Anton done (enough) and something new...

 I got the support ship completed sufficiently. It only needs to be docked with the Bayern for a poster image.

I'd polish a bit more if I intended to animate, but this is enough for now.

ISV-5 Anton Dohrn

Anton Docked with Bayern.

I had some right pain with this. I'd lost my fuel ball rebuild, so I had to do it again. I have floating model parts that disconnect from their actual location. This is sometimes caused by a displacement that moves the mesh during rendering, but I couldn't see where it was applied or why.

Something different.

I bought a new product, Character Creator 4. It creates 3D characters for animation. I want better characters in my scene, and this seems like a good start. Although the range of available characters is large, they are super-expensive, so I might end up sticking with the default characters.

Susan!

This is a good start! Installed Character Creator 4. Installed an auto-setup plugin and a Blender workflow plugin. Loaded one of the default characters into CC4. Clicked on the Load into Blender button -- Boom! Blender opens and the character is loaded in, all ready to render.

Susan watches  the True-Sky sun

Pretty good quality

I need more clothes. 

Bayern Support Ship

 Today, I started on the final element of the Bayern Project: one of the two survey ships that form the Bayern's small flotilla.

Anton!

Roughly blocked out thrusters

Mid-level detailing mostly complete

I may have it completed tomorrow, unless I decide to shift onto something else.

Animation!

 The animation is completed! I used Capcut to encode it, but that was a rather unpleasant experience. It's an excellent free tool, but it doesn't look optimal for traditional frame-based animation.

I shared the video in a few places and got resoundingly positive feedback. Hurrah! That's nice.

I'll return to build the sister ship, which can dock under the front of the Bayern. 

Luna Land

In the afternoon, I started playing with World Creator. I want to do a terrain-based animation next. A lunar facility, I think.

No rest for the wicked: Animation prep

 The thoughts of animating the Bayern both excited and scared me. This morning, I tried to line up the spin habitats for setting a cyclic animation, essentially wheels that spin for the entire duration of an animation. Well, it turns out that having an object made up of a hundred different bits isn't going to work too well. Everything needs to be parented, and once you have that many parent associations the viewport gets laggy.

The brute force solution was to massively consolidate the ship. Make those piles of 100 meshes into single meshes. Then you are only animating a big complex mesh, not a hundred separate ones, which sometimes float off in the wrong direction.

Hours it took!

Rebuilt for animation.

I broke things numerous times, but it worked out in the end.

Viewport

Back to True-Terrain 5

Good old-fashioned 3d terrains. This work is very prone to crashing compared with ship modelling. This is an alpha, and most crashes are caused by the lack of guard rails against spinning up parameters so that you instantly exhaust available memory, etc.

Using the Simulation approach rather than frames makes the new water less broken.

Bayern...sorta finished

 There are countless things I would change and improve on, but I've reached the point where I need to function in other areas of life. 

I may try to set up an animation with the hab rings spinning, but I'm taking a break first.

Lighting test 

Composite effects test 

Close-up

With some PCO background

Answer: We are not finished

 I intended to take today off the project, but in the afternoon, I found myself itching to make some improvements. I rebuilt the forward section, mainly by tightening up the rather desperate compartments and providing slightly better blending.

Starting point

More hull elements have dedicated materials, mainly applied per-face. 

I intend to create some decals for critical areas. I'll add a ship's name badge too.

Unified the ring superstructure using the yellow painted metal.

More progress tomorrow!

In other news

The space theme continues with the release of Physical Celestial Objects (PCO) the Blender add-on for creating realistic planets. I bought it when it was made available as an alpha release back in October 2022. See here.

PCO v1.0 Nice!

The add-on has been rewritten. The UI looks cleaner. I'll need to play around with it before I make a final judgement, but it looks great so far. 

Are we finished?

 This quick weekend project has jumped over the barn. Oh, What fun!

Today, I downed tools after reaching about 95%. I needed a break, and what better form of break is there than getting into the shader editor? So, I did a quick material test. I experienced a weird CUDA bug. After rebooting, I'm not sure the issue was accidentally turning stuff off in the outliner.

Cryo carrier sub-craft

Building the subcraft was good fun. Nice and simple. It came together very quickly.

Ready for the final push to the front section.

Here we are at very nearly finished. Time for that break!

Simple colour, some DOF too.

A quick lighting and composite test before going to bed:

Glow effect, colour correction and lens distortion all give these shots a feeling of reality. 

Back to school

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't sure how I felt about the build. I thought that I'd sunk a few hours in yesterday where I was throwing crap at the model in terms of discordant and ill-fitting additions. The classic problem occurs when my enthusiasm and eye for detail are lost. I grabbed a coffee and had a look at the previous night's progressive renders. Actually, the issues were nothing more tidy-up can't fix.

School!

My two children returned to school today, giving me a clear run at continuing the "mini" project, which has surpassed most projects I've done before. In terms of built effort, this looks like the most significant model I've ever built. I use a lot of instancing and mirroring, which means keeping the file size down. I'm organizing the outliner far better than in the past—hierarchies and everything!

