Moments of Clarity

Yesterday, something happened. In a single moment, a destructive/wasteful thought-cycle went from all-consuming to nearly gone. Is it gone for good? We will see, but it feels good -- it's weird because we can end up clinging to these things, like an injury you feel compelled to keep prodding, until you almost feel like you need it.
 

Metabolic Clarity

I'm starting a ten-day period of continuous glucose monitoring to look more deeply into my metabolic health. I check my blood glucose levels a few times per day, but these snapshots can miss the bigger picture -- are insulin spikes happening between my checks? What's happening through the night? Maybe my regular waking up at 3am is down to glycogen exhaustion. Maybe not. We will see.

Blender

Scene 002

I made good progress at the end of last week, getting the city mostly done. I placed the city on the terrain and found that I'd underestimated the elevation changes, so the outer part of the city sits below the landscape. Next week, I will create a terrain cutout of the city area, add it to the city file, and find a way to map the city correctly onto the ground. I can also use this to better handle the city border, making the city's edge more gradual.

Tomorrow morning, I will do a Star of the Week post, looking at what was missed from last week's aims and what needs to be added next week.

Terrain therapy

I keep forgetting that the latest version of True Terrain has a broken loader for mask files. I confirmed this by loading up a backup earlier version of Blender and creating a terrain with masks. You'll see how the mask colours the rock debris correctly.

True Terrain 5.1

For now, True Terrain 5.2 displaces the mask files so they don't line up with the corresponding topology. Note the textures are different, but the masks are consistent, and you can see how the boulders and pebbles are painted onto the wrong places.

I hope team True-VFX can put out a fix soon. At least I have this workflow fix where I can do the initial creation in Blender 4.5, then load the terrain into Blender 5.2 to continue with working masks.

True Terrain 5.2

City build

 Scene 002

I'm taking a break from the terrain materials. Yesterday I took Gabe's previs depot model and shrank it down into something I could place into the scene. It definitely works better than my rushed lash-up. I may need better materials.

Next, I started to build out the city on the island/coastline. Creating a low-poly city that has enough detail to be sold as a real place requires quite a lot of mesh noodling. While slowly setting up a base mesh, I was aware of how well Blender Guppy's Random Flow would handle mid-level details. 

I haven't used Random Flow for a while, and I've forgotten the finer details of its procedural system. I should watch the recent beginner's video about it.

True Terrain Material Testing

Looking at the pre-built material, which I intend to do a breakdown for: