Blender Friday

It's Black Friday! It's also Blender Friday as Superhivemarket starts a store-wide 25% sale. Cool! I picked up some more rock brushes. Once again, I struggled to get them to install. I finally added them to my main machine, so I don't have to swap scenes around when I want to do some sculpting.

I will pick up a few more things before the sale ends. I'm tempted to get the addon that lets you import stuff from Quixel Bridge. I downloaded a lot of stuff, but it takes so much work to clean up and fix badly converted material nodes that I have hardly used any of the stuff, which is a shame because it's of super quality.

I still have my eye on Matplus, the addon that gives Blender a Substance Painter-like layer-based material editing system. I fear that it needs very good UVs in order to work correctly, and I'm not very good at making high-quality UVs. I could look at some UV tools.

Weekend plan

Keep an eye on Blender 5's instability. If it doesn't improve with the 5.0.1 patch release, I will consider doing a wipe and then installing it from scratch with a gradual approach to addon installation.

The Foundations of Science Fiction Design

Yesterday, I daydreamed that I wrote a massive textbook on the subject of science fiction design, one that became THE seminal reference work for budding science fiction artists. Dream big, eh?! 

This is a concept that I could chip away at. Not because I'm a super science-fiction design artist, but by producing notes for such a work, I'd improve my design skills.

Foundations-of-SF-Design

1. Big-Medium-Small

Designing complicated things that look good is hard. A good approach is to do your design in a strict sequence that helps ensure that your process isn't five steps forward and six steps back. Start with the big shapes, the most significant elements of your design. Don't worry about anything else until you love the overall shape. My old illustration lecturer used to tell us to do a "squint test" to evaluate the composition of elements in a work.

Next, move on to the middle-scale details. No fine detail, only the elements that significantly modify your top-level big shapes.

Finally, only when you love where you are on the big and the middle stuff do you attend to the small details.

2. Shapes have make feelings

Even simple shapes can invoke an emotion. 

• Triangles that sit with the base towards the ground imbue a sense of strength and can symbolise power.
• Rectangles and squares invoke a sense of stability, order and balance. At the correct scale, they can turn on your "I love brutalism" light.
• Curved shapes provide a sense of movement and are positive, more approachable, and humane.
• Circular shapes convey a sense of unity and are visually peaceful. Is the Death Star in range yet?

It never takes much work to defuse these traits, but it is worthwhile to have a kind of visual syntax to start a design.

3. 70/30 Rule

A rule of thumb is to ensure that 80% of your design is "clean", and only clutter about 20-30% of the design with little stuff. Often referred to as the "70/30 rule", although this is a line in the sand. Just remember that you don't want to overdo surface detail, as you will end up with a very cluttered design.

For some things, you can throw these rules out if the design you want is an industrial/military design, which isn't built to win design awards. Go cluttered, go ugly, but if so, it better look cool!

4. Emphasis and movement

Imagine that your design is a painting or a photograph, to be judged according to aesthetics. The viewer gazes on your design and, if you have done your job well, their eyes go on a visually stimulating journey. If you can chain together design elements that naturally lead the eye, it's a quality that can translate into the viewer judging your design to be good.

Take care to avoid overdoing it when adding visual interest. It's another application of the 70/30 rule: you want enough eye movement to feel like a visual journey, not so much emphasis that you end up with a wall of detail that might as well be no detail at all. Movement creates a dance for the viewer's eyes and can be used to build a story.

5. Variety and repetition

The use of novel and repeated elements is a useful device when carefully employed to ensure visual balance. Too much variety, and your design falls into the "emphasis trap" of having too many interesting elements, leading the viewer to lose interest. Too much repetition just doesn't excite the eye.

6. Size, scale and proportion

Using reference elements to set the correct space. The ratio of elements can be crucial in setting proper proportions.

7. Unity

Unity can be created through patterns and themes. The highest level of echoing. One risk of kitbashing is that it can create conflicting patterns that break unity. 

Gaea 4, but why?

