system) with massive terrain displaced from a massive 1GB height map created in the latest World Creator beta. 

Starting point...

True-VFX Community Competition: Prep

 
I've made a tentative start on the challenge submission. Some sketching while sitting in a coffee shop. Some water experimentation. A bit of jetty..

Expensive in terms of resources. I thought I'd try a simpler approach

More instancing, arrays and simpler geometry.. not sure..

True-Terrain 5's Water is something else!

Sharpening tools

 Always a good excuse for not actually getting any work done. Sharpen the tools before starting the work. Sharpen, sharpen. More sharpen. Is that one sharp enough?

Geoscatter refresh. Manual scatter!!

Last year, I watched a YouTube video by Maarten Nauta, an immensely talented environmental artist. He joked that he overused Geoscatter's manual scatter. I now see why he favoured it so much. Tuned right, it feels more fluid and creative than using the maths-based scatter types -- like painting with grasses.

Scatter + fog

Scatter + fog + lens Sim + Photographer 5 post-effects

I need to brush up on how to scatter things better. I'm going to need to get a lot better at scattering rocks and pebbles, which I currently don't quite scatter convincingly.

Moah scatters

More photography and lens sim work

An overview of the scatter scene

Just playing. I didn't even find a suitable subject for the render. I was just playing with rocks, grass and trees. Then, I realised that if I'd scattered the trees first, I would have saved time and system resources by not scattering grass under them...

True-Terrain 5 Materials work

I used Berglmir's new TT5-compatible packs for his excellent TT5 terrain materials. Alas, there is an issue with unpacking some materials, so the links need to be corrected. I'm slowly going through the configuration and fixing the paths. It's going to take a while.

I'm also adding some beach rock and sand materials from the Quixel library. Adding new materials is laborious, but these textures are amazing, so it's worth it.

Terrain 1

Terrain 2

Terrain 3