In the Easter break

 I took my boys on a day trip to Lincoln on Tuesday. Yesterday, we had a lazy day. I've been in a creative funk. It's more a lack of focus and drive. I start things, feel bad about them, then go away and start something else. It's bad news for productivity. Get a strong plan. Make a strong start. Then, when you fall down, you get up and carry on instead of going home.

Sketchin 

Although I've lacked a strong plan, I've had some creative time with terrain sketching. 

A common fault I see and have often done myself is compressing a landscape scene so that flat lands, foothills, and snow-topped mountains are all in the same one or two-kilometre stretch. While creatively, this will give you maximum bang for your terrain mesh bucks, it isn't very realistic.

The benefits of stretching out your scene's view distance:

• Those distant mountains can benefit from smaller mesh density.
• Atmospherics require fewer creative tweaks as you're sticking closer to real-world scales.
• You get more sky. Make your sky a co-star of your scene, not a bit-player!
• It's easier to get a more epic feel with wider viewing angles.

Some disadvantages:

•  It's harder to create a scene where you are close to the subject. You can do this by staging a foreground plate directly in front of the camera. Dense scatters and a more intimate subject can all happen there.
• This approach doesn't work for every situation. If you're going for a more telephoto-style scene where the background and foreground squeeze together, you may have to deal with more dead space. 
•  Wide angles mean less scope for camera culling. Either the scenes use more resources, or you might need to reduce things to stay within your system's rendering budget.

Installed and configured the full version of True-Terrain 5.1

About yesterday...

 What. The. Hell. 

The problem with Geo-Scatter had come back. Scatters were elevated above the terrain height. It wasn't because of misplaced object origins or other transformation malarky.

 I did some basic fault checking. I'd installed Blender 4.32 and True Terrain 5 and was planning to test Geo-Scatter there. However, after doing a quick terrain render, I found my PC flashing red—FLASH RED from within. It's a function of the Corsair ICUE system that uses RGB lighting for various effects. This wasn't decorative, and it threw me into a panic. I stopped Blender and checked the system monitor. I could see 100 degrees on the CPU. Well, SHEEEET.

I closed Blender, and after a few minutes of feeling glum, I realised that after installing Blender 4.32, I'd missed the step to switch over to GPU rendering, so I'd been running Blender on the CPU. Still, it's a very poor showing that I got the CPU overheating just by rendering. It could be worse, I guess. All things being equal, it isn't really a fault; it is just a reminder that you need to use the GPU.

The Geo-Scatter fault might either not be a fault or is fixed. I'm still testing.

Terrain therapy

Creating terrains makes me feel better.

I did a quick animation of the same scene.

Next.

I need to make some money, so I need to make some models or assets. Maybe I will go back and start another vehicle, finally fix up one of my space vehicles, or start something new. First, a terrain scene.

Rig progress (regression) and test animation

 

This rough animation helped me identify problems that will matter in a fly-past animation. Look out for what looks like a stray point light that the ship flies through, causing a weird light bloom.

Some of the later changes are not working for me. I may have started on the details too soon. Elements like the thruster packs which were done quickly and without much enthusiasm. I will do some rebuilding and improving today. First, a break, I think. A terrain, maybe...

True-Terrain 5 BREAKS!!!

 Awooga awgooga! Full battle stations! My favourite Blender add-on has stopped working.


Just trying to add a terrain height map, scatter, or anything else results in a crash to desktop.

# backtrace

Exception Record:
ExceptionCode         : EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Exception Address     : 0x00007FF65B63DE53
Exception Module      : blender.exe
Exception Flags       : 0x00000000
Exception Parameters  : 0x2
    Parameters[0] : 0x0000000000000000
    Parameters[1] : 0x0000000000000000


Prior to the add-on becoming a crash monkey, I was experiencing a problem where Geoscatter's main scatter types were not working. It's possible that they were projecting scatters on an offset of the terrain's apparent ground level.

I re-added the add-on. I then installed it on a copy of Blender 4.3. It worked! 
I then completely removed and reinstalled it. Fixed! Phew!

What was the cause?

Not at all sure. Some theories:

1) I used Blender 4.4 through Blender Base, which might interfere with the configuration. I used Steam Blender from two separate PCs with different setups. I wonder if any hardware-specific configuration might have polluted the application files, so opening Blender on the other machine resulted in misconfiguration.

All unlikely, but it does seem weird that things went very wonky.

Today

Back to the Rig

Lots of tidying up to do. I want to have the build complete by tomorrow.

Quirk-o-clock

 Hmm...

I took a break from the rig to play with True-Terrain 5. 

Some stuff has gone weird. I've already experienced real problems selecting objects. Geo-Scatter doesn't work correctly for some scatter types, at least on True-Terrain 5 terrains.

Three terrains

I started to place scatters on the foreground terrain, but nothing worked unless I used a manual or quick scatter. 

I created a terrain manually and tried to scatter. It worked. I tested on both the old and new systems. Curiously, the first render showed a huge difference in render time. Later renders didn't show this difference.

Athena 9:42

 Vulcan 4:50

I'll be looking into this more closely, though this afternoon I'll be completing the build of the Medium Rig

Rig progress

 The Gypsey Vanner Medium Rig is progressing okay. When I left it last night, I was losing faith in the design, specifically the back end. It looked crude and a bit weird. This morning's polygon bashing has brought it back for me.