 I received an offer of 40% off for pre-ordering Gaea 3. Now this should just pass me by, but the first thing I did when I woke up was watch a video by a 3d creative using Gaea 2. It immediately struck me that the terrain he created was bigger and more detailed than my World Creator output. I decided to finally dive into Gaea and start using it to create terrain heightmaps. That seems a long way from putting up the money for next year's version, but there you go.

I opened Gaea 2, set up a very basic terrain—pretty much a default canyon — and set it to export at 16k. Half an hour later, I was still waiting for the build to finish; it had been stuck at 33% on the second of three tasks. What the hell!? It's going to force me to read some instructions, or at least watch a few videos.

Expect to see some Gaea School posts, right here, right soon.

Lesson 1: When setting up an export to an EXR height map, select all your nodes for export with F3. Otherwise, the export process chugs along, waiting for steps that will not be included. 

Promising, although not revelatory

Sparrow's road

I have more changes to make on the service road rally point. It may entail sculpting more rocks to match the storyboard. I'll then move on to the larger task: the ambush point.

Blender school

CDMCGI has created a really nice texture mixer for ground meshes. He's giving it away for free, although I will definitely go back and tip if it works half as well as it looks.

Noise Texture added to the breakup mask.

Explanation

The tool comes in three parts:

1) The texture mixer panel that accepts four input materials (Materials A, B, C, and D). Note: You must include a displacement in the material that is plugged into the material group output.

2)  The Texture Scaler is a work in progress and will allow the tool to handle larger terrains in future. Still some quirks to iron out. Right now, it handles vector and texture scale for each material.


Adjust the base height of each material so it protrudes through the mix.
In the Material Mixer, you can add noise textures to the breakup mask to stop the resulting ground from looking repetitive. Use a colour ramp to soften the blending. The breakup sharpness slider helps with this. A splat map will work too!

Use the false colour mode to get a better handle on how the mix is applied.

3) A Waterline shader provides a softer shoreline with rings. Works well at high subdivision levels.

Hoping that Blender 5.0.1 comes out soon. Blender 5.0 has been crashing a lot. 

Died in the night...

Quick test before CUDA errors struck.

My 4090 system was shut down, and I couldn't get it back on. Dayam! Well, after going through the full CMOS reset, it came back. Phew!! Not a nice feeling. I was browsing SCAN's website, looking at the massive cost of a replacement. Glad to kick that can down the road for a bit.

Fingers crossed that this was an aberration. Could I have shut down by accident? I don't think so...

 Work continues

The next previs reworking for Sparrow films is urgent. I'll get it done today.

Skies

Playing with TrueSKY 3 (beta 4). Something quirky is going on. The new system for controlling volume quality might need more tuning, or the clouds might be broken. Richard and Zach are taking a few days off, so we might need to enjoy clear skies for a while. 

UPDATE!

Richard was online and confirmed the issue was caused by the merging in of breaking changes. He's released beta 5 that fixes the issue.

Rock remodelling

Old and new

Stare decisis

 I've struggled to stay motivated to complete the work to fix the service road elements. It's been tedious work compared to playing with TrueSKY 3, but here we are, time to roll up my sleeves and get the damned work finished.

Additional reference photos for the service road biome.

Cov Phillips was right about the value of Google Earth; it is an absolute treasure for environmental art. Granted, 99.8% of its images are captured on roads, but roads go through every sort of biome, so it's not a significant limiter on usefulness.

Novemberender

 On Friday I previewed fixed for the first service area fix. Success! Although I do need to increase the area by about 10%. I think that my dressing is too big and it's taking up more of the road area than the storyboard version.

I also found the scene to be really stuttery. A sure sign that it's too big for the animators. I'm now redoing all the service road cliff assets to make them more efficient and a lot better. I bought some VDB rock brushes so that I can sculpt realistic rock forms onto the rock walls and boulders. It's quite therapeutic!

Stuttery!

