Back to work #3 New Term

 It's Monday! It's day one of the final term, leading into the Summer. This morning I was struggling with the idea of returning to the grind, but then I remembered, I don't grind. I do three hours per day after having oodles of time to develop my passions. This is the life of Riley -- which was a saying, now probably an anachronism. Edit: I checked, yeah, it's a late 19th- to early 20th-century idiot with either song or soldiering roots. 

I got a haircut! It cost me some work-time, but it's nice to be trim for the start of the new term.

Blender

I need to jump back into the Halo: Raptor scene. I was making some progress. I was sculpting more elements that will be decimated and instanced for many mountains. I need a strong terrain plate for the lake (I may have this sorted), and a plate for the canyon area. I was making some progress with this, finding that you really need a lot of resolution to achieve a convincing result, which might call for instancing many copies rather than a single big terrain plate.

Expansive tracks

More broken with rocky cliffs

I shall set myself the deadline of Friday to complete the scene. This will mean maximum focus on the task.

Shiny things that have drawn my attention away:

Giant window

I saw an art photograph of a figure set against a huge, round window/opening. I had a play with the form, and it would make a cool scene if I dedicated myself to the details.

I saw a favela structure that I'd built about five years ago. I wanted to go back and explore modular concrete structures. These could become a product to sell on Superhive.

This first blast was okay. I then wanted to focus on the modular aspect with a steel frame and concrete slabs. Once the basic forms are built, I'd create the more specialised elements such as those that incorporate staircases, windows, and door openings.

Production Meeting

 The Halo: Raptor Project had the latest production meeting. It was good to catch up. The non-NDA-breaking gist: We need to up our work rates, we have a new and exciting commitment, and there's a drive to get together more to watch stuff, play games, and hang out. All good plans!

I really have fallen into a low-productivity slump — partly because the current task is very difficult to do well. I'm not yet ready for deep geonodes R&D, so I have been tackling the same technical challenges for months using the same toolset. I need to widen my technical skills and confidence with Blender's more advanced elements.

I need to be pushing my training more—if you, for some crazy reason, read these posts, you'll know I talk about getting training done far more than I actually do the training. Blame my ADHD! Writing this blog is 50% an attempt to hold myself to account for not meeting creative milestones or delivering on productivity commitments.

Random photo of my old school

My mind wandered as I searched for the shots I created (below) and just added a photo of Myers Grove School. This school was demolished to make way for a brand-new school, Forge Valley.

Oh, look, terrains!

Moah Nova

I was looking back at a post from about four years ago when I was using World Creator's ability to create seamless terrain tiles, so you could duplicate and match up. This is a capability that wasn't carried over to the latest version -- sadly. Moah Nova is a huge (16km terrain tile), baked out of True-Terrain, decimated to about 20 million polygons, then instanced and mirrored so that it can tile nicely.

Old old terrain that I had a quick look at. I need to audit the terrains I've created.

Today

Gather yesterday's sculpted mountains and arrange them in shot 002, along with the lake plate. Then work out how to incorporate canyons in the foreground. Do a low-res block-out version before worrying about any details.

Back to work - part 2

 Yesterday, I returned to my part-time job for one shift. It was actually a nice break, very quiet. I started at 8am and was heading home at 11:20. Clara's brother was visiting Sheffield with his friend, so we spent the rest of the day doing housework and preparing for an evening meet-up.

So, not much was done yesterday. Tonight there is a production meeting for Halo: Raptor at 11pm. Well past my usual bedtime, it has to be said.

View-aligned Voronoi Islands

Thomas Kole is a technical artist who dedicated his free time to building a near-perfect replica of Tenochitilan. Seriously good work -- driving the project forward through clever cheating. The takeaway from this presentation is that when the terrains get big, cheat with everything that you can. For example, you can't scatter over hundreds of square miles of terrain without a very complex fragmentary render-flow. Instead, Thomas developed shader-based solutions for handling the forests and much of the city.

http://www.chengfolio.com/google_map_customizer#satellitemap
I use this to capture bits of Google mapping terrain. You need to use it as a starting point rather than use it directly, or you will get Google watermarks in your terrains. If you capture an area using overlapping screen captures that you stitch together in your favourite image editor, you can get massively detailed real-world terrain from which you can clone and paint your own landscapes.

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/
This handy wrapper captures Google Map height data and filters it to generate heightmaps. This would be indispensable if only it could export high-bit-depth EXRs. Still worth using!

https://cloud.maptiler.com/maps/
This commercial service offers a free but limited account. It does both the texture and height-map generation really well. Useful for capturing a real-world geographic location in 3D.

Back to work - part 1

 It's time to return to my Halo: Raptor chores. This didn't stop me from doing the initial rough measurements of the Project: Hail Mary ship. 

