Stargard

For my tenth birthday, I got a set of weird but brilliant space warrior figures called the "Stargard" -- not to be confused with the city in Poland. They had bright yellow spacesuits and transparent-dome helmets. Retro cool! This morning, I took a break from terrain work to try recreating a few of the figures in Blender.

 I gave them off-the-shelf contemporary firearms because I couldn't remember what the originals carried. I think they were wrist-mounted sink plungers, which might explain why the entire toy range seemed to have been wiped out by Christmas that same year.

Blue plateau

Blue plateau at last,
the mountain no longer climbs,
Only the wind now tests me.

Terrain test and scene setup

Start of Week

Last week was another productivity slump (for Blender work). I completed three more iterations of the Service Road terrain test. I'm happy with the results, but I think I have a couple more cycles before I declare it ready for the next stage, more in the SOW. I made modest progress on Orbital Elements, but not much. Jeepers, what was I doing last week? Well, my brain has developed a bit of a fixation, and I'm trying to work through it. This week, more work, less endless rumination.

Raptor: Service Road update. I'll complete another iteration and add more detail to the edge of the road. It would be great to add some rock structures to provide flat rock projections in the right places. Some details might need to be added as bolt-on assets.

Other Raptor news: my Sparrow films Hoody should arrive very soon. Hurrah!

MSVC: I've done a lot of sketches. I think it's time I built a light rig using the new design rules.

I still like the idea of a fold-out MFI Ring. This week I will finalise a small-to-medium rig design for building.

Blender School idea

While working on the test scene above, it felt like time to stop relying on True Terrain 3, which has entered an era of very slow development as Richard and Zac juggle TrueVFX work with day jobs. This will mean learning the whole stack for terrain texturing so I can export a terrain, bake the materials, and then use Blender's default systems to finish the terrain. The one element I'm missing is the masking system in True Terrain, which broke in the last big update, as I've mentioned a few times. It makes realistic material masking difficult.

One option is to complete a terrain course; I have one in mind.
https://www.cgboost.com/courses/master-3d-environments-in-blender

I'll look into it more this week and decide over the weekend.

More figures

I realised that I'd not used Hitem3D for more than a week. Those credits won't spend themselves! I need to clarify when the credits need to be used by so I can make sure they don't go to waste.

Prince Albert (Sheffield city centre statue), A Division agent and a fashionable woman

Service Road

 Although this work is technically under an NDA, I judge that a fog-obscured render can get a pass.

A tale of two terrain generators

 I've somehow fallen into a new workflow where I use both World Creator (WC) and Gaea to create a terrain. I use WC's ability to quickly build and sculpt a basic terrain from primitive landforms. I then import the heightmap into Gaea in order to use its superior node-based filter system.

Then I can take the Gaea output and import it back into WC to make more tweaks...and presumably ping-pong between the two applications until I'm in a happy place.

World Creator base terrain

Imported into Blender 

Into the Octoberverse

 Month ten, already! Wow!

Last week I kept thinking, developing, and sketching for Orbital Elements, so I don't have much to log in this blog. This week, I'll be back here catching up.

I like how close this design comes to the first OE space vehicle. Most big ships are built on a super-strong stem, made out of space elevator material, which has mind-blowingly high tensile and compressive strength.

I need to account for heat management - that MF ring generates a lot of thermal energy, so there needs to be a big radiator array or some novel heat sink system -- maybe huge tanks of salt.

Playing with the idea that smaller vehicles still need really big MF rings. Maybe they fold out/inflate, or they just don't appear in the vehicle sketch.

Blender time! Astronaut created using Hitem3D

Start of Week

Last week was all Orbital Elements. This week, I'll confine this work to my evenings out -- Mondays and Thursdays, when I walk with Noah to Army Cadets.

Halo: Raptor

Time to appraise where I am and what I need to do. Have I become fixated on the details and accuracy? I feel like I've been led to a task that is more open-ended and can easily become impractical. I need more Gaea expertise, but more importantly, I need to really understand how terrains are engineered. 

The service road's walls are very steep, and it seems they need to be enhanced manually after the terrain is converted to a regular mesh.

A practice service road-like terrain

OE Vehicle project

As a side project that works in both streams, I'll create a highly detailed OE vehicle to showcase the new design rules.

Proof-of-workflow test

More MSVA sketches

 The concept work was supposed to end on Monday, but I was on a roll, so I kept sketching.

General vehicle sketches

I wanted to introduce a technological constraint as a distinctive visual cue for Orbital Elements, like how Star Trek's UFP ships have a recognisable visual language of warp nacelles and saucers. The best candidate for this cue is the Mach-Fontier Inductor, a technology that massively reduces the apparent inertia of a ship, allowing vehicles to travel the solar system at miraculous speeds and fuel efficiency. 

Instead of the MF inductor being a small indistinct component at the heart of the vehicle, it is now a large ring that slightly leads the bulk of the ship, as the dampening field occurs behind the centre of the ring.

Inertial dampening using Mach-Fontier field induction rings (MFFIRs)

After sketching rigid rings, I envision the ring as a giant inflatable structure, tethered to the body of the space vehicle with cables, evoking the form of giant solar sail craft. I think the prototype MF drive was nearly 2km in diameter—vast!! Over the last century, the size of the MF inductor has been greatly reduced, at the cost of increased energy input, mostly delivered by the move to matter-annihilation (anti-matter) drives.

MF inductors have a minimum diameter, so light rigs have proportionately large rings, while rings are less dominant on larger vehicles.                                                                                                                  

Witcher 3

Last night I reinstalled Witcher 3 because it was just rereleased as an enhanced version. It encouraged me to install the latest Nvidia drivers, which I hadn't been using because they had caused Blender to stop working. I installed the drivers and restarted. Blender worked fine. I reinstalled the Atmosphere 2 addon, which caused Blender to crash on first use. Blehh!