I now realise that I need to do more large-scale displacement on the cliff walls before applying rock structure. VDB brushes apply real geometry, so they create real displacement, but you need an enormous number of polygons on the mesh to bring out the lovely quality of rock.

Test rock assets

I decided that it would be more efficient to sculpt the rocks straight into the current placeholder planes rather than pipe up blocks like these. We'll see what this evening's test looks like.

True Sky 3

Oh my word, it's great.

This girl's sky...

Back to work ..on the service road.

 I have some outstanding revision work to complete on the previs service road elements. There's not a huge amount to do in principle, but I suspect that I will encounter some snags.

The biggest question mark is how successfully I can resculpt the ambush section's underlying terrain to take out a big kink that currently offers the characters a hide that they should have.

Here are the changes, in brief:

1. A hidden entrance

The tunnel entrance should be obscured so it startles the characters as they follow the road. The layout currently doesn't support this dramatic moment.

To do: resculpt and or redress the scatters so that the entrance isn't visible until you pass the area (in red). Also, replace the proxy trees and bushes with actual tree/bush objects.

2. Nowhere to hide

Current previs version

Storyboard version showing how this section of road should look.

The ambush section bends and provides outcroppings that would give the characters a prominent place to rush to gain cover from the incoming sniper fire. That kink needs to be removed so that the characters must hide among the small boulders in their area.

This task looks like the most work, but if I just do a big cutout of the underlying terrain and use scatters to handle the cliff itself, it may not be much work.

3. A better rock

The rally points critical rock formation doesn't provide the cover that is intended for the scene. I need to make adjustments. Shouldn't be too hard, except I really don't like these scatter objects any more. I got a bit unspooled trying to rebuild the scatters rather than just resculpting the rock. Well have another go!

Blender School: True Sky 3 (Part 1)

True Sky 2.x was arguably the best Blender addon for creating your own skies. It didn't give you the high detail or complexity of a well-chosen HDRI, but it could generate an animation-ready living sky with a full day/night cycle and some cool volumetrics for fog and atmospherics.

It was fast and flexible, but it lacked a few things, such as more complex multi-layered clouds or a robust way to export an HDRI from its output. From today, those limitations are gone. As its strapline claims, the sky is no longer the limit.

True Sky 3

A quick tour of True-VFX's new addon.

5's alive!

 Yesterday's Internet issues looked like they would scupper all the releases. In the end, everything got released.

Blender 5.0 is now officially released, and I got it installed and braved bringing in 4.5 settings, saving me a considerable amount of time - providing it didn't break Blender. There were a couple of addon failures that got instant resolution:

Meshmachin3 tools and True Sky 2.x were both updated within minutes of installing Blender. All sorted. Phew! True Sky 2 didn't get much use because of the release of a brand-new version... see below.

Other addons may cause problems, but these can be tackled as and when they reveal themselves. Worst case: I'll delete and perform a complete fresh installation. 

True Sky 3 

The Internet disruption only slightly delayed the release. I came home late and purchased it in a bit of a rush. I didn't notice that my discount was accepted, but it wasn't applied, so I'm probably the only person to pay full price on day one. Superhive will hopefully resolve the issue. [Edit: They did, just a few hours later]

Early Test: 3 Cloud layers at 600 samples

What's it like?

First impressions. Oh boy! The evident capabilities of this addon are breathtaking. It's not an incremental update on version 2.0 that adds some improvements here and there; what you get is a completely rebuilt system that changes and improves everything.

Some things to hold in mind as the giddy superlatives fill the air: This is early access. There are some rough edges, some missing elements, and, most significantly to me, after a couple of hours, this is not like True Sky 2, where you turn it on and get a lovely base sky. This gives you a lot more control, and right now, it doesn't offer any defaults, so you have to attend to various settings. It's a shame that there isn't a mode that lets you run the addon in "simple mode", where it outputs to the True Sky 2 default setup. Being a from-the-ground-up rewrite, there's no attempt to read True Sky 2 scenes, so any old scenes that contain True Sky will need to be redone. Early access is what it is. Some things might be technically too difficult or impractical to implement, while other things might be added soon.