Overall Length: 136m

Instead of my infection getting better, I feel worse today. My head isn't right. Back to my part-time job, tomorrow morning. It's going to hit me like a ton of bricks unless I'm really well rested, so I might have an early, early night.

Happy Chocolate

 I'm officially out of time for my personal project. It was fun. There's a lot more I should be doing, but I need to get back to the "job".

Tall renders are so rare

The ring structure was a rare bit of kitbashing, using a ringed space station I built in March 2023.

I keep replicating the sections. This is about 500m deep. Blender crashes if I try to delete one of the instance collections.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Good Friday, fallow Friday

 Happy Easter, peeps!

Test lamp down at the base...just not enough light down there.

Weird holiday that requires some serious mental gymnastics to transmute into a "celebration". Chocolate does so much heavy lifting!

I still feel very rough, maybe not quite as rough. It's now nearly a week since I did my regular resistance training and walking. I feel a bit "fallow", but I need to start pushing myself, even if I don't feel good.

Clara is on a late shift, so I need to get some groceries to feed the boys tonight.

Blender

I made a bit of progress on the apartment complex yesterday. Working mostly to improve the materials and UVs in key places. Not a lot of work, but some nice tweaks here and there. I'm particularly pleased with the single plane that I textured with a high-contrast noise map, which is placed behind the window panes of each apartment block. This provides a random element that breaks up the unrealistic unity of the many windows.

Much of the remaining work will be about breaking up regularity and adding more detail in the right places.

So, what's next?

Firstly, the version of the scene where I had created two more tunnel instances crashed when I tried to delete them. I've reverted to the single instance-version of the scene. If I want the apartments to rise higher, I need to let more light in. When there are apartments that rise into the sky, they block most of the light, and it just gets too dark.



I will do an animation for this scene, to be completed by Monday. I need to create a storyboard and use that to work out where I need more details. There's a good foundation for some scenes, but I need to break up the regularity. For example:

• Something to break up the regularity of the railings.
• Signs, notices and decals
• Street lights
• Street furniture
• Rubbish and clutter
• Crowds? 
• Something in the central pool? 
• Cables and wiring
• More pipes

That water is looking good. It's from the Sanctus Library

Incredible things

 

In this hellish, wartorn timeline, it's very gratifying to have a brief moment where we remember that there is competence, dedication and a striving for something bigger. Manned space exploration no longer lands the same way as it did when I was Leo's age. This isn't a battle of ideology because is the Trump administration really any different from the CCP? Granted, they have replaced the huge bureaucratic party system with a gold-plated ballroom, but it's not East vs West, Totalitarianism vs Freedom. Watching NASA people sweat details was the competence porn I so very much needed. I hope their missions succeed, and watching this stuff together might pull some people out of the Trump stupor.

Blender

Lurgi and gum pain diminished, but not gone. What a waste of a week. Well, almost. My dystopian apartment block continues to rise.

Shell game

working on improving the materials a but

A giant pool of water at the bottom.

Apartments

I think we wrap this up for creating a short animation over the weekend evenings. Nothing dramatic, maybe some pans across, up, and down from different locations. 

First, we need to find a way to add some variations. The light from the apartment windows needs to be broken up. I think I might be able to put a giant plane behind each "bank" of apartment windows to adjust the amount of light emitted. I need to break up the walkways, maybe add some low-poly denizens. Some more pipes, clutter, and lamps. Maybe I'll put some boats/barrels/trash in the central pool. 

I need a bit more light in the depths. The aim was to have this tower three instances high, but at that point, the bottom is truly a gloomy place.

Forbidden porridge

 It seems like I wasn't supposed to have porridge this morning, but I really fancied some. I have it about once a week. It takes a lot longer to prepare than my usual breakfast of Greek yoghurt with blueberries and nuts. I still feel very low, and a nice warm bowl of porridge would just hit the spot. My gum pain has subsided, possibly to make room for a very sore back. My cold has got to my chest, causing me to rasp. My unwellness has worsened. Bleh! So, I wanted my porridge.

First, the digital scales are mysteriously broken. Delving into the mystery, I might have recently set a heavy pan on top of it, which could have caused the LCD to break. I can be breathtakingly clumsy. Mr Bean without the laughs.

So, how do you measure 50g of rolled oats? I managed to find a conversion for measuring in cups. Then, after not finding any measuring cups, I found a conversion for tablespoons. So far, so good. Except I think I messed up the measure of milk, which I modified to include some of my yoghurt, for its fat content. I needed more fluid as the oats were getting too hot. I gave the pan a quick nudge to move the contents around, but nothing was stuck together, so globs of milk and porridge went onto the hob. Some must have worked its way into a dial's recess, which causes the sparker for lighting the hob to  continuously fire...on...and..on...and...on

So now, twenty minutes after finishing my porridge — which was perfect, at least I got that — there is a clicking sound coming from the kitchen, with a one-second interval. Why did I get out of bed? That was actually the back pain! If it wasn't for my sore lower back, I would have just stayed in bed all day. Meh.