Restarted Blender; it all seems to be working. Still not a good feeling seeing Blender crash to the desktop. I will see how it goes; it would be great to have Atmos 2 available to use.

Atmosphere 2 in the house, with its enhanced clouds

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                                   

MSVAs Sketchy progress

 The space vehicle sketching continues.

Project: Hail Mary provided a ton of inspiration—mostly for the multi-rod form. For MSVAs, this sets the expectation that vehicles are built on open frames, usually a longish stem to which vehicle components connect. 




I think this applies more to bigger vehicles than to the small rigs, but it is a reasonable ground rule.

I'm going to keep sketching over the weekend, then I'll start breaking components down to see how they might apply across lots of vehicles. There needs to be a range of options for each component type -- not a single type of vernier thruster, but maybe two or three in each of the three classes (small,medium,large). That's what I think at the moment.

A point of inflection

 Halo: Raptor

The news of Microsoft's closure of Halo Studio and its transfer of the IP to Activision has, unsurprisingly, plunged the project into fear and uncertainty. I think Raptor will likely continue, with an adjusted aim point, since Microsoft can no longer provide a path to a web series production. I might even prefer a worse scenario, where they develop a whole new IP. Clearly, Halo has a huge following, and anything Halo automatically generates interest. This automatic interest comes at the cost of creative shackles; you're very constrained in what is a pretty derivative (Aliens blended with golden-age sci-fi) universe. A fresh start could open so many interesting new doorways, without significantly changing the story we intend to tell.

We will see!

I'll keep punching out iterations of the service road terrain, although I am struggling to get the fine detail I crave. I'll keep trying different approaches.

WC-Gaea-Blender workflow practice. Something quirky happened...

Reduced displacement looks better, but it isn't what I was aiming for.

MSVAs

I'm enjoying the concept creation phase of the work. Sketching and thinking, usually fueled by coffee and occasionally cake. The Modular Space Vehicle Assets line is tied directly to the Orbital Elements (OE) universe. Killing two birds with one stone, if you will. This means that OE provides design constraints, while the Blender modelling end provides OE with some ship designs, if not a ship kitbashing system.

A mid-sized space ship vehicle (In OE, we don't call them ships)

I still need to take a decent of Noah to use with Hitem3D for his Attack on Titan commemorative render.

A Blender sketch I made while trying to persuade my 11-year-old that it was bedtime. 

whoopsy

 I fat-fingered the build of a new Gaea terrain for Halo: Raptor; instead of setting its resolution to 16k, I set it to 64k by mistake. The result was a very, very long build time, which exhausted my system's storage before it finished—about half a terabyte. I had to cancel and delete the cache files. Phew! Lucky I didn't corrupt my system.

I'll try again tomorrow. I feel like I just can't get the density right.

Concept sketches for MSVAs

Gaea School: A return to the Vosges mountains

 We're taking a break from the usual diary format to do a deep dive into a complex Gaea setup. This is based on the sample provided by the brilliant Maarten Nauta.


The following graphic shows how deeply nuanced and interesting terrains are generated from massive graphs, that are literally too big to view in totality in the graph editor.

Look at the size of this graph?!

1. The base terrain noise

This stretch of the Vosges mountains is built on a Perlin noise base, which is then eroded (Er2), and the result is squished using two transform nodes.

Perlin - Erosion - Transform1 - Transform 2

The transforms change the scale of the erosion patterns and can move them up, down, and around.

The next block begins with a Chokepoint node. Apparently (because I've never used one), this is how you combine collective graph inputs without a long processing tail—it's memory efficient.

Chokepoint

Next, the input goes through a warp, which adds subtle but specific noise patterns. The Warp is masked to the lower reaches of the terrain with a Height mask, which is applied to a Combine node that blends the Warped input with another Perlin noise node.

Meanwhile, a Snow node is applied to a height-masked area.

No node quite like a Snow Node

Masked lower reaches

The result: subtle levelling of the downcutting.

Time for another family to join the tree(graph)

A Mountain node is added and gets quite a lot of jiggery-pokery.

Mountain -> multiple terrain bumps

The mountain node goes through multiple transforms, which combine to create a cluster of mountains; each transform is additive, so one mountain can become three.


Three Radial nodes are combined (blended) into a mask that acts as a mask, so that small portion of the terrain gets a messy height boost.

Not easy to see, but the radials create a slight rise.

A Draw node adds another terrain bump, followed by the next Erosion2 node, then outputs to a Chokepoint Node, labelled "baseshape".

Next up: Apply Fractal Terraces on a sloped area, using a blur for the modulation and a slope for the mask.

Terraces, but only on this sloped area. Clever!

Erosion 2, again.

Thermal2 node applied, with an exclusion mask for the fractal terrace area.

Mask

Creative masking in the next step: Take the Thermal2 output and create a mask that leaves a flow trace on the slopes, like so:

Creative masking

The result

Next new input terrain: A sandstone cellular structure:

Another elaborately set up mask from a flow adjusted every which way, then combined through a Bomber node. A Bomber node is a scattering and stamping tool that takes an input shape or heightfield and "bombs" (multiplies and scatters) it across your terrain surface.

Another set of targeted (via slope nodes) tweaks for Thermal Erosion and Roughen. 

The biggest takeaway for me is the importance of masks, mostly slopes, in this example. This terrain is, on reflection,  too big for a single article. Most of the remaining graph is pulling out  specific regions for colour treatment and material output.

Moving into the colour space for materials and masks.

More on Gaea, soon. This weekend: Some more personal project stuff. Possibly more on the MSVA.

The never-quite-finished Shamrayev. MSVA-like construction.