This is such a big change and complex... It's not complex; it's parameter-rich. There are so many parameters; there are countless ways to change the sky. Some are very direct and obvious, while others are ambiguous or extremely deep in the maths weeds. It's twenty steps forward, put a gentle push off the edge of a cliff.

I should do an episode of Blender School that performs a deep dive. 

Blender 5 Released Today

I may be jumping the gun here, but today is the scheduled day for Blender 5's release. It's a big deal! I have already pointed out that, in the thirteen years I've been using Blender, I've only witnessed versions 3.0 and 4.0. That's a slow climb! I guess the big 3D app players have long dropped traditional version numbering in favour of year-based names, so they can iterate without flying through all the numbers, or having people dwell too long on whether a release is full-fat, or a modest top-up.

Egg House 5

I could have changed and improved twenty things, but I just ran out of time. 

1. Composition and lighting tweaks, although they're not too bad, there is a lot of room for improvement.
2. My added dirt is subtle, which I am happy with, but the dirt maps could have better matched the shape of the egg house. Maybe streak lines coming down from the top and drop stains from some of the ports.
3. Some more clutter around the egg. I rendered with ivy, which looked fun and cool, but also broke up the egg shape a bit too much and wasn't at all plausible. Given that the full render took 5 hours, I only re-rendered the region with the ivy and placed it over a copy of the original render. This is a quick way to do spot fixes on mistakes in a still with a long render time.

Second ivy. The original was too sparse and just distracting.

I'll do another update later today about the status, so if Blender 5.0 isn't released, I'll issue a correction and look like a goober.

Also, there's another celebration. Addon developer True-VFX have its 7th birthday and will be releasing TrueSKY3. I will be having a play with it.

Blender School: Ultimate 3D Environment Animation Course - Blender

It's time to start learning more about 3d Environment design, this time from Cov Phillips.

1. References

Great computer-generated imagery captures qualities from reality, even if you are not striving for photorealism.  You can't store all these details of the world in your head, so it's really important to use references. In most cases, this means reference photos. Use them for modelling, to explore the qualities of materials and patterns, such as the way grass grows or the way rocks scatter.

Cov uses Google Maps to explore the world for visual references. Amazing idea! 

Also Getty Images, the photo site.

Any such site, such as Pinterest or Flickr, will offer a wealth of example images of almost anything out there.

Obligatory plug for PureRef. It seems like everyone recognises how good it is for the way you gather and arrange your reference images.

2. Blocking Out

"You really can't go wrong in this part. Except you can."  

True! When you draw and paint, going wrong usually results in a restart of the work. In 3D, there's no situation where a mistake can't be remedied without throwing your work away. However, this misses something important. Your most precious resource is often time. If you go wrong in a 3D project and need to backtrack, you will typically waste a significant amount of effort.

Start a project by getting the big, simple forms right. There's no point in getting the details if you turn around later and realise it wasn't the correct scale or didn't fit your design.

 Building the house

Cov takes the next few lessons to complete the build of the scene's main point of focus, an old American house.

The house that Cov built

Dreaded return to the dentist

 Just as my mouth is starting to recover, I return for the serious work, which I think is code for an extraction. Bugger. I am treating myself to treats. I'm going to get Arborea Nature Addon, and I just picked up another environmental design course, this time from Cov Phillips, who has shown off some fantastic work on YouTube.

Celebration Crit

I made good progress on the celebration scene. Enough to require a critique

The dramatic depth of field makes for nice framing, except the egg house is a bit lost in the composition. I should cut out some of the top and bottom and get it closer to the rule of thirds.

I may redo the ivy or expand it across the other side of the egg. There needs to be a bit more grime on the egg, and also some more decals to add the look of a space vehicle.

The portal ring needs some breakup. Maybe even some tiny lights or a regular pattern.

Deadline is probably Tuesday, so I'm down to the final polishing.