Time for a crit!

Key changes:

I want a rail on the fuel tank support rings. Those tanks come out by sliding forward. Maybe I should add tiny vernier thusters on the tank so they can guide themselves in?

The cargo rack is messy. I should redo it with cleaner lines.

The mid-section thruster block needs more work and detail. Like the forward thruster blocks, it is a detachable module.

The nose section should contain some fold-out sensors, chiefly a parabolic dish on a mast. If it looks too distracting, I'll go with something simpler.

 Although I now like the back end, it needs to be broken up a bit. Some detail blocks and possibly a docked drone/decoy on the top/centre line.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho

I write this entry just before heading off to my first day at my new job. Just 2pm-5pm, today.

Nervous? Yes, a little. As it should be, I think. On the Blender front, the Medium Rig I started a couple of days ago has turned a corner.

The sketch that nailed the overall design

First blocking-out

Middle detail and...bust

I didn't like the framework. While it was built more cleanly and quickly with the right approach, it doesn't look like a space system. Not "structural engineering" enough. So I restarted. This time the plan was to ditch the frame element, which didn't appear in the original sketch, anyway.

Into the level-3 detail too soon.

Still important decisions to make about the back end.

So far I'm happy with the results but I should have resolved the engines in more detail before worrying about the trimmings on the front. I'll go back there next. After work, in fact.

Weekend

 This is the last weekend before I start a new part-time menial job. While it doesn't pay enough, it will allow me to complete my commercial Blender efforts, get more products into the Blender store, and do other stuff—like my Tabletop Role-Playing Game. After a few months, I can evaluate whether I need to do an additional job to bring in more money. I will miss the comfort and security of a salary job, but I think global events will massively disrupt the next five years. I think there will be economic turmoil that will impact employment across the board. Cheerful stuff, eh?!

We will see.

Blender School: Pipework

I am always doing this wrong. Here's the right way.

1. Add a primitive plane and delete all but 1 vertex.
2. Shift+S to make the origin sit on the remaining vertex.
3. Extrude (E) the vertex in your required direction.
4. Once the frame is modelled, add bevels (Ctrl+Shift+B).
5. Convert to a curve. Adjust the Bevel to make the pipes solid.
6. Convert back to mesh and add some loops.

Voila! No more fighting to make pipe bends consistent...

Benchmarkery

RTX 5090 (Vulcan) 36s: RTX 4090 (Athena) 43s That's about a 19% uplift

RTX 5090 (Vulcan) 39s: RTX 4090 (Athena) 39s Sometimes parity!

It's clear that the 5090 does not demonstrate much higher performance in real-world applications. The extra VRAM and some higher bandwidth will nudge the 5090 ahead, but not by much. A lot has been made of the 5090's eye-watering cost, but my 4090 cost about the same on release. The difference is that I got the 4090 at the time of release, not six weeks later.

Vulcan sits on his fiery throne

 The new workstation is mostly set up. Blender is installed, and countless add-ons and asset packs are installed. We're ready for business, I think.

Side-by-side render competition

Errr.... what?

The new machine is fast, but it's not wildly faster than the 4090 machine. Other system parts, such as the PCIe 5 SSD and latest-gen CPU, might help reduce some bottlenecks, but the side-by-side render test didn't show a wild uplift in rendering performance.

There will be more testing to follow...

So far, okay. The quirks: The machine initially didn't boot up. Then, I installed the latest GPU driver and was rewarded with a BLACK SCREEN—the very thing these driver updates are supposed to fix.

Dead System Saga: Episode 7: The Return

Unpacking

The beast is back! I have named it "Vulcan", the Roman name for the Greek god of fire. Hopefully, this doesn't result in an irony attack when the damned thing catches fire.

Everything looked okay on inspection. The GPU support tool was still in place but a bit wonky. 

Wonky, but nothing appears broken.

That said, the machine took a few boot-up attempts to show a display, which was a Bitlocker unlock screen. Once that was resolved, everything looked good.

First Job: install Mouse without Borders, a keyboard and mouse share application, so I can use the keyboard and mouse across both my machines. It took a few attempts, but that's working.

Next Job: Transfer the Blender directory. 1.34TB of data, which Windows predicts will take three and a half hours to copy from my Western Digital Portable SSD.

All my Blender eggs are now in three baskets (Athena/Vulcan (new machine)/portable storage.)

Dead System Saga: Episode 6 - Second Coming

 

I received a text message containing a link to a video of my system slowly spinning on a little turntable. A woman proudly announces that the final quality control checks are complete, and my repaired system will soon be dispatched. I'd all but given up hope of it getting out tonight, but the dispatch notification arrived at about 10pm. Way to go, SCAN!

Work-in-progress scene 

This is a test scene for introducing Blender 4.4. It's just a rough-up that took far too long. I'm rusty with Geoscattter. I had a couple of crashes with Blender 4.4 but it might be quirks of the specific scene.

Old and new photogrammetry assets

I captured a couple of objects while out walking. I am considering bundling them all up for a Blender Market product—at a very low price, given these are low-to-medium-quality assets.