Engine clean-up

The thruster blocks are shorter and mount deeper within the engineering block recesses. I added struts to the docking arm. I quickly disliked these struts because they were sloppily cut.

Another kitbash addition! Docking arms from an Orbital Elements vehicle, fit nicely here.

I started to put some cables onto the engineering block. I'll go back and add more if I don't think it's overly cluttered. Now, it's time to turn my attention to the emergency ejection hatch for the stutter warp drive.

A door in the engineering block to push the stutterwarp drive out, if it decides to go critical...

The hatch was restarted twice. Reasonably happy with it now.

Lifeboats rebuilt. They'll pass for now. I'm eager to paint them orange.

I'm still not there. Tomorrow, I will complete the main build. Some additional external vehicles need to be attached to the front spin ring. However, most of the work remains on the front end. A nip-and-tuck of those discordant elements will get us to the finish line.

Then I'll need to decide if I go into texturing and lighting before completing the rather large docked sub-vessel, and exploration vessel that goes ahead to scout. I could do with a change from modelling before starting that.

Oops Moment

I had a fat-finger moment earlier today. I somehow turned on a Gismo change that stopped my scale tool from working. Instead, the tool only adjusted a coordinates gizmo I'd somehow turned on. I spent about twenty minutes trying to work out what I'd done.

Answer:
It turns out that I'd used a random keyboard shortcut to enable Origins-only for the transform tools. I disabled it using a checkbox under the Tool N tab.

Whoosh! There goes my deadline

 The weekend mini-project has yet to end. I worked until very late to complete the build, but it wouldn't have been completed very well if I had staggered into sleep deprivation.

So, the efforts have continued through today. The boys return to school tomorrow, so my efforts to find a paying job must take up more of my time. For now, I'll get the build completed. There's a huge amount to do:

1) Primary build of the Bayern itself
2) The life pods and cryo-pod ships that are mounted on the spin habitats
3) The externally mounted survey ship
4) Space planes and subvehicles.
5) Eventually, texturing and lighting...
6) A kick-ass animation to reveal the model to the community... Well maybe...

It's kitbash-O-clock!

I reached a point where I wanted to call upon some dense modelling elements. I'm not one for using a lot of Kitbash stuff, but I was sure there were earlier modelling efforts that I'd done that were a good fit. So in I dove!

Engine blocks and the life support and stockfeeder conduit. 

At this point, I'm heading for a second round of clean-up. There are lots of elements I'm not entirely happy about. It's often best to soldier on while making progress, then return and fix stuff later. Still, I'm pretty happy with the build so far.

2300AD Bayern Progress

 There's an old tradition in 3D modelling making. Tackle the hard bit first! In the beginning, you have the most enthusiasm and attention. It's the best time to get snags out of the way.

I pondered what bit is the hardest. I wanted to have the spin habitat rings supported and circular trusses, not super complex designs, more a chore with Blender's less-than-stellar array tools. Chores away!

Spin Habs!

My initial attempts weren't good enough- seen in the first wheel. I made a copy of the ring, lifted it from the model area and built a triangle-sectioned Truss. Precisely what I had in mind!

Fuel Tanks

I'd put the initial geo-ball tanks in place. It was time to add some details. Then, I added a cage and a cryogenic core, deleted all but one of the fuel tanks, built assembly pipes onto it, and copied it around.

Fair Progress!

I had mistaken the protruding ports for the ring access arms located outside the ring. Then I realized that these ports dropped down into the externally mounted lifeboats. Doh! The arms moved into the centre of the ring and incorporated into the truss.

Lifeboats. Distractingly orange!

Lifeboat ports built. Temporary lifeboats added.

Progress!

Weekend Miniproject: 2300AD Bayern

 I just bought a bunch of e-books (most of which I already have in printed form) from Bundle of Holdings. It's the second edition of the 2300AD Science Fiction Roleplaying Game from Mongoose. The item that most attracted me to the collection was the Bayern campaign boxset. The GDW edition Bayern was a very curious thing. A science campaign with the focus on space exploration and a finale right out of 2001/Contact. First contact with a proper god-like alien intelligence. Awesome stuff. Except that the first version was thin on details. The lack of deck plans was unforgivable. For a campaign centred around a giant starship, you just don't miss that out.

Anyway, looking through the new books got me excited again. I thought maybe I should do an update build!

Gavin Dady produced the ship's original model and deck plans himself. They're fine, but Gavin isn't an artist, and 3D modelling isn't a core skill set of his. So here goes...

GDW illustration by Steve Venters (1988)

Gavin Davy's model, following the GDW design pretty closely in the component list

The Mongoose Art Department spruced up in the current 2300AD style

I've already made a couple of starts on this. A few years ago, before the latest version of the book and its Bayern design was finalised,

A few years earlier...

Working off the GDW proportions.

The latest version begins with blocking out:

A starting point - blocks!