Yesterday

While some might spend their sick time watching comforting TV shows or YouTube cat videos, I elected to start building a dystopic prison-style apartment complex.

It's the framework. It needs more material touches and detailing, but not bad for a few hours' work. Odd, odd thought. The old British slang for prison/prison-time is porridge. *Stares into the void*

Under the weather #1 2026 edition

 I officially have a mild case of the dreaded lurgi. My throat burns with a mysterious fire, and my head is full of cotton wool. I feel like I need my batteries changing. The gum pain is present, but is currently only contributing to the chorus line of my momentary lived experience. Meh!

Today will not see any profound contributions in any field. Yesterday I spent three hours mopping a staircase and wiping grime off the walls of a corridor. That was worthy, that felt like a worthy contribution. I came home and then did an hour of housework. That also felt worthy, but I also felt proper-tired. By dinner, I was at a very low ebb, and it was then that I realised that I was actually poorly.

So about today...

Detailed References are limited. When, see Rocky streaming, question!

The wild idea of creating a highly detailed replica of Project: Hail Mary was, on reflection, peak ADHD. This is an incredibly detailed thing, and while it has a basic overall form, there are thousands of elements that need to be carefully measured and made. Now, this is something that I want to do, but I may tackle it very slowly. I must break the cycle of jumping excitedly into a new shiny thing, then abandoning the effort when a new shiny thing pops into my view.

Easter-break begins

 Firstly, Project: Hail Mary is an absolute triumph of an adaptation. It manages to fly along with just the right amount of exposition -- enough to tell you exactly what is going on without the deep-diving of the book. I loved all those deep dives, but in the cinematic world of show-don't-tell, it has to go.  I understand that the first cut of the film was about four hours long, so it seems like the heavy lifting of adaptation was all done in the editing suite. Bravo!

I am trying to dissuade myself from starting a highly detailed build of Mary, herself. I did a build after finishing the book, based on the schematic the author created. Master SF concept artist Paul Chadeisson took the broad idea and changed the very simple but scientifically plausible layout into a fascinating visual character that has maybe 85% of the book version's plausibility but is 400% more interesting.

I love the design, and I love that it's not too difficult to build. I might see what I get out of two hours. If I nail the big forms, it might happen. I can't find any decent blueprints, so far.

Halo: Raptor

I must progress the terrain and catch up. I've proven that a tile-based approach will work for creating large, detailed terrain. I need the right tiles and the right arrangement. I have a big lake section for the centre. Next, I need a range of mountains for the back, then foothills and canyons at the front.

Lower-level foothill tiles

EndMarch

 A bad night's sleep and gum pain have given the start of the Easter break a bit of a sour flavour. Still, I've been quite productive after a walk into the city centre mid-morning. Cold and a bit rainy, but pleasing to the spirit.

Not from today, but this is the same route -- home is located near the high-rise buildings in the distance.

Big landscapes

I cooked up a couple more big terrain tiles in World Creator. The process is pretty simple, though it can take a while for the chain to complete.

1. Create a True-Terrain scene as normal, using (in my case) a large EXR displacement file.
2. Once the terrain is textured and you are happy with its state, bake the geometry by making sure that the viewport resolution is set to 1.0. This will result in a potentially huge terrain object. 
3. Select the terrain and apply the True-Terrain modifier stack. This will bake the geonodes tree into a fixed mesh. This can take several minutes.
4. Add a Decimate modifier. I set mine to 0.4, which reduces the resolution by about half. You can adjust this step to achieve the level of mesh detail that suits your wants and needs. This can take several minutes.

Consider saving and cleaning up the scene file after each of the last two steps as it looks like these steps may exhaust your system memory. I had crashes early, possibly because I interfered with Blender while it was in a trans.

5. Once you have your terrain tile, Press Alt+D to create an instance, spin it on the Z-axis and move the new instance to create a new section of landscape, hopefully without visible repeating. Repeat until you have all the giant terrain of your dreams.

An 8-instance tile-set. Each spun to hide the fact that it's the same section of terrain being repeated.

                                                                    

It's flexible and (if you instance correctly) should be pretty efficient.

  Excited about tomorrow as I'm taking the family to see Project: Hail Mary, one of the favourite books from last year. I may be burning with inspiration for a space scene, this time tomorrow.                                                                                                    

I did a quick scene this afternoon, based on a photograph of a dark corridor illuminated by skylights. The scene I created was simpler, but I was still satisfied to generate an animation in less than ten minutes.

Dark Corridor